Yes, It's Bad, But I Still Have Hope
10 min read
A Small Light is an excellent series that conveys the moral dilemmas people faced during the Holocaust.
The new 8-part TV series A Small Light tackles the familiar story of Anne Frank, the famous diarist and Holocaust victim, from a new angle. Instead of focusing on Anne and her family, A Small Light tells the remarkable true story of Miep Gies, the young woman who helped hide the Franks and other Jews, risking her life over and over again for years.
Miep Gies in 1936, working at Opekta, a company owned by Otto Frank in Amsterdam
When the series begins, in 1933, Miep is a fun-loving 24-year-old – “a young woman with an independent spirit,” as she later recorded in her autobiography. “I prided myself on well-styled clothes… I was short, just over five feet, blue-eyed, with thick dark blond hair. I tried to make up for my size with my shoes, adding as much height as possible.”
In A Small Light, Miep – played by Bel Powley – is scatterbrained and lacks self-confidence. In real life, Miep was intensely proud of her sharp secretarial skills, the excellent grades she’d received in school, her handiness with a needle and thread as she recreated all the latest fashions for herself, and her prowess with a bicycle. That came in handy one day in 1933 as she cycled through the streets of Amsterdam, on her way to Voorburgwal Street to interview with a man named Otto Frank, played by Liev Schreiber, about a new job.
In 1933, Hitler had just been elected Chancellor in Germany, where the Frank family lived. Anti-Jewish decrees suddenly meant that Jews could no longer move and work freely. Jewish journalists and civil servants were fired soon after Hitler took power, and “no Jews allowed” signs began to appear in public spaces. In A Small Light’s first episode, Otto Frank explains that he finally decided to leave Germany when he had to explain to his children that they were no longer allowed to play tennis in their Frankfurt club.
Miep Gies, front row left, in 1945 with Otto Frank, front row center, and helpers Bep Voskuijl, front row right, Johannes Kleiman, back row left, and Victor Kugler. (Anne Frank House / Associated Press)
Miep liked her new boss from the start. “I felt immediately his kind and gentle nature,” she later recalled, “stiffened somewhat by shyness and slightly nervous demeanor.” Otto Frank’s Dutch was poor and Miep put him at ease by conversing with him in German. Miep was born into an impoverished family in Vienna; a charity sent her to live with a foster family in Amsterdam when she was ten to build up her strength. What was meant to be a six-month placement stretched to another six months, then another. Eventually, Miep’s adoptive Dutch family asked if she could stay with them indefinitely, and Miep agreed, fully embracing her new life as a Dutch woman.
A Small Light beautifully conveys the budding friendship between Otto Frank and Miep, who became his new secretary. Once Otto’s wife Edith joined him in Amsterdam, along with their two young daughters, Margo and Anne, Miep befriended the entire family. Their bond was even deeper in real life. Miep and her boyfriend Henk (called Jan in the show and played by Joe Cole) used to visit the Franks often for dinner and on Shabbat when the Franks opened their homes to guests. When Miep and Henk married a few months after Germany invaded the Netherlands, Otto Frank made sure that the war didn’t cloud the newlyweds’ day. He shut down the office and brought Anne to the wedding, a detail Miep fondly recalled for the rest of her life.
As the Nazis’ grip on the Netherlands tightened, Jews faced the same restrictions on their movements that had driven the Franks from Germany nearly a decade earlier. Germany invaded the Netherlands in May, 1940. Almost immediately, they fired Jewish government workers and forced Jews (and anyone with one Jewish parent) to register with the Nazi authorities. 159,806 people registered: the vast majority of them would not survive.
Margot Frank (Ashley Brooke) and Miep Gies (Bel Powley) in "A Small Light."
Jews living outside of Amsterdam were soon forced from their homes, either somehow finding refuge in Amsterdam or else being deported, first to the Westerbork concentration camp in the northeast of the country, and then on to death camps. In 1942, all Dutch Jews who remained alive were ordered to wear a yellow star. Later that year, Nazis began mass deportations of Amsterdam’s Jews to Westerbork and then on to death camps, primarily Auschwitz and Sobibor. In total, approximately 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported. Only 5,200 survived. Between 25,000 and 30,000 Dutch Jews went into hiding – the Frank family was among them.
The scene in episode two of A Small Light in which Otto Frank tells Miep he and his family intend to go into hiding is riveting. Would she help him? Miep immediately agrees, but Otto Frank cautions her: she needs to think about it.
Looking at him resolutely, Miep simply says, “No, I don’t.” She’s already made up her mind to do all she can to help.
The scene in real life was equally grave: “One morning, after the coffee cups were gathered up and washed, Mr. Frank called me into his private office. He closed the door. He locked eyes with me, his soft brown eyes looking deeply into mine with an almost piercing directness. ‘Miep,’ he began, ‘I have a secret to confide to you….’”
