Tragedy, yes, but also laughter and love in ‘A Small Light,’ a different view of the Anne Frank story

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In a time of crisis, what makes some people turn to depravity and some to decency?

It’s a question that came to mind as I watched “A Small Light,” a National Geographic/Disney Plus drama that looks at the story of Anne Frank and her family from the perspective of the woman who helped hide them from the Nazis for two years in Amsterdam.

Its central character is Miep Gies, the Austrian-born Dutch woman who along with other employees of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, helped conceal his family and four other Jewish people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

Obviously we know that the story doesn’t have a happy ending. In August 1944, less than a year before the Allies liberated the Netherlands, the Gestapo raided the annex above Otto’s office and sent its occupants to concentration camps. Of the eight, including Otto, Anne, her sister Margot and mother Edith, their friends Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer, only Otto survived.

But “A Small Light” is less a grim watch than a poignant one.

Nazi violence is mostly alluded to rather than shown. And amidst the danger and the sadness, the show also portrays laughter and love.

Miep, as portrayed by English actor Bel Powley, is a vivacious chatterbox, a sometimes frivolous young woman who loves to joke around and go dancing.

But when her boss and friend Otto, played by American actor Liev Schreiber, asks her to help his family hide, she says yes without hesitation. As the series progresses, the risks and stresses involved in the enterprise become ever clearer, not only for the Franks and their friends but for Miep, husband Jan (English actor Joe Cole) and her fellow employees at the Opekta offices.

Some of that toll is expressed in small but relatable ways: Mrs. Frank’s longing for some butter; Mrs. van Pels wondering wistfully when she’ll get to wear a beloved piece of clothing again.

Yes, the Nazis could break down the door to the annex at any time, but it’s tiny, tangible things that occupy the minds of those in hiding. Miep and Jan, meanwhile, deal with the increasingly fraught logistics of keeping their eight “friends” fed as well as helping other Jews evade the Nazis, and the toll that takes on their relationship.

Miep’s bonds are the heart of the series: with Jan, with Otto and with Anne, who’s played by British-French actor Billie Boulet as a whip smart, irrepressible young girl.

When Miep gifts the maturing Anne an old dress of hers and an impractical but beautiful pair of red shoes it’s a lovely expression of Miep’s devotion to her charges but also heart-wrenching since we know Anne will never wear the clothing outside the annex.

History, it seems to me, is often more easily consumed when it’s distilled to its small picture elements. Hearing that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust can seem overwhelming, almost impersonal. Visualizing the individuals behind that number can feel like a gut punch.

The tragedy indeed feels personal in “A Small Light,” but so does the beauty of its human connections.

I don’t know what makes some people rush to help in a crisis while others, like the Nazi sympathizers in the series, ignore or take advantage of suffering.

But Miep, who lived to 100 and stayed close to Otto Frank until his death, helping him publish his daughter’s famous “Diary of a Young Girl,” believed we all have the potential to be heroes, even though she disliked being called one.

As she put it, “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.”

A chilling documentary series

There’s a scene in “A Small Light” in which Otto Frank mentions having applied for visas to move his family to the United States and being denied. It put me in mind of the docuseries “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which examines the failure of that country to aid more than a fraction of the Jewish refugees trying to escape Hitler during the Second World War.

The three-part series, from Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, debuted on PBS in September 2022 and was picked up by CBC Gem in January.

It’s a typically exhaustive piece of work from those producers that lays out not only the consequences of American inaction but the context of those decisions, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere, including the rise of the discredited theory of eugenics; anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment in the wake of the Great War and the Great Depression; and the rise of Hitler in Germany.

It’s chilling to see how the political climate of the 1930s echoes the anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Semitism and racial bigotry that are on the rise today.

And Canadians have no reason to feel smug. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, this country took in fewer Jewish refugees than any other Western nation, just 5,000 between 1933 and 1947.

Debra Yeo is an editor and a writer for the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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