Disney’s A Small Light: The true story of the woman who hid Anne Frank

Bel Powley plays Miep Gies, the Amsterdam secretary who hid the Frank family, in the new show

A Small Light has arrived on Disney, chronicling the heroic efforts of Miep Gies, the Amsterdam secretary who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and preserved the girl’s diary.

Gies is played by The Morning Show’s Bel Powley in the series, with Joe Cole portraying her husband Jan.

But who was Gies and what did she do for the Franks?

Gies was born Hermine Santruschitz in 1909 in Vienna. She lived in Austria with her family until she was about 11. Because her mother was worried that she couldn’t feed Gies enough, due to food shortages during the First World War, she was sent to live with a foster family in the Netherlands.

By the time the Nazis invaded Amsterdam in the early 1940s, Gies was a fun-loving, twentysomething employee of Otto Frank (Anne’s father).

She had been working for him for years at that stage, and when he asked her to hide him and his family (his wife Edith and daughters Margot and Anne) in the annex above his office, she didn’t hesitate.

Every day, for 25 months, she helped hide the Franks, bringing them rations and keeping their location secret with a bookcase that covered the entrance to the annex.

She also hid other Jews above the office: Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels, as well as Fritz Pfeffer.

A photo of Anne Frank is displayed at the opening of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, a History for Today’ (AP2009)

Gies avoided suspicion for a long time. She would buy food from several different shops and markets in a day so that people wouldn’t question why she was getting so much, and she never carried more than a shopping bag of items or more than she could hide under her coat. Her husband Jan, meanwhile, provided ration cards that he had obtained illegally.

Miep and Jan Gies, years later, stand by the bookcase that hid a secret entrance to the hiding place of Anne Frank, her family and four others in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam (EPA)

In an interview with The Independent, the show’s co-creator Joan Rater said: “Many people know the story of what happened inside the annex from Anne’s diary, but not what was happening outside, where Miep and Jan were hiding other people in and around Amsterdam.

“So there’s this coming of age story on one side of the bookcase, and there’s another coming of age story on the other side.”

After the family were tragically discovered in 1944, Gies managed to avoid execution, because the police officer who came to interrogate her was from Vienna, her birth town. She recognised his accent and told him they came from the same place, and he decided not to arrest her.

Gies preserved the diary of the youngest Frank daughter, Anne, which went on to become one of the most famous and influential books of all time.

Powley in ‘A Small Light’ (Disney)

She had wanted to return the book to Anne, but the child died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, so Gies gave the book to her father, the sole survivor from the annex.

Miep lived to be 100, dying the month before her 101st birthday in 2010. You can read more about her life in her autobiography, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family.

A Small Light is out now on Disney+.