Maartje: (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we are starting part one of a three-parter episode about A Small Light, which is a series that came out in 2023. It was created by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan. It’s a drama mini-series focused on Miep Gies, the Austrian Dutchwoman who helped to hide Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. We also did some additional reading for this.

One being the most obvious, The Diary of a Young Girl, which came out in nineteen forty seven by Anne Frank, obviously, her diary. And I also read Miep Gies’ memoir called Memories of Anne Frank, which was released originally in nineteen eighty seven, which is the year that I was born, which is crazy.

And it was written by Miep Gies herself with the help of her employee, Alison Leslie Gold. The miniseries as of today is available on CBC Gem for Canada and Amazon Prime if you’re in the US or elsewhere where you can’t watch it otherwise. This week we will be discussing episodes one through three. It’s an eight episode series.

What did you think of the series as a whole, Sam?

Sam: (01:31)
Okay, I thought it was great. It got really good reviews, and that totally makes sense. I don’t know why it took me so long to watch it, but I think it was paced extremely well. It didn’t ever drag into, you know, tragedy porn or anything like that. There were enough moments that broke the tension, that were funny, that really reminded me of what it’s like to put your head down and soldier on when things are falling apart around you. And I thought in particular Bel Powley’s performance was really incredible, really powerful. And I liked how the story of Anne Frank was seeded throughout the movie. Obviously, her relationship with Miep is really important. And obviously she is kind of our toehold into this world. I mean, she’s the reason that we’ve heard of all these people, and so yeah, I thought this was really well done. What about you?

Maartje: (02:21)
I watched the series the first week when it came out, and I remember liking it very much back then. But I liked it even more the second time, especially knowing a little bit more about Miep’s story from the book and just looking at it specifically with the podcast lens seems to always help me appreciate the story itself more. And there’s some dramatization going on in this thing, which makes sense. But it’s never unnecessary. I feel like all the additions to it are really good and helpful in putting you in that time in the Netherlands. And even the fact that all the actors are British, speaking with a British accent, doesn’t bother me even though they’re supposed to be German-Dutch-ish. It doesn’t matter.

Because it’s so well acted, you think about it for ten minutes and then you forget about it immediately. So it’s quite good. I really enjoyed it and I actually want to watch it again.

Sam: (03:19)
How did you find Miep’s book?

Maartje: (03:21)
Her memoir is an interesting one. It starts when she arrives in the Netherlands in nineteen thirty three and it takes you all the way through what happened in the war, and in my version of the book there’s a new afterword that was written when Miep was a hundred, so she’s had some more thoughts about it, specifically about the sort of witch hunt for whoever betrayed the Franks, and obviously the van Pelses who were also there. Which I thought was quite interesting, because she’s like, We will never know. Please stop hunting this thing that we’re never gonna find. It takes away from the story of who these people were, in a way, in her mind at least, which I understand. You want to give it a place, and then you want to remember them fondly, and it’s never gonna bring them back or anything, so that was interesting. And there’s also a foreword that is quite interesting. In her foreword Miep reminds you that she’s not a hero, that she was just doing what a lot of other people were doing at the time. And there were people who did a lot more, and it gives you a slight insight into her character, which I think is one of the reasons why she was so successful in helping these people. So yeah, good book.

Sam: (04:42)
Yeah, I think the people who genuinely do actual heroic stuff are the exact kind of people who think that what they’re doing is ordinary, who would never dream that they were being heroic. It’s pretty rare for someone to do heroic stuff and then to be all excited to take the credit for it. Normally the kind of person who would do that is the kind of person who was like, I’m just doing what’s right. I’m not trying to be a hero.

Maartje: (05:05)
That’s probably also why even a person like Otto Frank was so reluctant at first to publish Anne’s story. Miep herself was very reluctant to read it. It fits into her character really well, I think. But yes, I’m glad that her story was told because despite the fact that the Franks and the van Pelses were extremely brave and heroic themselves, Miep and Jan specifically also went through a lot of super dangerous shit. And they thought it was the most normal thing in the world, like you said, they don’t think it’s anything special. And I think it’s nice that they get it in the spotlight.

Sam: (05:47)
Yeah, me too.

Maartje: (05:49)
With that, should we get into episode one?

Sam: (06:00)
July 6th, 1942. The show opens on the morning Miep Gies, played by Bel Powley, is to take Margot Frank, played by Ashley Brooke, to the hiding place in the annex by bike, and they need to pass through a German checkpoint to get to the other part of Amsterdam before the checkpoint opens. While they’re on their bikes, they reach the checkpoint and it is open. And so Margot is kind of freaking out and Miep has to reassure her and get her through the checkpoint.

Maartje: (06:32)
I do really like the scene, though in real life apparently it wasn’t quite as dramatic. In this scene, we see Margot going out with her coat with the star of David on it to not raise any suspicions with the neighbors. That wasn’t true in real life. She was just wearing a regular coat without the star on it. And they also didn’t cross any checkpoints, nor see any German soldiers, so they were extremely lucky. And what they do show accurately in the show is that it was raining, which is one of the reasons why there weren’t as many people out on the street. So they just got to the annex fairly easily that morning, though I’m sure it would have been stressful. And Miep says something in her book about Margot Frank that she hadn’t one single hint of fear in her face. And the series changes that a little bit. And you see her quite visibly shaken. And I don’t mind it, because she’s a young girl and I’m sure she would be shaken even if it’s on the inside, but that doesn’t work for TV. So I understand why they changed that.

Sam: (07:42)
Yeah, exactly. They had to put those feelings on the outside for us to see. I thought that this scene set the stakes beautifully. They’re immediately in danger. It anchors us as an audience in the story that we’re familiar with, the story of Anne Frank and her family. And then immediately after this, we’re gonna flip back in time and that’s when we’re gonna get a really thorough introduction into the person that Miep is. So now they’ve told us why she matters, and now we’re gonna find out more about her. And I just thought it was really well put together.