“‘Miep, Edith, Margot, Anne, and I are planning to go under – to go into hiding.’” He then described a hidden set of rooms – just 450 meters square – in the attic of the very office building where they were sitting. Nearly nobody knew about the rooms, and it was difficult to even detect they were there. “This is where we will hide…As you will be working on, as usual, right next to us, I need to know if you have any objections?”
Otto Frank asked Miep for the greatest favor anyone could bestow. Dutch people who helped Jews faced arrest and execution. A three-day strike the previous year staged by thousands of Dutch workers to protest against anti-Jewish decrees was violently broken up. Miep recalled the moment that Otto Frank asked her to take care of his family, to somehow source food for them (and eventually another four Jews who hid with the Franks) and bring them supplies under the very noses of the Nazis, including employees in the office who worked as Nazi spies.
“He took a deep breath and asked, ‘Miep, are you willing to take on the responsibility of taking care of us while we are in hiding?’ ‘Of course,’ I answered. There is a look between two people once or twice in a lifetime that cannot be described by words. That look passed between us. ‘Miep, for those who help Jews, the punishment is harsh: imprisonment, perhaps….’ I cut him off. ‘I said, Of course. I meant it.’” That promise was to change her life forever.
The first two episodes of A Small Light, depict the initial days of the Franks and four other Jews spent in hiding, raising a number of moral questions.
“Even an ordinary secretary or housewife or teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
A Small Light takes its title from a quote the real Miep said in an interview. She never liked to be called a hero because she considered what she did to be completely normal: “Even an ordinary secretary or housewife or teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
Otto Frank and Jan Gies look on as Miep Gies holds baby Paul, born in 1950.
Watching the series raises the question: Would you behave so nobly? Would you risk your life to help another person? It was the rare resistor who defied the surrounding brainwashing and hate. Would you?
One striking feature of Miep’s memoirs is the way she describes resisting the prejudice and hatred of foreigners that so many people around her displayed. Interestingly, Miep’s resistance to hatred seems to have been grounded in a proud national identity as a Dutch woman.
Not every Dutch person behaved nobly; many Dutch were enthusiastic Nazis and collaborators. Yet Miep’s resistance to prejudice was rooted in a deeply-held ideal of who she was and what her identity as a Dutch woman demanded of her: “The Dutch are slow to anger, but when they finally get fed up, their anger will burn white hot. In order to show the full measure of indignity we Dutch felt about the treatment of the Jewish people we called a general strike (in 1941)...”
Deciding on your beliefs and forming your values when times are tranquil can help you to behave well when times get tough. Judaism emphasizes the importance of learning Torah texts and delving into moral dilemmas before one is in such a situation. That enables one to know the ideal course of behavior and focus on striving to nobly live up to one’s ideals.
Figuring out what you believe in and instilling the importance to live a moral life can help give you the courage you need when challenging times test your resolve.
When watching A Small Light, the Jews – both the Franks and their friends – are depicted as Miep perceived them: as the decent, honorable people they were. Left out of the series is the years of slander and smears that desensitized Europeans to antisemitism. In some ways this minimizes the tremendous challenge required to rise above the rampant societal hate.
Miep Gies and Anne Frank
The reality was far different: Jews were routinely accused of being dishonest in business, disloyal to their countries, and venal. That steady drumbeat of negative comments enabled people to turn a blind eye when Jews were viciously persecuted. One line in Episode Two captures this apathy: hearing that a group of Jews were harassed by Nazis after visiting an ice cream parlor, one of Miep’s friends insouciantly comments that there are plenty of ice cream parlors in the Jewish neighborhoods – why don’t the Jews just frequent those places?
Miep’s remarkable story is a reminder to all of us to resist labeling other people as inferior or bad, and to be on guard against feeling hatred or prejudice against other groups of people, no matter what the circumstances.
One of the most valuable lessons of A Small Light is the way it redefines heroism. We’re used to thinking of heroic actions as grand gestures that happen in an instance. Miep Geis’s heroism was different: it unfolded quietly, uncelebrated, over the course of years. Caring for the Franks and other Jews necessitated constant vigilance, endless drudgery, and quiet courage. She received no rewards beyond the Franks’ deep and abiding gratitude and love, and the satisfaction that she was doing the right thing.
Miep began her memoir with the words “I am not a hero.” The beauty of A Small Light is the portrayal of Miep’s – and thousands like her – patient sacrifice who toiled away largely unknown and unacknowledged, insisting on doing what is right simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Recommended Reading:
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family by Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold (Simon & Schuster, New York: 1987 and 2009).
