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Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her
(JTA) — The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers. The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” — featuring the only known footage of Anne — to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001).
On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family.
Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate.
“A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”
In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Her secret pushes her away from friends and family, while her marriage strains under the weight of ever-looming disaster. The creators of “A Small Light” sought to recreate a hero as a modern, flawed, at times even annoying person.
“She’s not some kind of saint,” executive producer Joan Rater told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “She had moods, she had a new marriage, she wanted to hang out with friends. She wanted to take a day off and she couldn’t.”
“I think everyone can relate to Miep,” said Powley, an English-Jewish actress known for starring in several British shows and in American films such as “The King of Staten Island.” “She was just an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.”
Although “A Small Light” is rife with tense scenes and suspense, the producers fashioned it with young audiences in mind. The show conspicuously avoids the explicit violence and horror typically expected of its subject matter, leaving out concentration camps and murders. Rater and co-creator Tony Phelan wanted children like their own to watch the series. While they were writing it, their daughter was the same age as Anne was when she was writing her diary.
Some young viewers have seen Anne’s story being swept up in literary purges across U.S. school districts, as part of the debate over what should be taught in American classrooms. Earlier this month, a Florida high school removed an illustrated adaptation of her diary after determining that references to her sexuality were “not age appropriate.” The same edition was previously yanked from a Texas school district, although it was reinstituted after public outcry. Meanwhile, a Tennessee school board banned “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, after objections over curse words and nudity last year.
The name “Anne Frank” has long been synonymous with Holocaust education as her diary remains one of the world’s most-read books, with translations in over 70 languages. But the “relatable” rescuer presents another appealing way to teach children about one of the most wretched chapters in human history, said Brad Prager, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri.
“It is the message that people like to hear,” Prager told the JTA. “If you ask a fourth-grader why we watch TV and movies — well, this is so that you can learn to do the right things, or you can learn that in certain circumstances anyone can be a hero.”
Liev Schreiber plays Otto Frank and Amira Casar plays Edith Frank in “A Small Light.” (National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)
A broader lens on the Netherlands during World War II is less palatable. The Germans and their Dutch collaborators implemented a highly effective system of persecution: Between 1942 and 1944, about 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibor, then murdered. Only 5,200 of them survived.
Although Gies did everything she could to save the Jews in her care, the unwritten ending to Anne’s diary is well-known. Three days after her last entry in August 1944, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer raided the annex. Gies escaped arrest by observing that she and Silberbauer shared a hometown.
“My luck was that the police officer in charge came from Vienna, the same town where I was born,” she said in a 1997 interview with Scholastic. “I noticed this from his accent. So, when he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna too.’ And, although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me.”
In a valiant last-ditch effort, Gies walked into the German police office the next day and attempted to buy her friends’ freedom. She was unsuccessful.
Gies found Anne’s notebooks and papers strewn on the annex floor. Without reading them, she gathered and tucked the writings into a drawer, hoping to return them to their owner. Germany had all but lost the war already, with Allied troops less than 250 miles from Amsterdam.
The Franks were packed on the last train ever to leave the Westerbork transit camp for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Otto was separated from his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot on the Auschwitz platform. In October, the girls were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and Edith succumbed to starvation in January 1945. Her daughters died of typhus a month later, when Anne was 15 years old.
Some studies have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing. In 2020, the Claims Conference found that 63% of Millenial and Gen Z Americans (ages 18-39) did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. More than 10% did not recall ever hearing about the Holocaust, while 11% believed that Jews caused it. Another Claims Conference survey reported that despite living in the country where Anne hid from the Nazis, a majority of Dutch people did not know the Holocaust took place there.
“In a time that antisemitism is on the rise and there are more displaced people in the world than there ever have been before, it couldn’t be a better time to re-explore this part of history, but through the lens of this ordinary young woman,” said Powley.
While “A Small Light” celebrates the power of the individual, the fate of Anne Frank also represents the failure of the whole world, said Prager. By centering Gies’ perspective, he said, the series risks making Anne a peripheral character in her own brutally aborted story.
“When you decenter Anne Frank, one thing is that you lose the Jewish perspective on the persecution,” he said.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the annex, appeared at Jan and Miep Gies’ doorstep after the war and ended up living with them for over seven years. In July 1945, Gies watched as he received the notice that his children were dead.