Maartje: (08:08)
Yes, I don’t know how they puzzled it together so well, but it’s really great. So the next scene, like you said, is nineteen thirty three when we meet Miep. She has her adoptive family and her parents want her to marry her brother Casimir, her adoptive brother, I should mention, who’s played by Laurie Kynaston. And that would solve all their problems because Miep doesn’t have a job and everybody’s poor. And what the parents don’t know, but we soon learn, is that her brother Casimir is gay. So there are some objections in general to her marrying her adoptive brother in the first place, but he’s also not into a girl, so they’re not getting married. Instead Casimir has gotten her an interview at Otto Frank’s jam making company. I say jam making, but apparently it’s a big point that it is not in fact jam, but it’s the pectin that makes things into jam. And it’s a thing in the book where they’re like, it’s not jam. But yes. Otto Frank was played by Liev Schreiber in a brilliant performance. He gives her the job as a secretary even though she’s super nervous. And then once she’s hired, he primarily tells her to make a bunch of jam for a long time. And it’s this montage of her just making all sorts of different kinds of jam and you’re like, why is she making jam?

But eventually she succeeds in making jam and that’s when she graduates, basically, and gets to talk to people about making jam on the phone instead. So she’s talking to all these housewives who are failing their jam making and she gets to tell them how to do it.

Sam: (09:52)
Yeah, they make pectin, right? Which is a bonding agent that you can use in, you know, this kind of stuff.

Maartje: (09:56)
Yes.

Sam: (09:57)
Yeah.

Maartje: (09:58)
Yes. So Casimir, her gay adoptive brother, there’s no evidence that she had a gay brother, but there were five guys. So statistically one of them had to be gay. And the showrunner has said that they use it as a way into this other storyline that shines a light on a gay man in the resistance. And it also raises the stakes for Miep personally, right? So I’m not mad at it, actually.

Sam: (10:28)
Yeah, I don’t hate it either. Although what you just said made me laugh because all of a sudden I imagined what if they were a statistical anomaly and all five of them were gay?

Maartje: (10:37)
Yes. So this is a really big family and what we’ll see later is that Miep’s adoptive family were quite generous in taking people in. There’s a quote about there not being enough food and there’s seven of them and they say, What’s one more? At some point, and then it comes back later in the show as well, which is quite nice.

Sam: (11:02)
Yeah. You get a sense at least of where Miep gets her generosity from.

Maartje: (11:07)
Yes.

Sam: (11:07)
Well, one night Miep goes out on her usual club hopping jaunt with her friend Tess, played by Eleanor Tomlinson, and she sees this kind of dorky looking but handsome dude reading a book at the bar, and she introduces herself to him. His name is Jan. He’s played by Joe Cole. He will be her future husband, but she doesn’t know it yet. She initially thinks he’s a bit of a drag. And they end up meeting up again later by accident and he’s like, You ditched me at the bar, and she’s like, Well I don’t know, you were boring. The whole thing is cute and they do end up together, so there you go.

Maartje: (11:39)
It’s extremely cute. Now as for Tess, her best friend in this show, she doesn’t exist, at least not that we know of. She’s not in her memoir, there’s no mention of any friends, to be honest. I don’t know if she didn’t have any or that she just didn’t focus on them because of the subjects of the book. But Tess as a character is entirely made up. But I think, and we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, that she’s meant to represent the many, many people in the Netherlands who prefer to look the other way when things got a little difficult for them or specifically for other people, but they just didn’t want to bother with it. So Tess is nice, she’s a good friend, but she’s also not very good, if that makes sense.

Sam: (12:28)
I quite liked seeing this story from the perspective of Miep and Jan, where much of their time is spent fighting for their lives, sometimes literally, and fighting for the lives of their friends. And they’re just so buried by this. And meanwhile, there’s people around them like Tess who are literally just living their best lives. Tess is gonna get engaged at one point. She’s like, Miep why don’t you wanna hang out anymore? Why can’t we have fun? And Miep is like, We’ve been invaded by the Nazis. It’s very much these people who are like, you know, Miep and Jan are just completely underwater with this, and other people around them are like, Yeah, that would be hard, so I’m not gonna do it. I’m just gonna pretend everything is fine.

Maartje: (13:09)
Yeah, Tess wants to be a fashion designer and she wants to go to Paris and she wants to do all the fun stuff and she actually accuses Miep of no longer being any fun. And if you know what you know, like no shit, Sherlock.

Sam: (13:23)
Right, she simply does not have time. There’s eight people in an annex, it’s a whole thing.

Maartje: (13:28)
Miep and Jan didn’t have the meet cute we see in the series. They met in a kind of boring way. They met at work, at a place they both worked at, then lost touch and then saw each other over time. It grew slowly and all that. It’s kind of a boring meet, but this one is way more fun and it also works better on TV. So understandable. And fun.

Sam: (13:53)
For sure, yeah. It establishes both of their characters pretty well in the beginning.

Maartje: (13:57)
It’s also really funny because in the book she describes Jan as being this really dark, handsome man and then you see him in the show and it’s this blonde dude. I know he’s a Brit, but he looks fairly Dutch. And I’m like, hm, I thought he’d be more handsome. And then I looked at a picture of actual Jan Gies and I’m like, they’re not that far off.

Sam: (14:19)
Right. Most people don’t look like Cary Grant in real life. You see a handsome person and you’re like, Yeah, he’s hot, but he’s not blockbuster movie hot.

Maartje: (14:28)
No, and it also just reminds you that beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. Clearly Miep loved him a lot and that influenced how she spoke of him.

Sam: (14:38)
Yes, for sure. She’s like, he may be a dork, but he’s my hot dork.

Maartje: (14:42)
Exactly. We learn Otto had left Germany because of anti-Semitism in Germany and his family is soon coming over too. And at the same time we also discover that Miep is in fact Austrian, but her mother has sent her here as a very malnourished child that she couldn’t afford to keep feeding. And Miep stayed, and this is a choice. Miep really wanted to stay in the Netherlands. She has a very strong Dutch identity, more than an Austrian one. Which I thought is so, I never feel very proud of being Dutch. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be Dutch, but I guess Miep liked it. And there’s something weird in the show. They say that she doesn’t have a father in Austria, but she totally does. He’s not dead, he’s still very much alive. Her parents are very supportive of her staying in the Netherlands. I don’t know why the show did that.

Sam: (15:34)
Yeah, but then she gets to have Otto Frank as a father figure and it’s a whole thing.

