A Small Light, Disney Plus
Would you be brave enough? Would you risk your life to do the right thing?
These are the central questions of A Small Light and ones to which there aren’t easy answers.
More than likely none of us know what we would do until we were in that situation and the vast majority would walk the other way.
That’s why we see Meip Gies and Oskar Schindler as heroes. We recognise their bravery implicitly.
Gies was one of the key people who helped the Frank family hide in a secret annex above the family business in Amsterdam which would become famous when Anne Frank’s diaries were published after the war.
A Small Light (the first two episodes of eight were released on Disney Plus on Tuesday) tells the story of how Gies and her husband risked their lives to save the Frank family and others.
Gies (Bel Powley) is a feckless young woman until she gets her first job with Otto Frank as a secretary to his jam making business.
Otto had already fled Germany with his Jewish family after the Nazis came to power but now fears the grip of the Gestapo has followed him to the Netherlands.
They failed to get a visa for the United States and reason that their only hope is to hide. But they need assistance.
Otto, who has struck up a friendship with his young assistant, asks Meip to help and she instantly accepts.
She has to continue running the business as everyone, the Nazis and their family friends, assume the Franks have fled to Switzerland.
But Gies’s bigger job is to keep their existence a secret and find a way to feed two families and their dentist by cunning, flattery and fake ration books.
Gies was born to a destitute family in Austria and adopted by a Dutch family when she was 10-years-old. She knows about hard choices and, with her husband, takes to her task with diligence and patience,
A Small Light opens with a tense scene in July 1942 as Meip tries to sneak Margot (Anne’s older sister) through a Nazi checkpoint and into hiding in the secret annexe.
She is not wearing her Jewish star as decreed by the fascists and fears for her life if caught.
We then flick back to simpler times in Amsterdam in 1933. Although not that simple in Meip’s household.
In a strange sub-plot, Meip’s parents decide radical action is needed to shock the young woman into finding a job or purpose in her life by suggesting that she marries her brother (she’s adopted so not blood related). He’s gay so not perturbed by the proposal.
There are other oddities about A Small Light.
As the opening credits role, up pops an onscreen warning that this drama “contains tobacco depictions”.
No doubt smoking on 1930s and 40s levels is triggering for some and tobacco is cancer causing so it’s not to be dismissed, other than remembering that this is a drama about the Holocaust.
That’s the murder of six million Jews amid their attempted extermination though concentration camps, gas wagons and firing squads. It includes themes of anti-Semitism, genocide and the presence of Nazis.
A Small Light is not prefect but Bel Powley is excellent as our hero and Liev Schreiber is outstanding as Otto Frank, the calm and kind patriarch of his family.
I suspect the story could have been told in a couple of hours, the first episode for instance is an unnecessarily long establishing sequence, but that is the nature of the business model of streaming services.
The story would also have more authenticity if told in Dutch and German, rather than a collection of different accents in English.
Still, A Small Light reminds a new generation about the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust and that can only be a good thing.