“He took it in his hands and suddenly he became eerily quiet,” Gies said in an interview for the Anne Frank House. “You cannot explain it, it was a silence that speaks. I looked up. He was white as a sheet. And he handed me the letter.”
Gies read the piece of paper, stood up and opened her desk drawer. “I took all the diaries, with all the separate sheets and everything and handed them over to Mr. Frank,” she said.
She told him, “This is your daughter Anne’s legacy.”
In 2010, Gies died at 100 years old. Every year on Aug. 4 — the day the Franks were arrested — she stayed at home, drew her curtains and did not answer the phone or doorbell.
Powley believes the show’s angle gives a fresh perspective on “your mom’s dusty copy of Anne Frank’s diary.” She approached the role of Gies with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“I feel a deeper connection to this story than I have with other projects,” she said. “This offer came to me on Holocaust Memorial Day and it immediately had that special feeling to it. My grandma, the Jewish matriarch of my family, died during COVID. I feel that she would be proud.”
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How the Ceuta migration crisis became fodder for anti-Israel conspiracy theorists
The sudden migration of an estimated 50,000 people from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta last week defied immediate explanation. Why now? Why all at once? Had someone sent them?
To a certain crowd, all the answers could be found some 2,000 miles away, on the other end of the Mediterranean Sea. The reason for all this, they said, was Israel.
There was no evidence for the claim that Israel engineered the incident, during which dozens of migrants died, according to Spanish and Moroccan authorities. The vast majority of the surviving migrants have since been deported back to Morocco.
Bleak work prospects for young Moroccans and crackdowns on government critics, combined with confusion over a change in Spain’s border policy and an apparent loosening of patrols by Moroccan authorities, triggered the exodus to Ceuta last week.
But the claim that Israel was behind it resonated widely on social media, pushed by pro-Palestinian celebrities like Hasan Piker and the actor Javier Bardem, and right-wing provocateurs like Ana Kasparian and Dan Bilzerian.
One widely circulated X post showed a graphic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unleashing a stream of migrants from his mouth into Spain.
Some Spanish political leaders also seemed to run with the claim.
Israel and Spain are bitter political enemies, with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announcing an arms embargo on the country that he said was aimed at “stopping the genocide” in Gaza, and Netanyahu responded by expelling Spain from the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a multinational effort whose purpose is to coordinate stabilization and relief efforts in Gaza.
Israel and Morocco, meanwhile, are allies. Led by King Mohammed VI, Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020.
Ceuta and Melilla, another Spanish city on the North African coast, are the only remaining European-held territories on Africa’s mainland. Morocco does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla and considers them to be occupied territories.
The theory spreading online went that Israel had nudged Morocco to hurt Spain by flooding the country with migrants, presenting a domestic problem for Sánchez’s left-wing government.
“Israel and America got the Moroccan government to send like 40,000 ppl into Spanish administered territory,” Piker said on his stream. “It’s not even on some conspiracy s–t either, like The New York Times is openly covering it as such. It was classic Israel in the way that they did it, in the shameless way that they took ownership over it.”
A few Israeli officials — and many of the country’s supporters — had expressed schadenfreude at Spain’s domestic trouble. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, posted on X on Friday: “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy. Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”
But Israel did not take responsibility for the crisis, and the Times had not covered it as such.
Instead, the Times cited a misinterpretation of a recent Spanish Supreme Court ruling as a possible reason for the sudden surge. It noted that Sánchez, the prime minister, had blamed human-trafficking networks for misleading migrants about the ease with which they could remain on Spanish territory.
The Times also highlighted in several articles the economic vulnerability and despair experienced by many Moroccans, which has led to previous border crises in Ceuta.
The Times did note that while Moroccan officials typically make it hard for migrants to get close to Ceuta, several migrants had said in interviews that police officers “waved them through, allowing them to overwhelm Spain’s border fence with relative ease.”
It did not propose an explanation for this, and Israel did not appear in the article.
Yair Netanyahu’s taunt
The most widely cited “smoking gun” came in the form of a 2019 tweet by Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister’s now-35-year-old son.
In the tweet — apparently a rejoinder to the notion that Israel is occupied Arab land — Netanyahu shared a map highlighting Spanish colonial territories in Africa, including Ceuta. He wrote, “Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start!”
Yair Netanyahu is a podcaster without an official role in the Israeli government.