Maartje: (15:39)
That is true. You said this to me before and I already forgot, but it is very true.

Sam: (15:44)
Miep meets the Franks, Edith and her two daughters, Anne and Margot, who are really young at this point, and they’re having a difficult time settling into life in the Netherlands, so she brings them a kitten. It’s very sweet. And then Jan meets the Franks and the van Pelses and they discuss whether or not they think Hitler will invade the Netherlands. Miep thinks wishfully that they won’t. And so the characters that we have here are Edith Frank, played by Amira Casar, Anne Frank played by Billie Boullet, Herman Van Pels played by Andy Nyman, Auguste Van Pels played by Caroline Catz, and Peter Van Pels played by Rudy Goodman.

Maartje: (16:19)
I love all these actors so much. They’re so different, all of them, and they’re so good.

Sam: (16:25)
Yes, I think Anne was super well cast. The girl playing her has just the right spark of mischief and impetuousness. I was like, my god, this is exactly the teenage girl that I read about in the diary.

Maartje: (16:39)
Yes, it is very on point. She even looks a bit like what Anne Frank used to look like. But I also think Margot’s quite good because they look like they could be sisters and then Margot’s just a more reserved, quiet, maybe more introverted one of the two and it works really well.

Sam: (16:57)
Yeah, I agree.

Maartje: (16:58)
And this meeting of the Van Pelses happens at a dinner over at the Franks and this happened a lot before the Germans invaded. Miep and Jan were basically two children at the Frank house. They were very often invited by them and the Franks just in general, but I think mostly Otto Frank, honestly, just really cared for them a lot.

Sam: (17:24)
Herman Van Pels, he worked with Otto, right? He was his business partner. That’s how they know each other, through work, and then anyone who is familiar with the story of Anne Frank knows that the Van Pelses end up going into hiding with them, so they’re gonna appear throughout the series.

Maartje: (17:40)
Yes. I’ve put a very short note in here because right after the scene where Miep expresses that she doesn’t think the Germans will invade, the next scene is May fifteenth, nineteen forty and German boots are in the streets of Amsterdam and it’s this perfect edit of her saying No they won’t invade to them being in the street and it’s just so well done.

Sam: (18:05)
It is, and she’s so gutted that she was wrong. She feels terrible about the fact that her country’s been invaded and that it’s putting her friends in danger.

Maartje: (18:13)
I know. And another thing I think is really well done in this show is that life does nonetheless go on. We see these people walking the streets, but it’s still Otto and Miep going back into work and there’s no immediate panic. And I don’t know why I thought it would be like that, but obviously it’s not, because if you panic right away there’s nowhere to go from there. And it’s really well done. It’s in Miep’s book a lot as well, where they just don’t panic right away.

Sam: (18:46)
Yeah. That feels like Dutch vibes to me too.

Maartje: (18:48)
Yes, that probably, and also the hindsight that we have currently where we know where it’ll end up. And obviously you’ve got to remain hopeful. I feel like the Franks in general were some of the most hopeful people I’ve ever read about.

Sam: (19:03)
Yeah, for sure. I guess you have to be in order to keep your mental health intact after two years of hiding in a small sequence of rooms with seven other people.

Maartje: (19:16)
Otto at some point tells Miep of his plan to go into hiding and he requests her help and she agrees immediately, despite him telling her to think about it first. And she doesn’t even tell Jan in the show until it’s Mr Van Pels in their house telling them that Margot has been called up to work in Germany. And the plan to move into the annex has moved up.

Sam: (19:41)
Yeah, we had just talked a few weeks ago in Schindler’s List about how Jewish people didn’t get a lot of agency in their own rescue, so it was nice to see those elements in the plot here, you know, Otto making these decisions and plans and Mr. Van Pels and the rest of the family all being involved.

Maartje: (19:56)
There is a lot more involved than what we see in the show. I will hopefully talk more about it in the next episode, though.

Sam: (20:05)
And back to July 6th, 1942, which was where we started in the first scene, they make it across the bridge without detection. Miep just rides right on by the German guy at the checkpoint, and she’s like, We forgot papers, we’re late for work, we’re gonna keep going, sorry bye. And then he doesn’t do anything because he’s like, Nah, it’s just two girls, you know? And I’m sure your heart would absolutely be racing in that scenario. And then once they reach Otto Frank’s office, Miep shows Margot to a small set of rooms that are up the steep stairs behind the office. And this is the secret annex where they will be hidden for the next couple of years. And she explains to her that during office hours nobody can make a sound. They really can’t have the windows open. They can’t really let anyone on the street look up and think that anyone is up here. So it’s definitely gonna be a tough haul.

Maartje: (20:54)
What I didn’t know, what I just discovered from going to the Anne Frank charity website, is that I thought they couldn’t make a sound the entire day. The entire workday. But it wasn’t quite like that. They just had to make sure that they didn’t make a sound when there were no office workers in, when it was just the warehouse workers that were there. They couldn’t make a noise, but once the office workers were inside, they were allowed to make some noise, but not too much, because that way when they were around they could explain it that it was them making the noise instead of the people in the annex. But it’s still so rough. If you look at these little rooms, you can look at them. On their website it’s got a 3D walkthrough that you can do. They’re so tiny. There’s nothing there, it’s just rooms.

Sam: (21:47)
Yeah. I was there two years ago, I think. My parents went back in the nineties and at the time the warehouses were not open to the public. So you just went in through the front door and you went up through this super steep flight of stairs, which you would have done back in the day. But now you go in through the warehouses and you can see all the offices and everything in there. And yeah, being in those rooms, I’m almost six feet tall and it’s just so cramped and claustrophobic. There’s this map on the wall that has all these little pins in it where they were listening to the radio and tracking the progress of the Allies, and there’s something really poignant about that, you know, these pins are going and then at a certain point they just stop. And yeah. I highly recommend anyone give it a visit if you’re able to go.

Maartje: (22:29)
I for obvious reasons have not been to the Anne Frank house.

Sam: (22:33)
Yeah, there’s a lot of steep stairs. I think that would be a struggle.

Maartje: (22:37)
Yeah, my worst nightmare would be being up there and being afraid to fall down the stairs. I mean as people in hiding, I mean. Those stairs are so frickin’ steep.

