Dan Snow's History Hit - Hiding Anne Frank

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

In this episode of Warfare, host James Patton Rogers is joined by Tony Phelan and Susanna Fogel, creators of the new TV series A Small Light, which explores the remarkable true story of Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. The trio discuss the character of Gies and how she went from Otto Frank's employee to hiding his whole family in the secret annexe for two years.A Small Light is currently streaming on Disney+, with two episodes released each week.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In this episode, I really want to share with you a brilliant episode from a sibling podcast of history hits in our stable. This is Warfare, a fantastic team led by Dr. James Rogers there. And he talked to Tony Fellon and Susanna Fogel. They're creators of the new TV series, A Small Light, which explores a really remarkable true story. It's the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. You might have heard my interview with Anne Frank's stepsister on this podcast a little while back, so this really does fill in the story from another point of view. James and his two guests discuss Meep Guys, how she went from being Otto Frank's employee to hiding that family

in the annex for two years. After you listen to this podcast, go and check out A Small Light. It's streaming on Disney+. There are two episodes released each week, and it's really good. In the meantime, folks, enjoy this episode of Warfare. Hi, Susanna and Tony. Welcome to Warfarefare and thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your new series for Disney Plus and National Geographic, A Small Light, an eight-part drama that follows Meep Guise, the young secretary who took on the dangerous and monumental task of hiding Otto Frank and his family from the Nazis during World War II. Now, Susanna and Tony, you are both known for your work on some of the biggest shows in US television and film, from Grey's Anatomy and The Flight Attendant to Booksmart amongst many, many others. What is it that made you want to focus on the history of the Frank family, a history that most people will think they know everything about? Well, my wife Joan and I, she created the show with me.

We've always been interested in Miep. There's a documentary in 96 called Anne Frank Remembered, where Miep is interviewed about her relationship with Anne and the fact that she's the one who saved the diary after the Nazis had dragged them all away. And she was this really kind of remarkable woman, feisty and funny and reflexive. And so we were interested in her and then we took our kids to the Anne Frank Museum

about seven years ago. And while we were there, we were reading about Miep, about that she was this young woman, newly married when she first started working for Otto Frank, and then he asked her to help hide his family. I need your help hiding my family. You need to take your time to think it through. No I don't. What do I do?

And she instantly said yes, no hesitation. And he was like no no no you should really think about it and she said I don't have to think about it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. And he was taken aback and we were taken aback by who is this person? And our son who was about Meep's age was there with us. And we kind of looked over at him and we were like, oh my God, she's him. I mean, she's just starting out in life, really

doesn't know how the world works and is the farthest thing from a spy that you can ever imagine. So how did that happen? And just answering those questions, as well as the fact that we uncovered that Otto lived with Mipinyan for seven years after the war. And so how did these two people of different classes, different nationalities, go from being employer-employee to family? being employer-employee to family. And it felt to us like this was a great way to tell a story where the Franks are more peripheral to the story. It's really about a young woman, her young marriage, and this commitment that she's made, and what are the ramifications in her life. Tell us a little bit about Miep, about her own history. I was lucky enough to head down to the Anne Frank house and talk with some of the archivists there. And we've had them on the podcast before. And the message that I got from them,

and I've had it time and time again, is that it's time to focus on those around the Frank family, just exactly as you were saying, that the bravery and heroism that they exhibited. But from every interview that I've seen with Meep, she wouldn't describe herself as a hero, would she? Ever, no. Well, she was, a lot of people know about the Kindertransport, but there was, I was surprised to find out, actually a very similar thing that happened after the First World War, where especially children, Miep was from, born in Vienna, to a single mother, and the poverty and hunger and malnutrition there after the war was pretty intense. She was 10 years old at the end of the war, very sick, had tuberculosis,

and they put her on this train going to Holland that had been neutral in the war, so there was plenty of food. She was adopted by a Dutch family of all of these sons and her, and really kind of taken in by these people, and found over time that she felt very comfortable there, and never ended up going back to Vienna. Cut to she meets Otto Frank, who is a recent German emigre.

She speaks fluent German. She is able to serve as this kind of wonderful conduit for him and his family and his extended community of German Jewish emrés, as this kind of wonderful introduction to the Dutch, to the language, to the culture, to the traditions. So she became part of that circle of people. So when you say what did Miep and Otto have in common, I think this identity as an immigrant was very important to them. Otto Frank was a, I think he would say, he was a non-observant Jew who really thought of himself, first and foremost, as German.

