Gies & Co.

Gies & Co. is the company dealing in spices and spice substitutes that was established in 1941 and operated from the building where Anne Frank and the others hid. The business connects the ordinary commercial life of the premises with the concealed life above and behind it: its goods supply work for the residents, but its vulnerable offices and warehouse also expose them to the risk of discovery.

Business and Place in the Annex

In Anne’s account of her father’s diminishing work at the office, she notes that Mr. Kugler had taken over Gies & Co. The company is identified as dealing in spices and spice substitutes, and its premises formed part of the larger office-and-warehouse building that became the hiding place. The business was therefore not simply a name attached to the Annex: its working spaces, stock, and access routes were interwoven with the residents’ daily security.

The company’s goods also entered the residents’ routine as labor. They filled packages with powdered gravy, one of Gies & Co.’s products, after Mr. Kugler could not find anyone else to do the work and because it was cheaper for them to undertake it. Anne describes the task as prison-like, monotonous work that made them dizzy and giggly. Commercial necessity thus reached into the hiding place, giving its residents a repetitive occupation while underscoring how confinement had narrowed ordinary life.

A Workplace Exposed to Burglary

The company’s premises were repeatedly targeted by burglars, and each break-in brought the dangers of the outside building close to the hidden residents. In one incident, Peter found the warehouse and street doors open at seven in the morning. The residents followed their security instructions: they did not wash or run water, kept quiet, dressed by eight, and avoided the bathroom. The burglars had forced the outer and warehouse doors with a crowbar, then tried another floor after finding nothing worth taking in the warehouse.

The thieves took two cashboxes containing 40 guilders, blank checkbooks, and, most damagingly, the residents’ entire sugar allotment: coupons for 330 pounds. Replacing the coupons promised to be difficult. Mr. Kugler suspected that the burglars belonged to the same gang that had tried unsuccessfully six weeks earlier to force the warehouse door and two outside doors. The theft therefore threatened both the company’s security and the hidden group’s already constrained food supply.

A later break-in again began with signs of intrusion among the company’s offices. Mr. van Daan found the glass door and office door open, the doors to the alcove open as well, and the front office in disorder. The uncertainty over whether the burglar might return made the business’s rooms a continuing point of vulnerability rather than a danger confined to a single night. Anne’s request for a trustworthy detective makes the predicament plain: any help had to be compatible with protecting people in hiding.

The Company and Concealed Life

Gies & Co. is part of the material infrastructure that sustains the Annex and part of what makes it precarious. Its products gave the residents work to do; its building offered the concealed rooms in which they lived; and its exposed doors, offices, and stock created openings through which outsiders might approach. After another burglary, the residents faced tighter precautions, including restrictions on going downstairs and preparations for a barricade made from white bedsteads. In the diary, the company’s ordinary commercial setting consequently acquires a double significance: it keeps functioning as a workplace, yet every disturbance there can reverberate through the fragile safety of the people hidden within it.