Telling the story of Anne Frank with Anne as a minor character is a brave creative decision. A Small Light finds a fresh way in to this tale of courage, resilience and tragedy and, in doing so, may well pass the story on to yet another generation. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Miep Gies and her husband, Jan, helped hide the Frank family and others in the Secret Annexe. Miep also found and kept Anne’s diary after the annexe was ransacked and its occupants were sent to the death camps; she played a key role in its publication.
Bel Powley, who made her name in the film The Diary of a Teenage Girl, plays Miep as the epitome of the feisty young teenager fighting for what is right. As always, with dramatisations of true stories, some dramatic licence has been applied; it has the familiar disclaimer that the series is “inspired by actual events”. Here, Miep begins working for the German businessman Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) when she was 18; in reality, she was 24 when she became his secretary.
Still, the point is to highlight her youthful idealism. As the series progresses, it only grows stronger. At first, the way the characters speak – in what seems to me to be a particularly modern manner – threatens to jar with the seriousness of the story. “Get your life together,” Miep’s foster father tells her early on, while attempting to marry her off to her gay adopted brother, who is as thrilled by the idea as she is. “It’s not worth it!” says Jan (Joe Cole), a Kafka-reading intellectual who is soon to be Miep’s husband, during a furious confrontation on the street. They seem so un-1930s.
Yet it soon ceases to seem odd and the drama settles into its own character and energy. What transpires is a lively, charming and poignant series that shines a new light on the Netherlands and what happened to its Jewish citizens during the second world war. Miep, who was born in Vienna and taken in by a Dutch family after her mother fell into poverty, needs to find a job in order to give her enjoyable but aimless life some purpose. When she applies to be Otto’s secretary, he sees the potential in his scrappy young charge.
One of the many strengths of A Small Light is the depth of the relationships it builds between the characters. Otto, not Anne, is the prominent member of the Frank family here. The way his friendship with Miep develops is gorgeous and very touching. Similarly, the relationship between Miep and Jan does not begin as an all-encompassing love affair – strangely, she is not immediately drawn to the man who conspicuously reads Metamorphosis on a night out – but, over the eight episodes, it grows into something solid and profound, as the pair work together to resist the German occupiers and help their friends.
This is not a particularly subtle rendering of the story. It is broadly drawn; you can see its attempts to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. There is nothing wrong with that. It opens with Miep attempting to smuggle Margot Frank, Anne’s older sister, past a Nazi checkpoint to reach the Secret Annexe; it is as tense as a heist film.
It flickers back and forth between 1934 and 1945. Life changes slowly and gradually as fascism creeps into view. Eleanor Tomlinson, as Miep’s best friend, Tess, in all her liveliness and youth, hints at a dangerously casual prejudice, while seemingly unaware of it herself. Women get engaged to Nazis; they tut at Jews for operating shops outside their “area”; they make plans to divide up the businesses of their friends who have disappeared. Brutality arrives suddenly, in plain sight. The naive, idealistic Miep is shocked by the arrival of the Nazis in Amsterdam. The Franks and their friends had foreseen it.
A Small Light’s emotional strengths appear under a great cloud, of course. We know the ending, despite the moments of rousing hope and temporary triumph that allow us, just for a second, to believe that it may be different. Yet the point is not to despair, but to illuminate courage. The series ends with a note telling us that Miep, who lived to be 100, gave talks throughout her life, insisting on the power of people to make a difference: “Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, in their own way, turn on a small light in a dark room.”
• A Small Light is available on Disney+