So when the German government suddenly said to a man who had served his country, was a lieutenant in the First World War, was wounded in action, you're no longer German. He had a hard time reconciling that. Herman he had a hard time reconciling that. I think that explains quite clearly about how Meep and Otto established their relationship and how like you say that continued for many years after the war but one of the things that fascinates me about Meep herself is that it wasn't just Otto that was asking her for help it seemed like that anybody who needed help or sheltering at this period of time and I think this is documented so well by the two of you in this series. But why is it that people turned to Meep? Was she just someone with an open heart who people knew they could get help from? Were there people trying to take advantage of her? What was it about Meep that meant people could turn to her?

I don't know. I think she has a great warmth to her. Obviously, we're talking about our interpretation of Meep, which is a composite of things we've read and things that Anne said, but that she felt like a relatable person that you could talk to, that she didn't feel that there's an openness to her and just that she feels like she could be her best friend. You know, that's why we really wanted to cast her and write the scenes and direct her in such a way where you're like, okay, this should not feel like this exalted hero that is unrelatable. It should feel like a person who just made a decision to do something instead of not doing something to help people who are being victimized.

So, yeah, I think just her openness, her relatability, her accessibility, the fact that she had a complicated story herself, the fact that she was leading an out-of-the-box life. She didn't care about getting married. She didn't care about having kids. She was not doing things by the book. So I think people felt comfortable approaching her and saying, how do you feel about this slightly subversive or massively subversive thing we're asking you to do? They suspected that she would have a very autonomous perspective on that, and she did. And one of the things that we talk about in the show is once you have said yes,

things that we talk about in the show is once you have said yes, how do you say no? The next time it comes up, we see them over and over again say yes and yes and yes, but at the same time have conversations between themselves saying there has got to be a line. There's got to be a place where we can say no, but they just don't find it because the ground is constantly shifting under them. breaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. To be continued... What would you have me do when Mr. Frank asked? Say no! Ask me! I didn't think I had to consult you before deciding to save a person's life. How do you say no? And what would any of us have done in that situation?

I think that comes to a head so well in the series. And I ask listeners to watch out for that particular moment where Meep and Yan have a specific argument about it. And it does, it makes you start to think, you know, what would I do in that situation? Do you focus on their relationship purely to try and help us become more related to the characters, to try and perhaps raise some more pertinent issues about what we should do in our own current political climate with the challenges of racism, for example, that we face today? Yeah, I mean, I think having that relationship exist just is one more facet of Meep that makes her a living, breathing character and not just

a person defined only in terms of the greatest hits of her heroic moments. You see her in the spaces between and you get to know her as a real person with a real relationship where she doesn't always do or say the right thing. And we really wanted people to be able to connect to that and to see themselves in her so they don't sort of just see her as this canonical figure doing, playing one of three roles in a war, victim, villain, hero, but also just being a person and showing other people who occupy one or more of those spaces or none of the above. So we wanted to change the face of what we believe heroism looks like, which is it can just be a very small thing that anyone can do. And that's what me believe too. But yeah, if people are thinking about that and thinking, what would I do? And then it can't help but resonate with something that they're seeing around them as they look at the news every day or anything. You can

see so many parallels with what happens in the show to what's going on now. And yeah, if people can be a little bit more attentive to that and a little bit more inspired to do something, as small as it may be, knowing that it could have such a huge impact, then we've succeeded in that way. We were also committed to the idea that we wanted to show these in-between moments. Between these bigger events, how do those bigger events then wash into your personal life? Your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your parents, your relationship with your friends? And especially when you're living in a circumstance where you cannot be completely honest with anybody. That's a really difficult space to live in. And so their kind of ongoing commitment to doing that, I find one of the more inspirational elements of them because they wanted to be able to share everything with each other, but they were forced to keep secrets

from each other. And I think this is something that the cast for this series gets across so well. I mean, what an amazing cast and Belle Powley just presents Meep in such depth, I think. But that must be also testament to your own directing and writing and the research. At least I'm going to give you the opportunity to kind of bring us some light onto the process that goes behind the research into this. I know that you filmed on location at the Frank House. That must have in itself been a particularly moving and poignant moment and one that must have been difficult to navigate at times. But while you were there, were you able to draw on some of the expertise, some of the archives?

