A miniseries based on the story of Miep Gies, the young woman who risked her life to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, will be produced by National Geographic in partnership with Disney+, ABC Signature and Keshet Studios, Deadline reported on Sunday.
Gies was an employee of Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, and she helped hide a group of Jews in an apartment above the office where she worked in Amsterdam. As well, she saved Anne Frank’s diary after the hiding place was discovered and the Frank family and others who hid with them were arrested and deported. Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Only Otto Frank survived, out of the eight who were arrested.
The series is called A Small Light, after a quote from Gies, who died in 2010 at the age of 100. She said she was uncomfortable being seen as a hero: “But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.” In another interview she said, “In that dark time of the war, we did not stand on the sidelines, but extended our hands to help others. Risking our own lives. We could not have done more.”
The series is being created by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, producers on Grey’s Anatomy, and Susanna Fogel, who was an executive producer on The Flight Attendant. Rater, Phelan and Fogel will executive produce with Keshet Studios’ Peter Traugott, Keshet International’s Alon Shtruzman and Keshet Media Group’s Avi Nir. Casting is currently underway.
The project is not connected to the recent investigation that revealed the name of a Jew who may have betrayed the Franks’ hiding place to the Nazis.