UNION SQUARE — In August 1944, Miep Gies opened the “secret annex” in her employer’s office building where Nazis had just arrested her boss, Otto Frank, who was hiding there with his family — wife Edith and daughters Margot and Anne.

The Franks and a few other Jewish families were taken away in trucks. In the annex, Gies found their belongings ransacked. On the floor was a tiny, red-and-orange checked cloth-bound book — Anne’s diary. Published in 1952, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” went on to become a literary classic. Her writings share her poignant views on adolescence in wartime andfear of oppression, but also the enduring hope of a girl who, at age 15, did not survive.

“So much had been lost, but now Anne’s voice would never be lost,” Gies, who was the office manager for Otto, a German spice merchant in the Netherlands, wrote in her autobiography. “My young friend had left a remarkable legacy to the world.”

Struggled With Faith

Gies was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909, but her family faced starvation from post-World War I food shortages. Her parents sent her to a foster family in the Netherlands, and she lived there the rest of her life until she died in 2010 at age 100.

Her birth family was Catholic, but Gies resisted the faith. In her autobiography, “Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped Hide the Frank Family,” Gies recalls how her parents took her to Mass.

“I didn’t really understand what was going on in the service,” she wrote. “My parents didn’t insist that I go. So, I never went back.” Gies added that she never doubted the existence of God, “that is, until the war.” She spent much of her life struggling with faith and religion.

Plans Stalled

Gies married Jan, her Dutch husband, in 1941, one year after Nazi forces occupied the Netherlands following a swift military victory. Jan, who worked in civil service, joined the local resistance.

But Nazis targeted the Franks and other European Jews for “liquidation.” Otto brought his family to Amsterdam to avoid Nazi terror in Germany. He also tried to send them to the United States, but the plans stalled.

Gies and a few co-workers, ever loyal to Otto, worked to create the annex that concealed the Frank family with four other Jews — Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist; Hermann van Pels, who was Otto’s customer; his wife, Auguste; and their son, Peter, Anne’s crush.

Aug. 4, 1944

They all endured the crowded annex for 25 months. Gies and others brought them food and news from the outside world.  But on Aug. 4, 1944, Nazis, acting on a tip, raided the building. They arrested everyone hiding there, plus two employees, but not Gies. The officer in charge, also from Austria, felt a moment of mercy and let her go.

Gies and the officer would meet again a few days later when, while risking arrest, she went to his headquarters with bribe money. Gies and her co-workers raised the funds, hoping to buy their friends’ freedom. The officer refused. But again, he inexplicably chose not to arrest her.

Gies hid the diary in a drawer, believing she would return it to Anne. Co-workers urged her to read it, but she refused out of respect for Anne’s privacy. The arrestees, meanwhile, were sent to various concentration camps. Otto Frank, held at the Auschwitz camp in Poland, returned emaciated. He knew that Edith had died there. Still, he hoped for his daughters’ return.

News soon followed of their fates: both died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany; Margot was 18, Anne was 15. “Now, Anne was not coming back for her diary,” Gies wrote. “Frank was sitting at his desk, his eyes murky with shock. I held out the diary and the papers to him. I said, ‘Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.’ ”

Emptiness Erased

Gies struggled as she grieved Anne and the others.

“My sense of God had been poisoned, and only an empty hole was left,” she wrote. But as time passed, she craved knowledge about God, so she read the Bible, plus books on Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism — “anything I could lay my hands on.”

Gies, however, avoided reading Anne’s diary until after it was published. “I didn’t feel the pain that I anticipated,” she wrote. “The emptiness in my heart was erased.”

‘I Will Never Know’

Gies did not specify how her faith journey continued. But, near the end of her life, she updated her autobiography with a new ending titled “Afterward: My 100th Birthday.”

“Why me?” she wrote. “Why was I spared the concentration camp after being caught helping to hide Jews? This I will never know. For some reason I was given a great opportunity to find and shelter the diary, to be able to bring the message from Anne to the world.

“I will never know why.”