Miep, the secretary who became an asteroid – 06/24/2023 – Elio Gaspari

Disney produced the series “A Small Light” (“A Little Light”). It is the story of Miep Gies, the secretary of the Jewish merchant Otto Frank. For two years she ensured the survival of Frank’s family, hidden in the attic of the office in Amsterdam.

In August 1944, when an Austrian policeman (like herself) discovered them, Miep was able to keep the diary of Anne, Otto’s teenage daughter. The girl died in March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her diary has become a reference to the history of the persecution of Jews.

Miep led a low-key life and died in 2010 at the age of 101. Since 2009, an asteroid circling between Mars and Jupiter has been named after her.

Miep was an example of the banality of good. The policeman who arrested the Franks, on the other hand, was protected by the banality of evil and was never held accountable for his act. His name was Karl Silberbauer. He was 22 years old and belonged to the SS troop. After the war he was incorporated into the police force in Germany.

It was the game played. After all, Kurt Waldheim, a German army officer involved in the atrocities committed in Yugoslavia, ended up as secretary general of the United Nations and elected president of Austria in 1971. Werner von Braun, who manufactured bombs for the Germans with a workforce of a concentration camp, was one of the brains that put the first man on the moon.

A treasure on the net

Blima Rajzla Lorger’s master’s thesis entitled “Brazilians in the Holocaust and Resistance to Nazifascism” is online.

Digging through the abundant archives of the period and drawing on the memoirs of survivors, she produced a treasure trove. On one side, it showed the 42 Brazilians killed in the Nazi death camps. On the other hand, it showed that at least 81 Brazilians were in the French Resistance and 15 died.

The murdered Jews had been born in Brazil or had Brazilian passports. For some reason, they were in France or in German-controlled territories.

Isaac Gradvohl, from Ceará, a prominent figure in the life of Fortaleza, lived with his wife in Paris. They died in the Auschwitz camp on November 2, 1942 —on the same day, the police of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship raided the Academic Center XI de Agosto, of the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo, arresting 30 students.

In 1944, when the Vargas government limited the granting of passports to Brazilians “of Semitic origin”, 17 Brazilians living in France were deported to Auschwitz.

On the 24th of July, the Germans shot Claude Falk, a lieutenant of the French troops who were fighting in the resistance, from São Paulo. In August, Michel Dreyfus, a fighter from the French Resistance, was shot from Ceará and Benjamin Levy, with his wife and daughter, was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp.

In March 1945, Hitler was locked in his bunker in Berlin, and Getúlio Vargas gave an interview admitting to continuing in government, by vote. The day before, the young gaucho Jacobo Dentici, a combatant of the Italian Resistance, died in the field of Gusen II. The following day, in the field of Buchenwald, the Paulista Robert Lepelerie, of the French Resistance, died.

In April, the Federal Supreme Court annulled the sentences of the Estado Novo dictatorship and days later the Jew Francisco José Messner, who had been vice-consul of Brazil in Vienna until 1931, was executed.

The war was ending. On May 6, 1945, Hitler was already dead and Germany was hours away from surrender, when the Ebensee camp, where Rio de Janeiro native Hubert Aron-Martin was, was liberated.

Since January, he had already gone through two others. He died free two weeks later. The next day Associated Press reporter Ed Miller broke through the Allied military censorship embargo and announced that the war was over.

Blima Lorber records that in March 2018, octogenarian Mireille Knoll was killed in Paris because she was Jewish. In 1942, in France, she was ten years old when her parents managed to escape, hiding some jewelry in her doll.

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