TELEVISION
A poignant drama celebrates the heroic woman who took Anne Frank’s family into hiding.
Miep Gies never thought she was extraordinary. Born in 1909 to a Catholic family in Vienna, she was sent to the Netherlands as a little girl to be fostered because her own family could no longer afford to feed her. So she knew about resourcefulness, about risk, from an early age. She married in 1941 and found a job in a jam-making business; in 1942, her employer Otto Frank told her his Jewish family would have to go into hiding to escape the genocidal persecution of the Nazis. Gies took it upon herself to help Otto and his family; it is thanks to her, in large part, that we know about his daughter Anne, of the Secret Annex and the diary she wrote there. Yet Gies made no great claims for herself. ‘Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room,’ she wrote.
Now, the eight-part drama A Small Light brings Gies to the world’s attention. Developed and written by Tony Phelan and Joan Rater (the duo behind Doubt, Grey’s Anatomy and Council of Dads), the absorbing series shows the Franks’ story from a new angle, removing any sense of inevitability and revealing, through Gies’ eyes, a sequence of events that are both quotidian and momentous, as each minor choice she makes has significant consequences – for herself, for her own adoptive family, for the Franks.
‘I’d always thought about Anne Frank’s story from the point of view of Anne herself,’ says Bel Powley, who portrays Gies with vibrant openness. Powley made her feature debut in 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, for which she was Bafta-nominated; more recently, she appeared in the BBC adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love. To prepare for her latest role, she read Gies’ book – Anne Frank Remembered, published in 1988 – and warmed to what she found there. ‘As much as she was a hero and brave, she always presented herself as an everywoman. She’s incredibly relatable, incredibly mo