Sam: (22:49)
Yeah, Anne called them ankle twisting in her diary.

Maartje: (22:52)
That’s not wrong. Anyway,

Sam: (22:54)
Yeah.

Maartje: (22:54)
that is episode one. Episode two. The episode opens and we think Miep is being tortured by the Germans because that’s what they make it look and sound like. But no, we find out that she’s actually at her Jewish dentist Fritz Pfeffer’s office. He’s played by Noah Taylor. I think this is really cleverly done again. It’s like movie magic to me that they can put these scenes so cleverly in there. And she’s taking a huge risk by going to a Jewish dentist because she’s not allowed to do that anymore. But this scene is also used to indicate that the news that the Franks have moved to Switzerland has reached the common man because Dr. Pfeffer has no idea where they are and he thinks they’ve gone to Switzerland. Which is interesting because Otto Frank had left a paper trail for a move to Switzerland, even though he’s not in Switzerland.

Sam: (23:53)
Yeah, it’s clever, necessary, obviously.

Maartje: (23:55)
Yes. So this thing with the dentist didn’t actually happen. But I think it’s a really smart way of bringing Doctor Pfeffer into the story.

Sam: (24:05)
Yeah, in Anne’s book she talks about how the family decided that they could have one more person living there with them and then they were sort of narrowing down their list of acquaintances and then they decided on Dr. Pfeffer and then Miep approached him and before she even could offer, he was like, Do you know of somewhere that I could hide? And she was like, Well yes, actually, that’s why I’m here.

Maartje: (24:29)
Funny you should say that.

Sam: (24:31)
Yeah. Life in the annex is not easy, as you can imagine. Margot is struggling. They’re having difficulty with just the emotional clusterfuck that it would be living in that small sequence of rooms with all of your immediate family, especially if you’re a teenage girl, you have no opportunity to go out and blow off steam, you have no opportunity to get some space from your parents, they are always there. Otto tries to keep the business running from behind the scenes and meanwhile it takes a village to keep the family fed. Miep is constantly going back and forth and trying to track down stuff for them to eat.

Maartje: (25:08)
Yes, she goes to all these different grocers to try and get a not too conspicuous amount of food because obviously she’s getting food for more people than just her and Jan. So she goes to as many different ones as she can muster. And in the book, Miep talks about one of the people that she goes to, the grocer, I think we see him in the series. And it turns out later, and we don’t hear about this in the series, that this grocer was also hiding people himself. So he noticed what Miep was doing. And that’s why he keeps giving her so much food, even when he probably didn’t have that much to give her at times.

Sam: (25:50)
Yeah, because that’s the other thing too, especially as the war deepens, the availability of food generally becomes less and less. Rationing becomes more and more severe. So even if you’re not hiding in an annex, you’re starting to have difficulty obtaining enough food for yourself.

Maartje: (26:06)
Yes. We talked about this in our Winter in Wartime episode if you wanna listen to that for some more about the Dutch famine. Fun times. Life for Miep and Jan isn’t easy either. They are renting from a Mrs. Stoppelman. She’s a Jewish lady, played by Liza Sadovy. And they actually got here because, we don’t see this in the show, but again, Otto Frank set them up with Mrs. Stoppelman because Otto Frank is a freaking Superman for some reason. And they rent the bottom floor of her house. But the house gets very crowded when her daughter, her son-in-law and their kids, called Libby and Alfred, come to stay from Leiden where it’s no longer safe for them to stay, so it’s this entire family. And Miep and Jan, who are a young couple in love. It’s great.

Sam: (26:59)
Yeah. That’s probably the last thing you want, an entire family practically right on top of you when you’re these two young people.

Maartje: (27:08)
Yes. And for me I wondered why Mrs. Stoppelman wasn’t in hiding yet at this point. But she wouldn’t have been because the only reason that the Franks were already hiding was because Margot was called up. So they wouldn’t have gone into hiding either this soon.

Sam: (27:28)
The Franks’ old apartment is raided by the Germans. Miep doesn’t tell them because who wants to hear that a bunch of Nazis were in your house? But it comes to light when the family Van Pels move into the annex earlier than planned. Miep and Otto decide to be more honest with each other in terms of, you know, news from the outside. And there are no more ration books left, which is extremely difficult. You need ration books in order to obtain food. So if you don’t have extra ration books, then you’re not gonna be able to get enough food for eight extra people.

Maartje: (28:00)
Yes, so the raiding of the apartment was actually not by the Germans, unfortunately. It’s by a couple of Dutch guys. So the raid trucks come out throughout the series. We see them a lot, by a moving company called A. Puls. And A. Puls was short for Abraham Puls and he was a Dutch member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi Party, and he owned this company. And “to Puls” became a verb in Amsterdam and it just meant that if an apartment was Pulsed then they would have come by and taken all your stuff. And around twenty nine thousand houses were raided by Mr Puls and his guys. He himself was arrested in nineteen forty seven and he was sentenced to death. But his sentence was turned into a twenty four year imprisonment instead, and he got to live life after and then he died in seventy five.

Sam: (28:54)
Yeah, and I’m assuming that this is part of this whole German apparatus where they’re basically just being like, Once the Jews are gone, we’re gonna take all their shit.

Maartje: (29:02)
Yes. And the idea was for all of that to be sent to Germany, but in reality a lot of stuff just got stolen and given to other people who didn’t deserve it. Jan, who’s a social worker, provides people with benefits, including ration cards, so he has direct access to ration cards. And he also helps them get jobs, many of which they’ve lost due to the German occupation. So he exhibits some eagerness to help people who the Germans deem to be unfavourable and this almost gets him into trouble, we think, with his superior named Bram. He’s played by Jim High.

Sam: (29:42)
Even before Jan gets involved with resistance work, it’s nice to see that he’s doing his utmost to help people who are vulnerable. That also matters. That is also an action people can take that makes a difference, to go a little bit above and beyond for people that you don’t know. And a lot of people don’t necessarily perceive that as being heroic, but I also think that that is a real thing.

Maartje: (30:04)
Definitely. He fabricates his books a little bit and he tries to do a little bit here and there. And he doesn’t tell Miep most of it because he doesn’t want her to worry. Which, I would say a shared burden is half a burden. I think it’s a Dutch expression, but I think you can understand what I mean by it. At the same time, the more you know, the more you can tell. So that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t tell her everything.

