January 11, 2010

2010Miep Gies, Austrian-Dutch humanitarian (born 1909)^[†]

Hermine "Miep" Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family and four other Dutch Jews from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank's business premises during World War II. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of eleven, she was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family in Leiden to whom she became very attached. Although she was only supposed to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which Gies chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands.

2010Éric Rohmer, French director, screenwriter, and critic (born 1920)^[†]

Jean Marie Maurice Schérer or Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, known as Éric Rohmer, was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and teacher. Rohmer was the last of the post-World War II French New Wave directors to become established. He edited the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, while most of his colleagues—among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—were making the transition from critics to filmmakers and gaining international attention.