5/22/2023 0 Comments Secret Light by Z.A. Maxfield![]() ![]() By centering the Gieses, Phelan and Rater illuminate the quotidian realities of the Nazi occupation-and particularly the courageous risks that regular Dutch people took to thwart the Reich’s genocidal mission. After all, we know how Anne’s tragically short life ended. This might sound like the setup for the kind of harrowing slog that we associate with Holocaust stories. A Small Light, premiering May 1, tells her story-a bracing, emotional but not excessively sentimental account of a regular woman’s resistance to fascism. When the Nazis finally raided the place and deported the eight people living there to concentration camps, Gies saved Anne Frank’s diary. Nearly a decade later, when the Nazis marched into the city and started rounding up Jews, she helped the Franks hide, for more than two years, in a secret annex above the Opekta offices. ![]() The man who hired Gies to be his secretary, in 1933, was Otto Frank, who had just moved his family from Germany to Amsterdam to escape Hitler. ![]() “The worst thing about it,” she reflects, “is that’s all they think I’m capable of-marrying my brother.” In an early scene from Nat Geo’s historical drama A Small Light, Miep’s (Bel Powley) parents urge her to wed her brother Cas (Laurie Kynaston), who isn’t a blood relative but does happen to be gay. Twenty-four and directionless, the Austrian-born Gies still lived with the Dutch family that had adopted her as a sick child. Miep Gies did not realize, when she started working as a secretary for pectin manufacturer Opekta, that she was destined for heroism. ![]()
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