Sam: (30:33)
Yeah, and I think the fact that they keep things from each other and the general stress of the situation really puts some weight on their relationship and puts some stress and tension in there and generates this conflict internally as well as externally. So they’re having some conflict within their home as well as everything that they’re facing outside. But ultimately at the end of the day they are supportive of each other and they do help each other out and they apologize and they make up and it was really nice to have that little nucleus in the middle of the series that wasn’t perfect and it was subject to all of the stressors that you would be expecting them to face, but at the same time it was really strong.

Maartje: (31:14)
I think it’s a good addition to the series actually because Miep doesn’t really divulge too much about her relationship with Jan in her book. It’s really focused on what happens in the annex and around the annex. And that makes me reluctant to say that they didn’t have their struggles. I think they would have had their struggles, so I’m glad they put them in there.

Sam: (31:36)
Yeah. Jan and Miep hear that this place called Como Bookstore might have some ration books available, so they go there. They can make new identity papers, but the Franks’ and the van Pelses’ old ones will be destroyed and with the new papers the Gieses will be able to get ration books, but obviously the papers have to not reflect that the Franks and the van Pelses are Jewish, so that’s a whole thing.

Maartje: (31:58)
Definitely. So Jan actually did make this happen in real life, just not specifically at Como Bookstore. Como Bookstore did exist. It was owned by a friend of Jan’s that he worked with and we know that they have connections to the resistance at the office. But it’s not like they had this hub of resistance workers like we see it in the show. It is however where Jan went to borrow books for people in hiding because they were bored as hell and he was like, I’ll get you some books.

Sam: (32:30)
Yeah, one of the things I enjoyed in Anne Frank’s diary was that you could always tell that a highlight of her day was whenever she got a visit from Jan or Miep or any of the other office workers and they would bring them books or little treats or they would play a little game with them and that really brightened up their little world in there.

Maartje: (32:51)
Yes. One extra, by the way, if you want to know what the Franks and in particular Anne Frank were reading in the annex, the Anne Frank House charity has a list of all her books on the website, which I think is really interesting to read.

Sam: (33:08)
Yeah, that is fascinating. Because yeah, if I lived in one of those annexes, I’m telling ya, I’d read a whole shelf in the library every day. I’d be flying through.

Maartje: (33:17)
Apparently Otto Frank was big into Dickens, so he read a lot of Dickens and he did read it in English so he could learn the language as well.

Sam: (33:25)
Cool. Good for him.

Maartje: (33:26)
Yes. So as you’ve already mentioned about the real life situation, Miep’s dentist needs hiding. And he asks her, look, do you know anywhere? And she has to be like, No, I don’t know anywhere, because she doesn’t want to endanger the annex. But later she thinks, well, I’m already getting food for seven, what’s one more? And that’s a callback to episode one where her parents say that about her. And Otto initially gets mad at her for suggesting that he should stay with them, saying it would put the family in danger, one of the reasons being that he has a fiancée who I don’t know if they trust in the series very much to not give them away.

Sam: (34:11)
Yeah, I think crucially he was married or engaged to a Christian woman and that’s how you can tell how dangerous things have gotten, because even his status as someone who is married to a Gentile can’t keep him safe.

Maartje: (34:26)
Yes. He was in fact married. I don’t know why the show made it an engagement. But he was married, you’re right. I’ve started reading the word Gentile more often and I realise I don’t even know what it means. Does that mean Christian people?

Sam: (34:42)
It’s just a non-Jewish person.

Maartje: (34:44)
Really, just anyone.

Sam: (34:45)
Yeah.

Maartje: (34:45)
All right.

Sam: (34:46)
Miep’s friend Tess, the one who didn’t have a care in the world, kind of an airhead, she’s been demanding more time with Miep and finally drags her and Jan out to the pub. And their night takes a turn when it turns out that Tess and her boyfriend are selective about which Jews are good people. They walk past this, I think it’s an ice cream store, and Tess is talking about how the ice cream man got shot for serving Jewish people. And Miep is like, My god, that’s terrible, of course, because she’s a normal person with empathy. And Tess is like, Well, he shouldn’t have broken the law, which is just such a wild justification that the minor crime of serving someone ice cream could merit immediate public execution. But anyway, that sours their night, as it would when you find out that your friend is like that. They all jump into the canal. They stay out till morning and they unfortunately witness a terrible roundup, super violent, and it shakes Miep up at least.

Maartje: (35:43)
Yes. And I read one response to this series from Miep Gies’ granddaughter. And the only thing she said about it, she said, it’s nice, they dramatized it a little bit, of course. But my grandmother would have never jumped into the canal.

Sam: (36:02)
Yeah, I really don’t know why you would. It’s not a good place for swimming.

Maartje: (36:06)
There’s another thing that I don’t really understand about this scene because there was a curfew at eight. So I don’t understand why they’re out at night. Because there’s no one else around. Are they just breaking curfew because they’re so privileged that they don’t have the fear that they’re gonna be arrested? I guess that’s it.

Sam: (36:26)
That is a great question and I don’t know the answer to it.

Maartje: (36:30)
No, I haven’t been able to find it in any filmmaking articles. I don’t know if it’s done on purpose or not, or if it’s just an accident. But there wasn’t a

Sam: (36:39)
Yeah, they just forgot. They forgot there was a curfew. The filmmakers, I mean.

Maartje: (36:44)
Mm, I don’t know, maybe I’m getting the curfew wrong, but I know there was a curfew, but maybe not the entire time of the war, that might be a thing. Also these roundups are terrible. And I’ve seen them portrayed in several series. This one does a good job, as do most of the other series that I’ve seen actually. It’s so hard to imagine that these things happen and people just look on and do nothing. Because obviously the Germans will be armed. But still so many people also just look the other way. Literally.

Sam: (37:15)
Yeah. And there’s something about people being ripped out of their houses. Home is supposed to be where you’re safe. It’s where your family is. And then to know that that fortress can be so easily breached and it doesn’t in fact keep you safe. It was just an illusion the whole time.

