Otto Heinrich Frank was the father of Anne Frank. He edited and published the first edition of her diary in 1947 and advised on its later theatrical and cinematic adaptations. In the 1950s and 60s he established European charities in his daughter's name and founded the trust which preserved his family's wartime hiding place, the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam.

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.