"When we talk about the Holocaust, we don’t talk enough about the many normal, decent civilians who said ‘no’ to tyranny,” says Liev Schreiber. “But it’s the bravery and kindness of those ordinary people I felt when I first read the script of this show.” The show in question is A Small Light, an elegant eight-part drama for Disney+ that charts the true story of Miep Gies, the vivacious young woman who risked everything to hide Anne Frank’s family in the annex of her father’s business premises in Amsterdam. 

Schreiber – the 55-year-old American star of Ray Donovan, who proves as intense and contained in person as he is on screen – takes the role of Anne’s father, Otto. English actress Bel Powley plays Gies as a woman who was focused on having fun until the war came along. Sitting beside Schreiber in a London hotel room, her bubbly enthusiasm a contrast to his compelling stillness, Powley says she was drawn to the idea of Gies as “a young woman, living her life, partying too much. I think we would have been doing her a disservice if we’d put her on a pedestal and portrayed her as a saintly character.”

A Small Light starts in 1942, fleshing out the backbone of Gies and Otto Frank’s relationship. Schreiber explains that the Frankfurt-born Frank – who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and died in 1980, aged 91 – was at that point a man who “identified very strongly as a German. He loved the language, the clothes, the food… It was only Hitler who forced him to identify as a Jew.” 

Indeed, Frank had fought for Germany in the First World War but had to flee before the Second World War to Holland, where he established the Amsterdam office of Opekta (which sold a gelling agent for jam making) by the canal on Prinsengracht. Gies was an Austrian-born girl who’d become so malnourished after the First World War that, in 1922, her mother had sent her to Holland, where she was adopted by the working-class Nieuwenburg family. After Frank recruited Gies as a secretary in 1933, they bonded over a shared love of the German language. She had just turned 30 when the war broke out and Frank asked her to assume control, not just of his business – but of his entire family’s survival.

Last seen lighting up the screen in the adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, Powley, 31, says that “Miep’s mantra, until the day she died, was that you don’t have to be special to help others. ‘I’m not a hero. I just did my duty as a human being.’ I think we all have that inside of us… “What did you say, Liev,” she asks, turning to her castmate. “That we’re all hard-wired to do the right thing?” Schreiber nods. His father is protestant, his mother Jewish; his maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian who emigrated to the US. Schreiber has campaigned hard for Americans to support Ukrainians and founded Blue Check Ukraine, which has raised money for non-governmental organisations on the ground.

“The script brought to mind what we’re seeing now in Europe and America,” he tells me. “People who are opening their doors to Ukrainian refugees, women and children who have left their homes with no more than two plastic shopping bags. I think we are hard-wired to care, to say no to fascism.” He shrugs. “Of course, whether we do it as boldly as Miep is another question…” Powley – now cross-legged on her chair – is nodding vigorously. “This show takes its name from something Miep said; that anybody can turn on a small light in a dark room. And we can.” Schreiber chips in. “I remember being in New York after September 11,” he says. “New Yorkers don’t smile at each other. It’s just not our thing. But then, for the first time in my memory, New Yorkers were looking at each other and smiling. Those small acts of acknowledgement, connection… just being a little bit kinder can make a difference.”

Having experienced anti-Semitism from a young age, Powley was also passionate about the story. “I was seven years old, in primary school, when it first happened,” she says. “I knew I was Jewish. Not religiously, but culturally. We did Passover; Hanukkah. I had a friend to pair up with for swimming lessons and one day she said: ‘I can’t be your partner anymore. My mum said I can’t hold your hand because you’re Jewish.’ “I was like: ‘Oh, OK. That’s weird.’ It didn’t really upset me. Then I told my mum and her reaction made me realise how serious that was. It was really odd because I’d never considered that my being Jewish would matter to anyone. It didn’t mean anything to me so…” Powley says that when she went to secondary school, the anti-Semitism “got much worse. My sister and I both used to wear a Star of David necklace every day. But I remember we were studying Nazi propaganda in school and people would circle grotesque cartoons of Jewish people with enormous noses and write ‘Bel’s dad’ in their textbooks – even though my dad isn’t Jewish, which is hilarious, it’s my mum who’s Jewish. [After that] my sister stopped wearing her necklace.”

Powley immersed herself in the role of Gies by “cycling around Amsterdam, which I think of as a character in the show”. The city’s chocolate-box charm – and its tantalising sense of fluid escapability – is an aspect of the Frank family drama that obviously doesn’t appear in the diary of the teenage Anne trapped in a windowless annex. But A Small Light highlights the gulf between the orderly Frank family’s hope of respectable, legal exodus and the appalling world beyond their walls.
For Schreiber, “what caught my attention was the stuff Otto didn’t want to be published in the diary. Sections where Anne complained about her parents fighting. That was compelling: the idea of being stuck in a very small space with somebody you’re not getting along with. It must have been incredibly difficult while you’re trying to maintain some order. You’re going through a hard time as a couple and you’re never alone.”

Though it’s not a narrative pursued in the series, Schreiber suspects that “Otto was in love with Miep. I don’t know that it was necessarily sexual. But how can he not have loved her? She was the person he most wanted to be with, for sure. He was trapped in a house, and once a day this ball of sunshine would come flying in with provisions and news of the outside world. She was probably the person all of them most wanted to see. He ended up living with her and [her husband] Jan after the war. It’s an extraordinary relationship.”

When Gies agreed to shield the Franks, she had recently married Jan, a Dutch social worker. He’s played in A Small Light by Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole and is the show’s quiet hero, unswervingly decent under the most terrifying pressure to crack. Powley read transcripts of interviews Gies (who died in 2010, aged 100) and her husband gave in the 1990s. “You get a sense of their banter, their love,” she says. “But she wore the trousers. He never spoke about what he did with the resistance, so our scriptwriters had to piece it together from other sources.”

For series director Susannah Fogel, Frank and Gies’s relationship “starts as a father-daughter thing, then they become peers and then, well… the ways in which Miep seems progressive in the show are not indulgences of the drama. She and her husband had to become spies in a weird way, had to learn to lie about everything, leaving things under benches, stealing ration books to keep people alive…” Powley says that “while we were filming we had to keep reminding ourselves not to ‘play the end’. To remember that the Frank family were homeschooling their kids in an annex – as people did in lockdown – in the expectation they would be back at school in a few months.”

Fogel says that “there were beautiful sunsets, beautiful moments going on during the war and we wanted to capture that. People were making jokes and falling in love while thinking about somebody being deported.” But the director found it emotionally shattering to film the show’s scenes of elderly people being ousted from their homes by the Nazis. “That was hard,” she says. “Even just directing actors to treat each other that way is a traumatising act. But that day, two [locals] came out of their apartments to watch the filming. The last time one had seen her family was in a situation like that, in a raid; the other was a Holocaust survivor called Jack. 

“They were personable and laughing – and described the experience as cathartic to watch. Jack, having this quirky sense of humour, asked: ‘Can I get my picture taken with all these Nazi guard extras because that would be really funny?’ So they flanked him and gave huge smiles for the camera. We were all laughing. It felt like it was a moment out of a comedy. Which, obviously, this wasn’t. But that was how he was dealing with his trauma. Through humour, through absurdness. It’s all part of the stew of being human.”

---

‘A Small Light’ is on Disney+ from Tuesday 2 May