Maartje: (37:31)
Yes. The more I watch stuff like this, the more I’m like, please be grateful for what we have. Even though our world is shit sometimes. It could always be worse. And let’s hope it doesn’t get there. Otto changes his mind about Dr. Pfeffer after all, he’s like, I won’t let the war change me into this hateful man. I don’t like what it’s doing to me, so he can stay with us. And Dr. Pfeffer moves into the annex. It has to be done with certain conditions, like it has to be immediately the next morning. The reason why it’s the next morning in the series is a little bit different from in the book, but in the book actually Doctor Pfeffer says, Look, I have this patient and I don’t wanna leave her with toothache. So Otto’s actually like, No, he can’t take this man from his patients. Let him treat her first and then he ends up coming to the annex, not knowing that the Franks are gonna be there. So that’s true to life. He didn’t know that they were gonna be there. And also he thought he was going to the countryside.

Sam: (38:33)
As a quote unquote character in Anne’s diary, he cracks me up almost more than anyone else, just because I think he sleeps in the same room as Anne.

Maartje: (38:43)
Yes.

Sam: (38:43)
And they can’t stand each other. If you know anything about Anne Frank, if you’ve read her diary, you know that when she can’t stand someone, you will know about it. And just their little back and forth that they do and she will rib him a little bit and pull little pranks on him and he will hoard his goodies that he gets from his wife and I really enjoyed them in the book. They really made me snicker a few times.

Maartje: (39:08)
They apparently also got into a fight about the desk in her room because they both wanted more time at the desk. And it’s just really funny to me that Anne calls him childish when she’s the actual child.

Sam: (39:20)
I know, and then they end up splitting it up where it’s every Saturday afternoon from two until five I get to use the desk and then blah blah blah.

Maartje: (39:28)
Yeah, part of me’s like they should have given Peter’s room to Doctor Pfeffer, just put Peter in Anne’s room, but we all know where that ends up, so I guess that’s maybe why.

Sam: (39:39)
Absolutely not. You gotta save room for, I was gonna say save room for Jesus, but they’re Jewish. But just the concept of saving room for Jesus. You can’t put them in the same room.

Maartje: (39:48)
Uh-huh.

Sam: (39:49)
So earlier when Jan got called into his boss’s office to quote unquote get in trouble, it actually was not to get him in trouble, it was to feel him out because his boss, amongst others at the place where they work, where all the social workers are, they’re part of a resistance branch. So they noticed the little things that Jan was doing to help people out, and they’re like, well, maybe this guy can help us out with our big plans. Jan gets invited to join, but he can’t tell Miep about it for her safety and for everyone’s safety.

Maartje: (40:18)
This is again so well done because you really do think he’s getting in trouble. There’s even this lady, I think she’s a typist or something, and she’s really stern with him and you’re like, shit, he’s done it now, he’s in trouble. And then they’re like, Well, we’ve noticed you and thought you might be good for some resistance work.

Sam: (40:38)
Yeah, I love it.

Maartje: (40:39)
So Miep in her book talks about Jan’s resistance work and says that she doesn’t really have that much to say about it. He didn’t talk about it during the war. He never talked about it after the war. About eight of them did show up at his funeral, but they barely spoke to her and it was all very awkward and she didn’t know what to talk to them about. So I don’t think Miep knew much of what Jan was doing during the war, and they just never talked about it again.

Sam: (41:09)
Yeah, and I guess that makes sense, right? If each of them are working on resistance adjacent activities, then they would both know how important it is to keep the other one in the dark. It’s such an interesting married relationship to think of. It’s like you’re laying in bed next to this person and you don’t know what they did all day, but you know that it was potentially life threatening.

Maartje: (41:28)
Later that night when Jan and Miep have a moment alone, they have a couple of sort of spicy scenes in this show where they try to be romantic together. And this is one of them. They have a moment alone because Mrs. Stoppelman’s children have left and they’ve taken their chances on the train back to Leiden, even though they’ve been told not to go because it’s dangerous. And just as they are about to have sexy talks together, there’s a knock on the door and it’s an SS man at the door with the two grandchildren, Libby and Alfred. And he says to them, Look, I found these kids at the train station, their parents were arrested, but I took pity on these kids and they better not be here when I get back. And it’s pretty darn tense.

Sam: (42:13)
It is, and man, whenever you see the once in a blue moon act of mercy or grace from a character like that in a movie, in this case a Nazi, it’s just kind of like, cool, but what about the thousands of other people you sent to the gas? You saw these two kids and they tugged your heartstrings a little bit and you couldn’t do it with these two, but what about the next ones?

Maartje: (42:37)
It’s also, I think, a conscious choice of the makers because Miep talks about this moment that did actually happen in her book, but it’s a woman and it’s not a German woman, it’s just a Dutch woman who brings them. So the Nazis may have left these kids alone, but it’s not a Nazi that shows up to their door and brings them. I think the woman says that she’s been told to deliver them to their home, but it’s not as in your face, a Nazi doing the thing.

Sam: (43:11)
Yeah. Interesting. Cut out the middleman, I guess.

Maartje: (43:14)
Yes. And I understand because it was still the Nazis’ intention to not send those children away to their deaths. So I guess that’s why they do it like this, but still it’s an interesting choice.

Sam: (43:26)
For sure.

Maartje: (43:27)
And that’s where episode two ends with these two small children being thrust back into their care.

Sam: (43:34)
In episode three, Jan and Miep have to remind themselves that as much as they might want to take in these kids, Libby and Alfred, they just can’t. Obviously they’re both taking so many risks in their day-to-day lives that by having these kids there, they’re putting everyone else at risk. Everyone that Miep is helping, they’re putting these kids at risk. So they have to figure out something else they can do with them. And Miep’s interactions with these kids are interspersed with memories of her trip from Austria when she was a kid, when there was a famine, she had to say goodbye to her mother, and then she was sent to the Netherlands and she met her new siblings, notably Cas, to whom she is closest. And the idea slips into her mind that her parents might be able to take the children in because her parents took her in, after all, back in the day. And so she goes to see them, but since Cas lives at home and as we discussed earlier, he is gay, then he is also in danger and she realizes that she can’t risk it. She can’t risk calling any attention onto their family.

