You’d be hard-pressed to find a person not thoroughly familiar with the story of Anne Frank, the precocious Jewish teenager forced into hiding with her family and four friends following the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam in the midst of World War II. Though the youngster was ultimately captured and imprisoned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she succumbed to typhus before ever reaching her 16th birthday, her diary, published posthumously, is one of the definitive writings on the Holocaust. Since its original release in 1947, the tome has been translated into more than 70 languages, featured on countless required reading lists, quoted myriad times in myriad publications, sold over 35 million copies becoming one of the best-selling books of all time, adapted into a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play as well as an Oscar-winning film and heralded by a succession of critics and luminaries, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who called it “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.”
As such, you may think that all aspects of Anne’s far-too-short life have already been exhaustively chronicled. But National Geographic’s new limited series “A Small Light” offers an entirely fresh angle, instead shining the spotlight on Miep Gies (Bel Powley, of “The Morning Show” fame), the longtime secretary of Anne’s father, Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber), who was instrumental in hiding the family, going to extraordinary lengths to keep them safe throughout the 761 days they spent in the infamous Secret Annex.
Created by Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, the husband-and-wife power team who also wrote and executive produced “Grey’s Anatomy,” the first two episodes hit National Geographic last night, with the remaining episodes set to air on the channel each Monday night at 9 and the following day on both Hulu and Disney+. This writer has screened the entire series and can honestly say it is a singularly special show, the kind that comes around once in a blue moon. Despite depicting a harrowing time in history, “A Small Light” manages to be a beacon of hope and positivity, showcasing how the extreme resilience and extraordinary kindness of even just a small few can shine brightly through the darkest of days. As Miep was apt to say, “Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, in their own way, turn on a small light in a dark room.”
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Image Credit: National Geographic Set in Amsterdam, where the Frank family relocated in 1933 following the rise of the Nazi regime in their native Germany, the production team strived for authenticity in selecting the series’ backdrops, though only a portion of filming actually took place in the Dutch capital. For both practical and economic reasons, “A Small Light” was mainly lensed in Prague, with additional segments shot in Hradec Králové and Haarlem.
Incredibly, the handful of Amsterdam sites includes the Franks’ real former apartment building at Merwedeplein 37-2 (pictured above), where Anne (Billie Boullet) and her family lived for almost a decade before going into hiding in 1942. The structure, restored to its original 1930s state by the Ymere corporation in 2004, currently serves as housing for refugee writers. Run by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Anne Frank House website explains, “These ‘refugee writers’ are foreign writers who cannot work freely in their own countries. The house is a safe haven and a place to write in peace.” Due to its current usage and rather small size, only the exterior of the building was utilized in “A Small Light.” Interiors were instead captured on a set closely modeled after the space at Barrandov Studio in Prague.
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Amsterdam (NL), Anne-Frank-Huis
Image Credit: By Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 The building portraying the Opekta pectin and spice company headquarters, where Otto worked as a managing director and where the Frank family spent two-plus years in hiding, is another Amsterdam locale. The real former office, which still stands at Prinsengracht 263 in the Canal District, was transformed into the Anne Frank House (pictured above), a museum dedicated to the young diarist, in 1960. Open to the public daily, the site is one of the city’s most popular attractions, with lines of eager visitors stretching across its sidewalks at all hours, therefore proving “impossible to shoot,” as production designer Marc Homes (who also fashioned the looks of “The Martian” and “Skyfall”) explained to DIRT. The modernization of a portion of its façade only added to its impracticality for use on the period-set show. So Homes and his team searched instead for a suitable stand-in nearby.
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Image Credit: Google The group found precisely what they were looking for just a little over a mile away in the middle of a leafy block teeming with handsome era-appropriate architecture overlooking the Reguliersgracht Canal at Reguliersgracht 16. (Please remember this is a private home. Do not trespass or bother the residents or the property in any way.)
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Image Credit: By Michiel1972; CC BY-SA 3.0 Erected in 1932, the Traditionalist five-story brick building was deemed Amsterdam National Monument #4916 thanks to the ornate sandstone gable that caps its roof. Initially situated atop an 18th-century residence that was demolished in 1932, the piece was reclaimed by Eelke van Houten, the then Chief Inspector of the Amsterdam Municipal Building and Housing Department, who, according to an article chronicling his extensive reuse efforts, “devoted himself to placing old sculpted gables, salvaged from demolished houses, on newly built houses in Amsterdam’s inner city,” resulting in “an important contribution in the 1930s in preserving Amsterdam’s cityscape, in a time when there was scarcely any protection.”
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Image Credit: Google The residence’s exterior was modified a bit for the “A Small Light” shoot, with the garage doors painted green and refashioned to appear as warehouse doors and signage reading “Opekta” added. Homes furthered retro-fied the block and surrounding frontages by removing all modern cars and bikes from the roadway and installing a slew of 1940s ephemera, including plants and wooden street carts, in their place.
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Image Credit: National Geographic For interior scenes, the production designer crafted an extensive multi-level set at Barrandov Studio, painstakingly modeling it after the actual Opekta offices, which he toured prior to filming, taking exacting measurements of every nook, cranny and corner using a laser pointer. The set re-creation included the front hall, the warehouse, the staff offices, the kitchen, and, of course, the eight-room, three-story Secret Annex hidden at the building’s rear. The latter was adjusted only slightly for the shoot. Measuring a mere 450 square feet in real life, Homes fashioned the set version to be 10–15% larger to facilitate camera movement. He also added several doors, moveable panels and a heightened ceiling in order to open the space up and allow the actors to move about more freely while filming.
While certainly tight quarters, especially considering the fact that it surreptitiously housed eight people for over two years, the Annex was warm, light and full of love, as beautifully showcased on the series, thanks to the compassion and spirit of its inhabitants and those who worked so selflessly to save them.