Margot Frank, played by Ashley Brooke, and Miep Gies, played by Bel Powley, arrive at a government checkpoint in A SMALL LIGHT. (Photo credit: National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)

Editor’s Note: Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. Follow him on TwitterInstagram and Facebook and at royschwartz.com. The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN  — 

In 1941, a young secretary in a small company for jam and jelly products in Amsterdam was asked by her Jewish boss Otto Frank to help hide his family from the occupying Nazis. She agreed without hesitation.

Roy Schwartz

For two long years, Miep Gies and her husband Jan, with several others, protected and provided for Otto, Edith, Margot and Anne Frank, along with four more people, hiding in a 450-square-foot space secretly built above the company’s office building, hidden behind a bookcase.

Miep’s amazing story is told in the new eight-part series “A Small Light,” a joint production of National Geographic, ABC Signature and Keshet Studios, premiering May 1 — two weeks after the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and at the beginning of Jewish American Heritage Month. Episodes will air Mondays on Nat Geo and Tuesdays on Disney+. British actors Bel Powley and Joe Cole play Miep and Jan, with Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank.

Miep, who was born Hermine Santrouschitz in 1909 to a poor Catholic family in Vienna, Austria and sent at the age of 11 to a foster family in Amsterdam, risked her life to help eight people, four of whom she barely knew, stay safe and fed for 761 days. When the secret annex was eventually discovered and raided in 1944, Miep was spared arrest, but its inhabitants were sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Only Otto Frank survived.

It was Miep who found Anne’s diary and hid it from the Nazis, giving it to Otto when he returned after the war. “The Diary of a Young Girl,” better known as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” was published in 1947, becoming the most famous and widely read Holocaust memoir.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock (2541698a)
Anne Frank's (1929-1945) world famous diary charts two years of her life from 1942 to 1944, when her family were hiding in Amsterdam from German Nazis. The diary begins just before the family retreated into their 'Secret Annexe'.
History

Miep and Jan were named “Righteous Among the Nations,” the highest honor bestowed on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

“A Small Light” is Miep’s story, not Anne’s, about what was happening on the other side of the bookcase. For most, Anne Frank’s diary is a faint memory of a middle school reading assignment. But the show’s modern sensibility makes it feel immediate and relevant. It makes audiences ask themselves what they would have done, and if they have the courage to stand up to hatred in our own time.

Powley, who portrays Miep with gripping relatability, told me that what struck her was how “this ordinary woman did these extraordinary things… every time I read one of the scripts, I couldn’t believe it was true. I’d call up [co-showrunner] Tony Phelan and be like, ‘this must be made up,’ and it never was. The bravery this woman showed is so inspiring.”

“The fact that she was so ordinary was something we wanted to highlight,” Joan Rater, co-showrunner and Phalen’s wife, also told me. “To show her self-doubt, to show moments of anger, or humor.” But, as perfectly average as she was, even insecure, she was anything but normal. “She hated being called a hero,” Rater said. “She felt like she did what anyone would do. But the fact is that not anyone would, because not everyone did.”

One thing that stood out to me when watching the show was that, despite the subject matter, it avoids graphic violence or anything else that might be inappropriate for a teen or, aside from some profanity, even a preteen. I asked Phelan about it.

“As creators, we’re always looking for those shows that you can sit down and watch as a family,” he told me. “The reason we chose to write this show was because of our family. We were visiting the Anne Frank museum with our kids…and we read this plaque about Miep Gies and what she did, and had this realization that when Otto Frank asked her to help save his family, she was not much older than our kids.”

The timing is auspicious. Anne Frank has particularly been in the zeitgeist in recent years, with the 2021 French animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” a magical retelling of her story loosely based on the 2018 graphic novel; the 2022 Dutch Netflix movie “My Best Friend Anne Frank,” based on the book “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend”; the controversial, eventually pulled 2022 book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank”; and “After the Annex: Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Beyond,” coming out in May.