Maartje: (44:34)
They also have an interesting conversation, Miep and Cas, where she asks him if he can be less himself for a little while. Can’t you just be less gay for two seconds? And he reminds her that to not be himself is to live a lie and he doesn’t want to live a lie. And that’s when she leaves the house.

Sam: (44:54)
Yeah. It’s like if you let the Nazis cram you back into the closet, is that the same as letting them win, you know?

Maartje: (45:02)
Right. And I think it is. Yeah. So in real life this didn’t happen, Miep’s parents weren’t involved, she purposely kept them out of all of it. But I do enjoy the fact that they bring us back to her family and Cas especially because it ties it all together, so I think it’s clever filmmaking.

Sam: (45:24)
Yeah, and I like that she has this relationship with someone who is sympathetic, you know, it’s not like her friend Tess, but also someone who is just not really involved in the resistance side of her life. It’s just someone she knew from childhood, and so she has this person that she’s keeping stuff from, and he’s noticing that she’s keeping things from him, and yeah, I liked their relationship. I liked seeing them interact quite a lot.

Maartje: (45:50)
I think it’s quite amazing that they managed to do so much with his character and her character despite there being so few scenes between them. It works really well. Jan meanwhile does a bunch of sleuthy resistance things. We see him pick up some false IDs and he asks his superior at work, Bram, for some help with these kids that he’s come into care of. And Bram sends him to a pub that is visited often by gay men where he meets a man called Willem Arondeus. He’s played by Sean Hart. Willem agrees to help him in exchange for a mission that he has to do. Jan has to retrieve a packet of papers from a drawer in a Jewish family’s apartment that is set to be Pulsed, and he uses his social worker credentials to get in there and that’s why he was so useful, obviously, to the resistance. He has a reason for being there. And when he gets there and gets into the room where he’s supposed to be and opens the drawer, there’s in fact a baby in a drawer that he has to bring with him and he didn’t know that this is what he was sent to do and he almost gets caught by a German smoking outside, but he lets him go. He can tell that he knows, but he just lets him go. And then as a thank you for helping, Willem gives him the name of someone who can help him with that kid. So he’s really upset at Willem for having sent him in blind, but now they at least know that they can trust him.

Sam: (47:25)
I love Willem. He’s got his little scarf on. He’s debonair. I enjoyed him as a character. Yes.

Maartje: (47:30)
An artist.

Sam: (47:31)
Yeah, and the real Willem Arondeus was an artist and a writer who was part of the Dutch Resistance. He initially ran an underground newspaper and then in nineteen forty-three he became involved in forging documents such as identity cards. So as we kind of touched on earlier, if you were a Jewish person, your identity card would have a J on it, and so you would want an identity card that did not have that if you wanted to travel or get ration cards or anything else. But since the forged documents could be checked against registration lists, this obviously makes them less useful. So Arondeus and a group of associates resolved to attack the municipal registration office in March 1943, and we will see this later in the series where we’ll talk about it more. And though I don’t think we know if Jan actually knew him, the inclusion of this moment of queer history is important, in my opinion. I am glad that they slipped it into the series. Arondeus was openly gay and he worked with fellow gay and lesbian resistance fighters such as Frieda Belinfante. And likely because of this, his contributions were not initially acknowledged after the war. The bombing of the registration office was credited to a different heterosexual resistance fighter. It wasn’t until forty odd years later that his story received wider recognition. And today his final words to his lawyer after his arrest by the Nazis are somewhat well known. And he said, Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.

Maartje: (48:50)
Amen. And it’s also in the show, which is good.

Sam: (48:54)
Yeah, what a badass.

Maartje: (48:55)
In Miep’s book there is mention of this bombing of the registration office, but she doesn’t write about it in a way that suggests to me that she knows anything about the raid. So that’s interesting to me and it also makes me think that Jan probably wasn’t involved, but it’s okay that he’s not. I understand why they did it in the show.

Sam: (49:19)
Yeah, I didn’t mind including him in that. It gave him a little bit more to do and it allowed us to pull in that part of history that we might not otherwise have gotten them to depict, you know.

Maartje: (49:30)
Right. And there’s many of those moments in this show that are really interesting but do not belong to the Gieses. And there might be other shows we can look at later in other episodes that depict the same thing. So that’ll be interesting to check out.

Sam: (49:46)
Yes. A man named Tony Ahlers shows up at Opekta where Miep works looking for Otto, who he says he has a standing meeting with. It’s immediately extremely suspicious. He’s like, I really need to see Otto. Is he in Switzerland? And Miep is like, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure. Yeah, I have no information, sorry. And then later he turns up in the office and we learn that he’s with the NSB, the Dutch Nazi Party. And Miep confronts Otto about him. She’s like, Why do you have a standing meeting with this man? And then he explains that this man had witnessed Otto expressing anti-fascist opinions and he was blackmailing him and threatening to turn him in to the Nazis. And so now obviously this guy, Ahlers, wants to find out where Otto is because he’s like, Well, I can’t turn him in to the Nazis if I don’t know where he is.

Also in the annex, tensions between Anne and her mother rise, and I was so glad to see these depicted in the show because to me in the book, the relationship that looms largest for me is the one between Anne and her mother. And we talked about this a little bit when we’ve talked about Anne Frank’s diary before, but part of me thinks that just the way she writes about her mother is so raw and she is so upset with her a lot of the time. And I think that if Anne had survived the war and she had had a few years to decompress and not live in her mother’s pocket and grow up a little bit, I wonder if she would have included a lot of the stuff in her diary that was in there about her mother because it’s so teenage girl and her mom. It’s so familiar to me. These knockdown drag out fights that they’re having and the way that Anne feels that her mother doesn’t respect her and her mother doesn’t see her and it’s just like, I’m so glad that we got a little bit of that in the show because to me it was such an important part of the book and that’s what really resonated with me the first time I read it, way back in the day when I was a teenage girl.

Maartje: (51:40)
It’s funny, I have the diary of Anne Frank in Dutch. I don’t know why I did this, but I bought a scientific version of it where they compare all the versions and then they do fingerprint research on it and handwriting research and all that sort of stuff on the side. But I have no memory of reading it before and I’m sure I have. I feel like it’s been mandatory reading, especially in Dutch. But I just have no memory of it. It’s weird.