The post Bardem shared with his 1.5 million followers, originally posted on Instagram by writer Miranda Vidak, cited the tweet even as it seemingly acknowledged the lack of stronger evidence.
“We don’t know who engineered this crisis, but we know who benefits from a weakened, destabilised Spain: Israel, and the Western far right eager to turn migration into a weapon against Muslims,” the post read.
Members of the activist left and intellectual right also fanned the flames of conspiracy. Sean Davis, the founder of the Federalist, and Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, shared the conjecture online.
Roth said Israel’s long-term goal was for Spain to cede control of Ceuta to Morocco, which would prevent Spain from blocking Israeli ships in the Strait of Gibraltar.
Pundits have also observed that the absence of Morocco’s border patrol could be a reaction to Sánchez’s recent official visit to Algeria, which supports independence for Western Sahara, a territory claimed by Morocco.
While Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, has not associated the breach with Israel, Spanish Transportation Minister Óscar Puente appeared to suggest that Israel bore some responsibility in response to Danon.
Puente responded to Danon in Spanish: “Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.”
JTA contributed reporting.
The post How the Ceuta migration crisis became fodder for anti-Israel conspiracy theorists appeared first on The Forward.
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Man charged in a Jewish journalist’s death vandalized a Jewish business days before
The unsolved murder of a Jewish man in a public park, a synagogue desecrated with motor oil and feces, a bagel shop splattered with dirt, and the sudden and tragic death of a Jewish journalist.
Those incidents within a few miles of each other in a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Queens have put the Jewish community in that borough on alert since May. Ronnie Perry, who works at Benny’s Brick Oven Kosher Pizza in the neighborhood, said he can’t help but see a pattern.
“You know what the common denominator is, right?” Perry said.
Though investigators have not determined the motives in each case, prosecutors on Monday charged the same man who allegedly caused the death of the journalist with a hate crime for allegedly vandalizing the bagel shop.
“I was beyond horrified,” said Rachel Sales, daughter of the killed journalist, Cara Trager. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed.”
Perry, whose pizzeria is just a block from the vandalized bagel shop, told the Forward that the string of troubling incidents have rattled the community, and there’s not a lot visibly Jewish businesses like his can do to bolster security.
Nily Rozic, the Jewish state Assembly member who represents the Queens district where many of those attacks took place, said the incidents are more than just property damage or isolated violence.
“It really makes people feel like they’re being targeted as a community,” she said.
Last week, prosecutors charged Dawood Faisal, 22, with a hate crime for destroying property at Bagels & Co, a bagel shop on the corner of a major thoroughfare in Fresh Meadows that advertises itself as kosher in neon lights and displays Israeli flags. On two separate occasions in May, Faisal allegedly knocked over multiple plant stands outside the shop and, in one instance, hurled dirt at the outside wall of the store.
In May, Faisal was arraigned on charges of manslaughter for the death of Trager, a Queens-based journalist who was also active in her Jewish community. Faisal allegedly sped over 75 mph through two red lights and collided with two cars, propelling one into a crosswalk where it struck Trager and her husband, Michael, who survived.
Prosecutors have not presented any evidence that Trager was specifically targeted by Faisal, and authorities are not investigating the crash as a hate crime, according to a spokesperson for District Attorney Melinda Katz.
But even before the vandalism charge, Michael Trager told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed that Faisal had been “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area.”
Sales told the Forward her mom was passionate about fighting antisemitism, and the two often discussed the uptick in anti-Jewish hate crimes — including the bagel shop’s vandalism days before Cara Trager’s death on May 29.
“This is a tragedy for the entire Jewish community to understand, and beyond the Jewish community, this is a tragedy for New Yorkers, for Americans, to see that hate crimes don’t end at vandalism. People could die,” Sales said. “My mom died.”
Just a week before the car crash, Albert Itzkowitz, a local rabbi and former kosher bakery owner, was shot and killed while visiting Kissena Park in Queens. Police are investigating the incident as a murder but have not identified any suspects.
His family is calling for the killing to be investigated as a hate crime.
“Daddy was visibly Jewish. He was targeted in broad daylight. He was killed in a public park where he should have been safe,” his daughter, Leah Livshitz, said at a press conference in June. “His family deserves answers. The Jewish community deserves answers.”
Then in July, two Orthodox congregations in Queens were desecrated with feces and motor oil. Police are also investigating that vandalism as a hate crime.