Jan and Miep Gies (Joe Cole and Bel Powley) join the Franks and the van Pels (from left: Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank, Ashley Brooke as Margot Frank, Rudi Goodman as Peter van Pels, Amira Casar as Edith Frank, Billie Boullet as Anne Frank and Caroline Catz as Mrs. van Pels) and watch as Mr. van Pels (Andy Nyman) lights the menorah during Hanukkah, as seen the upcoming limited series 'A Small Light.'

At the same time, the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary was removed from a Florida high school earlier this month, as well as from all school libraries in a Texas district in August, along with dozens of other books (it was eventually returned following an outcry). Another graphic novel about the Holocaust, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” was banned in a Tennessee school district in January 2022. According to PEN America, in 2022 there were more than 2,500 school book bans across the US, 80% involving racial minority or LGBTQ+ themes and characters. (There’s an irony here. The Nazis outlawed books before they outlawed people.)

And this is at a time when Holocaust ignorance, particularly among Millennials and Gen Zers, is nothing short of shocking. A 2020 nationwide survey found that, among Americans ages 18–40, more than 10% don’t recall ever hearing about the Holocaust. 63% don’t know that six million Jews were murdered, and almost 10% don’t believe or aren’t sure it even happened. Another 11% think Jews caused it (19% in New York, the state with the largest Jewish population). More than 50% have seen Holocaust denial or Nazi symbols online or in their community. States with mandated Holocaust education did not show better results.

In the Netherlands, Anne Frank’s home country, a recent survey found that, in the same age group, 23% believe the Holocaust was either a myth or greatly exaggerated, and another 12% are unsure. 59% don’t know that six million Jews were murdered, and the same number don’t know or believe the Holocaust took place in their country. 22% find it acceptable to support neo-Nazi views and 13% are unsure. While 89% have heard of Anne Frank, 32% don’t know she died in a concentration camp.

Although “A Small Light” is a Holocaust story, it doesn’t focus on the atrocities or reduce its characters to victims. It shows ordinary people who find themselves in a world gone mad, and the choices they make. It’s about a young woman who refuses to stand by, and makes the choice, day after day, for hundreds of days, to risk her life for others.

It’s also an ode to nonconformity, a potent reminder at a time of increasing political dogma, groupthink and social media echo chambers. Miep is something of an awkward misfit, which is exactly why she doesn’t fall in line. While most of her friends and countrymen get swept up in the tidal wave, she keeps swimming against the current. And she manages to inspire the same strength in others.

The Holocaust took place over 80 years ago. Soon there will be no more survivors, and it will pass from living memory. What will remain is the responsibility, to remember but also to understand. The great lesson of the Holocaust isn’t the eternal condemnation of Nazis. It shouldn’t be thought of, or taught, as ‘something that happened back then, over there, to them.’ Nazism isn’t a historical event, it’s a moral danger. The great lesson is that, if we’re not careful, we too can become that. That’s what “Never Again” really means.

A history book can tell the dry facts, the incomprehensible, abstract numbers. But true understanding, true empathy, often comes from personal stories like Miep’s. It’s important to find new contexts and new narratives for each generation, to connect the Holocaust to the here and now, to us.

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“It couldn’t be more relevant today, with the rise of antisemitism.” Powley told me. “There couldn’t be a better time to have a show that will hopefully make people put a mirror up to themselves and think, ‘what would I do?’ and ‘what should I do?’”

It’s a good reminder that the Holocaust isn’t a Jewish story, it’s a human story. Whether it’s antisemitic incidents in America tripling in the last six years, the highest on record, or the surge of bills targeting LGBTQ rights across the US, 306 in 2022 and 385 through March 7 of this year alone, or the number of forcibly displaced people around the world exceeding 100 million, almost double the number following World War II, silence in the face of any injustice is the same silence.

If watching the show, especially with our children and grandchildren, can make us see the world a bit differently, with a bit more compassion. If it inspires us not just to be better but do better, it’s worth the time.

The show’s title comes from a statement Gies once made: “I don’t like being called a hero because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”