Sam: (52:11)
I did reread it again within the last couple of months because I knew we were gonna be talking about this series. And if you read it as a teenager, I definitely would recommend reading it again as an adult. It’s so interesting to have read it when I was Anne’s age and now I’m reading it when I’m, you know, approaching Edith’s age. You have a totally different perspective on it.

Maartje: (52:33)
Yes, I’m sure that if you’re a teenager reading it, you must feel like you identify with Anne on so many things. And now you’re older, you’re like, you’re such a child. A well-spoken child, sure, and a smart one too, but still a child.

Sam: (52:51)
I guess I wouldn’t wanna run the risk of diminishing her feelings and stuff because they were real and the fact that she was trapped in this tiny suite of rooms while being chased by Nazis and you know, she can’t get literally any space from anyone in her family at a time in her life when that is when you need space from your family. Yeah, her feelings were massive and she was a typical teenage girl and everything felt like the end of the world, but in many ways a lot of things were the end of the world. So I definitely wouldn’t wanna, you know, invalidate her feelings. It’s like, yeah, she was a kid, but she was feeling a lot of things that were important.

Maartje: (53:29)
It makes me really kinda sad because we know that Margot was also writing a diary and it was never found. And I think it would have been so interesting to read those two side by side just to see how different they were and how they experienced things differently, if differently at all.

Sam: (53:48)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje: (53:50)
With the plan to hide the two kids starting to take shape, the kids will be staying with a family in the countryside like most kids were in the Netherlands. They have to bleach their very Jewish black hair and change their appearance as much as possible. Libby the girl doesn’t want to, but Miep reminds her that she’s brave and she’ll have her brother with her, and again this is interspersed with Miep having to do this all by herself as a child, although not in fear of her life maybe, but still moving to another country to somewhere unfamiliar all by herself, and Libby will have her brother. So they take these kids by car into some woods where they’re picked up by two other people that they don’t know, and they unfortunately have to be separated for their own safety. So the promise that Miep made to Libby ends up not being true, but Libby does take it like a champ. I think it’s an interesting addition to the show, though it didn’t happen like this in real life, most likely. Miep talks about it in her book, but it’s only one sentence in her book where she says, Well, the kids were picked up by some people. The kids were never taken to the country by them, so I don’t think that they were as involved as they were made out to be in the show. But the show does this more often where they have Jan and Miep together experiencing some of these things that they may have not experienced in real life.

Sam: (55:18)
Yeah, and this is one of the things that they do where it’s like, man, what an awful thing to have to separate a family and, yes, you’re doing it for their survival, but it’s just the actions that you have to take in this scenario for the benefit of as many people as possible, just so many difficult decisions that they have to make, you know?

Maartje: (55:36)
Yeah, very true. Well, in real life it’s easy to forget what a freaking day job looking after the people in the annex was. They had some shit to do every single day, going out and getting food, or at least multiple times a week. And we see mostly Miep doing all this, but all the office workers and Jan, they all visited the annex often and they also tried to keep the people in the annex happy beyond just giving them food, right? Because they were so sheltered and locked up for so long. You would start to lose your marbles a little.

Sam: (56:12)
Yeah, you can’t even look outside really, because you have to have the windows covered in case anyone sees you walking around in there. You’re in your dark little rooms and you’re shut up like an animal. You can’t even go and get a breath of fresh air.

Maartje: (56:25)
Right. No, and again, the series does a great job to me of portraying all that. It does feel like that. And that’s the first three episodes that we’re gonna be covering today. There’s eight of them in total, so don’t ask me how we’re gonna do this, but it’ll make sense when you listen to it.

I have some interesting side notes that I read in the book, for one about Miep and Jan, that weren’t put into the show. In nineteen thirty eight, to her horror, Miep was issued a German passport. Obviously she was Austrian, but then Austria had the Anschluss. So she got a German passport with a big black swastika in it. And she was horrified to receive it. And then shortly after that she was visited by a German lady asking her to join the women’s branch of the Nazi Party. And she talks about this in her book. This lady was just really cheerful, German Aryan sister, she called herself. And this lady was talking to Miep like she had already joined a party. So Miep was annoyed about this. And she said, Why would I ever want to join such a party? Have you seen what the Germans are doing to the Jews in Germany? So at this point she was talking openly about her disdain for anything happening in Germany. And it’s just again, she wanted to be Dutch so badly. She was like, I don’t want to be German. Leave me alone. Go away.

Sam: (58:04)
At this particular point in history, I can’t blame her.

Maartje: (58:07)
No. Exactly. And another thing we don’t see in the series that I thought was interesting was that Opekta became Gies & Co on December eighteenth of nineteen forty one. This is when Otto Frank stepped down from the board and became still an official advisor, but he no longer had the reins, at least to the outside world. And he had said that he thought a reliable, non-Jewish straw man and an Aryan looking figurehead would draw less attention to the company. So again, when we’re talking about agency, Otto Frank was a very smart man.

Sam: (58:46)
Yeah, he was paying attention, right? Very shrewd of him to recognize where the chips were gonna fall.

Maartje: (58:52)
Yes. We don’t see much of this in the series because there simply isn’t enough time to put this all in, I guess. But also the way he set up the annex in secret over months and months of time and getting all the furniture in and all that. This man really was the architect of his own hiding and it makes me so extra sad that they were discovered. And they were almost there too, which is so annoying.

Sam: (59:21)
Yeah, this man really did everything in his power to save his family and then in the face of overwhelming evil it wasn’t enough, but it still matters that he tried.

Maartje: (59:30)
Yes. Anyway, so much to talk about and we’ll be talking about it some more in the next episode. So I would like to invite you to come back next week and listen to us talk some more about this amazing story. We will do our rating at the very end of the last episode about this. And until then I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcast or rate us five stars. You can send this episode to your friend ahead of the other episodes. So do we have a good one for this one? I do actually. Every time you send this episode to your friend, the annex gets an extra ration card.

Sam: (1:00:08)
Nice.

Maartje: (1:00:08)
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast or you can visit our website, RosietheReviewer dot com. And we’ll see you for the next one.

Sam: (1:00:18)
Bye.