Rozic, the first and only Israeli-born New York state Assembly member, said even as investigations are ongoing, she understands the incidents as “interconnected” and has heard from Jewish constituents who feel afraid.
“Context is important,” Rozic said. “When incidents like this are followed by additional violence, it compounds the fear and the trauma of the community.”
Anti-Jewish hate crimes have increased by 8.5% in New York City this year — with 205 reported versus 189 for the same period last year, according to data from the NYPD.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who previously represented a Queens district in the statehouse, has noted his administration’s 800% increased investment in the office of hate crime prevention. But in recent weeks, he has faced backlash from some Jewish New Yorkers after he released a video referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal” and calling on New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader’s planned visit to the United Nations in September. Mamdani has defended his comments on Netanyahu as “critiques of a political leader, not of people of a specific faith.”
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He stumbled upon Leonard Bernstein’s stubble on his way to finding a ‘Lost Mozart’
David Israel needed an electric razor, so he borrowed Leonard Bernstein’s.
It was the early ‘90s and Israel was about to make his first trip overseas as a representative of the Bernstein estate at the London Symphony Orchestra. He knew that European outlets had a different voltage and so he phoned up the maestro’s daughter Jamie to ask if he could use the one at the Dakota, where Israel worked as an editor, preparing the definitive scores for Mass, West Side Story and On the Town after Bernstein’s death in 1990.
“I took a red eye, so I’m there in the morning, and I was going to shave,” Israel told me in a video call from his home in Malibu. “All of Lenny’s gray stubble comes falling out into the sink. And I thought, ‘Well, if I get a piece of Scotch tape, I could save this, and we could clone him at some point.’ And so I did.”
Israel, who has composed music for Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, knew he had a story to tell about his picaresque early days in the world of classical music. His second novel, The Lost Mozart is a kunstleroman that borrows quite a bit from life and, like the stubbly attempt to revive Leonard Bernstein, is about an effort to bring genius back to life.
The story follows Noah Wideman, like Israel a graduate of the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, who stumbles on a fragment of an unfinished Mozart string quartet. An unprecedented 627th composition from a life that lasted only 35 years.
Together with a crew of older men — a legendary classical music radio announcer, his partner and their collector friend in possession of the titular sketch — Noah works to finish what Amadeus started.
Noah, a gifted pasticheur, is primed for the task and, due to an early job at ASCAP, where he surreptitiously recorded the music playing at strip clubs that failed to pay their annual licensing fee, his skills as a detective.
Completing the work of one of the greatest musical geniuses is an act of chutzpah, something Israel knows something about. His own lost Mozart moment came shortly after college, when he made a play for the legacy of another great.
He knew Bernstein socially through the dean of the Hartt School, and chose the college in part because he knew the maestro often came to visit. Israel was scheduled to have dinner with him in 1990, but Bernstein died a month earlier. Israel produced a memorial concert and, on March 13, 1991, was at a party where he ran into Bernstein’s former assistant, who ran the publishing arm of his estate.
“We were just chit-chatting in the kitchen after this concert at this party, and he said, ‘What are you going to do when you graduate?’” Israel recalled. “And I said, ‘ I’m going to work for you,’ and that’s how the job came to be.”
Israel immersed himself in Bernstein’s scores and correspondence, in much the same way Noah dives into the Mozart archive. Bernstein was an idol, but Israel reveres Mozart, and picked him as a subject over Bach or Beethoven in part because of how prolific he was.
“The reason why I felt like this was good material for a novel is because by 2023, which is when I was writing the book, it seemed like the only way you could experience new Mozart was through fiction,” Israel said.
Not anymore. In June, just a couple of months before Israel’s pub date, a curator at France’s National Library found a notebook with sketches from the 22-year-old Mozart, who was in Paris to audition as a court musician at Versailles.
There’s more to the story, Israel said, including Wolfgang’s oft-overlooked older sister Maria Anna, a composer and musician in her own right who got top billing in the siblings’ early tours through the courts of Europe.
The sequel, Israel tells me, will feature her as another “lost Mozart,” and draw from Israel’s own time working on Bernstein’s archive, including his impromptu jam session with Yo-Yo Ma.
“It’s one of the funniest scenes in the first few chapters,” Israel promises. He can’t yet say more about what happens at the Dakota. Readers will have to discover those lost movements for themselves.
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