![]() Though the series has a disclaimer at the beginning of every episode, explaining that while the story is based on historical events, some details and characters are fictional, most of the story is true. It makes for a gripping watch, full of subterfuge and suspense and people to root for. Even the potato supplier seems to know that the Gieses are hiding people, bringing extra food and taking care to hide his oversized deliveries from suspicious soldiers. Jan’s bosses connect him to those hiding children and help him find extra ration cards so they can get food for the fugitives. ![]() There’s a gay bar that hosts Resistance meetings because homosexuals, too, are illegal under the Nazi regime. “A Small Light” also introduces us to other Dutch resisting the Nazis in Amsterdam. The two hid another dissident in their small apartment, putting Miep and Jan at even greater risk at a time households were often searched by Nazis. Jan worked with the Resistance, and helped hide Jewish children with adoptive families in the countryside. After Otto - played by a gruff Liev Schreiber - hires her, she bonds with the Frank family, also transplants from Germany, over their shared language.Īfter the Frank and Van Pels families, along with dentist Fritz Pfeffer, go into hiding, Miep and her husband Jan go to enormous lengths in order to protect people - not only those in the Annex - from the Nazis. ![]() On the surface, her story is not entirely dissimilar from that of the Jews: As a child, she was sick from malnutrition thanks to the food scarcity in Austria after World War I, and was sent away to an adoptive family in the Netherlands she never saw her birth family again. Opening before the war, Gies, as played by Bel Powley, is a bright-eyed and vibrant woman who loves to go out dancing, but also feels like a misfit. In 2025, Dutch records of Nazi collaborators will become publicly available, an event which many Dutch expect to be deeply discomfiting as people learn the true activities of their families. Only in 2020 did the Dutch government apologize for its collaboration with the Nazis. Though the Netherlands has the second-highest number of documented saviors, and is renowned for its citizens’ fierce fight against the Germans, it also had one of the highest Jewish death tolls, losing more than 100,000 out of its 140,000 Jews. Gies’ story, too, is related to a similar controversy. Hate groups have long denied or distorted the Holocaust, but now entire governments, such as Poland’s, have begun to emphasize the deaths of non-Jewish Polish citizens who died during the war, papering over the many citizens who turned in their neighbors and drawing focus away from the Jewish population that was systematically hunted and exterminated. Following Miep Gies, perhaps the best known of the six people who helped to hide the Franks, it shows the work of the Dutch Resistance as well as what non-Jews were going through in Amsterdam under the Nazi occupation.īut highlighting non-Jews in the Holocaust is a delicate matter, and “A Small Light” is coming out at a time in which Holocaust revisionism is on the rise. “A Small Light,” a new show from National Geographic, turns the camera around to what was going on around Anne, outside the Secret Annex. Since being published, the book has made millions of people familiar with the trials of the Secret Annex where the young girl documented the food shortages, close quarters and constant fear - along with her familial spats, dreams of becoming a famous writer and hopes for the war’s end. Anne Frank’s diary is famous for documenting life in hiding during the Holocaust.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |