What is courage?

I read with sadness of the death of Miep Gies who was the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank from the Nazis.

She worked as a secretary in Otto Frank's company, and got to know the family well.
With her husband (Jan) and colleagues, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, and Bep Voskuijl, Miep helped hide the Franks (Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne) the van Pels (Hermann, Auguste, and Peter), as well as Fritz Pfeffer, for more than two years.
These eight people were hidden in a sealed-off annexe in the company's offices on Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, for two years!

In theory, Miep and the others could have been shot for hiding Jews, nevertheless the quintet went ahead and showed that ordinary human decency can shine even in the darkest of times.

If you ever go to Amsterdam, it is well worth joining the more than a million visitors to the Ann Frank Huis (http://www.annefrank.org), and seeing for yourself the conditions that the octet had to put up with, and the cloying fear of discovery at any moment.

Mark Twain wrote that, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear", how apt.

Mies was an ordinary women, who showed extraordinary courage.

Rust in vrede Mies.