What was it that you based these characters upon? We hired a Dutch researcher who combed through the Amsterdam City archives to find us anything about Miep en Jan. We were able to interview people who had never been interviewed before. There were many survivors who did not want to share their stories.

And surprisingly enough, it's only when their grandchildren came to them and said, you've got to tell this before you leave this earth. You have to share with us what happened. That they're just now opening up a little bit about it. So that was exciting. And also we, because of the subject matter, found ourselves meeting survivors as we were scouting locations, as we were just moving through the city of Amsterdam. I went on a scout of Merweterplein, which is where the Franks apartment was, and Dutch

Angle, who was our production services company in Amsterdam, set me up with a historian who had just done an oral history of the neighborhood. And as we were walking through the streets, she ran across the street to this old woman who was pushing her grocery cart, and she beckoned me over. And this woman was a playmate of Anne's. And so I said, what was Anne really like? And she was like, Anne was a pain in the ass. Anne had to be right all the time. But, you know, she was a

big personality. But just to have contact with those people who knew the actual people and went through the experience themselves, obviously, is really humbling when you're telling a historical story. But that detail, that's what ideally makes it not feel stayed and formal and stately, but makes it feel real and lived in and immediate, which was always our intention. And we don't have long left, Susanna and Tony, we don't have long left to document these first-hand living histories of this truly terrible period in history. And so I suppose it's here that your new series provides a really important service as well, because you're providing this history potentially to a whole new audience on Disney Plus and National Geographic, perhaps even

a younger audience. Is that something you had in mind when creating this show? Yeah, I mean, I think especially when it became clear that Disney Plus was going to be our home, it felt like that much more exciting. You know, there's always, as you're presenting your pitch to different outlets, you think about different versions, slightly different versions of the show and who's going to be watching what networks.

And Disney Plus is watched by everyone and young people and a lot of families, so many families subscribe to Disney Plus in all sides of the political spectrum all over the world. And that's really the best possible outcome for this show is not to just target people who are highly educated, liberal, know about this, believe this, but also targeting people who might live in a community that doesn't talk about this or where there's Holocaust denial or where there's the banning of the diary, which is something that some factions of Americans are trying to do. Anyway, just people coming to this material with maybe with no knowledge of it or with

disinformation about it and getting to see an alternate, more truthful history of it. It feels like a really wonderful outcome of being with Disney for this. So our intention is, best case scenario, we have young people watch the show, and as they do, then do a deep dive. Then go online and dig into it themselves and maybe go back to the diary or read it for the first time, or go on Wikipedia and dig into me. Or want to go to Amsterdam and go to the house themselves. Yeah. We want that. And interest in history because they've been hoodwinked into being entertained and to caring is our goal for the young people. But keeping in mind just that young people consume media in a very different way than we did when we were growing up. Yeah, you want to kind of tap into that and find a way to engage them on social media, to engage them in as many ways as you can to kind of pull them into experiencing it.

Tony will be developing a historical video game. It's all part of the campaign. Go on Meep's shopping trip. Yeah. So we're hoping to reach as many people as we can with the show. Well, as you say, it's incredibly pertinent, surprisingly poignant, I suppose, at this moment in time, because there are those in the United States. So I think the illustrated version of Anne Frank's diary has been banned in some parts

of the United States. We do indeed live in strange times. It's an amazing graphic novel, a depiction of the story. But I think that that just goes to show that as we grapple with new generations coming up, the Anne Frank House, I think two or three years ago, did a video diary version to kind of, if Anne had had a cell phone and was telling the same story, what would it look like? So I think it's just, yeah, like the graphic novel, it's a different way of engaging people and getting them to ask their grandparents what was life like back then and how are things different. And it's a scary time to be a historian and a writer and a filmmaker but I think these are the times that compel you to tell certain stories absolutely well Susanna and Tony

thank you so much a small light a powerful eight-part series starring the always excellent Belle Powley, Joe Cole and Liv Schreiber is out in the spring thank you both so much for your time thank you so much thanks for time. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. But before you go, a reminder that you can now follow along online on Twitter at HistoryHitWW2, on Instagram at JamesRogersHistory, and on TikTok, also at JamesRogersHistory.

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