Heroes of the Holocaust: A Small Light

Thank you Tony Phelan and Joan Rater for creating the moving and mesmerizing limited series, A Small Light about Miep Gies, who hid the Frank family from the Nazis during the Holocaust in Amsterdam. I met them at a Jewish Federation Los Angeles screening at UTA and at Stephen Wise Temple. Joan Rater told the audience, “People make choices and choices make history.” Miep Gies believed she was just an ordinary person who made a choice that anyone would make but we know that is not true. Would we choose to help? As Miep would say, “We can all turn on a small light in a dark room.”

A Small Light Screening by Jewish Federation LA at UTA

Listen or watch our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform

READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Lisa Niver:

Good afternoon, this is Lisa Niver. I’m the founder of We Said Go Travel, and the author of Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless after 50. And I am beyond excited and honored to have the most incredible producer joining me today. Tony, thank you so much for being here.

Tony Phelan:

I’m happy to be here.

Lisa Niver:

I loved meeting you at the Federation event at UTA about your current project, A Small Light. I know it’s available for people to see now, and we are definitely going to talk about this show, which I think everybody should watch. I think they should have it in classrooms. I used to teach at Steven Wise Tempe, I taught in Culver City Middle School. Everybody needs to see your show, but before we get there–You have a long, very prominent, incredible career with movies and television, so can you give people a little bit of background? Who are you?

Tony Phelan:

Well, I am a writer, director, showrunner and my wife, Joan, and I write as a team. We have been on such shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Madam Secretary. We just created a show for CBS this past year called Fire Country.

Lisa Niver:

The top rated new show of last season.

Tony Phelan:

We’re very excited about that. We came to A Small Light having pretty much spent our entire career in television on network. A Small Light, which tells the story of Meap Gies, who was Otto Frank’s secretary and was instrumental in hiding the Franks as well as the other people in the secret annex. What Joan and I discovered through our research was that while she and her husband Jan were hiding the Franks, they were also hiding up to 12 other people in and around Amsterdam. And so this to us, felt like a wonderful opportunity to tell the story of the helpers of people who in Amsterdam during World War II, helped to hide Jews. And tell the story of people who, when faced with bigotry and antisemitism went out, could have chosen to do nothing, but instead chose to go out of their way to help their fellow man. It really felt like an inspirational story and a way to tell the story of Anne Frank from a different perspective. In partnership with Disney+ and Nat Geo, we created an eight episode limited series, which is now available on Disney+ and Hulu and really has some wonderful performances. The intention was to tell a historical story and wipe away the cobwebs and to really tell it in such a way that felt immediate and vital and exciting.

Lisa Niver:

It’s phenomenal. I saw it with an incredible crowd, and my parents saw it the following night at Stephen Wise Temple a big crowd. Everyone I’ve spoken to about it who’s watched it comes away with the same thing that it’s so compelling. For many of us, I grew up with a lot of education about the Holocaust and knowing about the Frank family, but I had no idea, which was one of the things you guys discussed that night, that she was so young and newly married.

Tony Phelan:

She and Otto Frank formed this amazing relationship. When he hired her, she was very young in her early twenties. By the time he asked her to help hide his family, she was newly married. She was just starting out in life, but was a bit of a hot mess. In a way that I think feels very relatable. She herself was an immigrant. She was born in Vienna. After World War I, there was a program to relocate children who were in the war zone to the Netherlands, which had been neutral during World War I. They had food and all sorts of services that were available to children. There was this strange reverse kinder transport that happened at that time that we discovered.

Meep was adopted by a Dutch family, and found herself wanting to stay in Holland. When she met Mr. Frank, who was an immigrant from Germany, they formed an immediate kinship because they shared a language. Mr. Frank then used Miep and her husband Jan, as what they refer to as their Dutch friends. And so put them in contact with all these other German Jewish emigres because they could help them navigate the social morays and the customs of the Netherlands and help them with the language and other issues. So that when it came time for him to ask for her help in hiding his family, she immediately said yes to the point where he said, no, no, no. Take a moment. Think about it. You could be arrested or killed if you were found hiding Jews.

She said, I don’t need to think about it. Anyone would do it. Well, we know that not anyone would do it, because not everyone did, but she did. Our research in the show was really about why was she so open to helping others. We think part of it was the fact that she was an immigrant herself. Part of it was what she later said in life, after the success of Ann’s diary, was that you don’t have to be special in order to help other people. Small acts of kindness can really do tremendous things. That was a message that we felt the world needed right now. We’re thrilled to bring that and the story of Miep and how she was the person who scooped up Anne’s diary after everyone was arrested in the annex and kept it in a locked drawer for Anne when she came back.

When they found out that Anne and Margot were not coming back from Bergen Belson, she gathered up the diary and walked it into Mr. Frank’s office and laid it on his desk and said, this is the legacy of your daughter. And then together, they made sure that the diary found as many readers as possible. After the war, Otto chose to live with Miep for seven years until he remarried, which is pretty remarkable that this boss and employee could eventually move into being really family.

Tony Phelan and Lisa Niver recording our interview

Lisa Niver:

That’s a lot of what you feel in the episodes of the show is about chosen family and choices. At the screening you reported that Miep always said– anyone would’ve done it. But we know, looking at the issues with bystanders, allys and upstanders, that she was an original upstander. When called into action, she was committed. I thought the contrast in some of the scenes where the friend is having the party and she’s wearing the fancy dress and skating and the opulence versus these people hiding. You really see how it was so tenuous for Anne every day, wondering if she could get food? Did they have the ration books? What was going to happen next?

Tony Phelan:

Not only that, but how do you live with the fact that you get to go outside? If you chose to, your life was not that different. As the Nazis were systematically ridding Amsterdam and the Netherlands of Jews, if you chose to collaborate or just turn away, your life was relatively unaffected. People ask us did we take some dramatic liberties with the story. We tried to stick to the historical record as much as we could.

But in the example of the friend that you bring up, that was an invented character, because we wanted to show that people who did not make the same choice she did. And how the fact that Meep was hiding this from her family, from her friends, caused huge rifts in her life. Even she and Jan, her husband, had to keep things hidden from each other. That put tension on their new marriage.

Lisa Niver:

All of your shows from Grey’s Anatomy to Fire Country have dramatic tension about real relationships. The smallest details to the largest details of what would you do create compelling shows with so much for people to think about. When there’s an accident in the street who calls 9 1 1? That’s a very small participation that I’ve been involved in different accidents. I worked on a cruise ship for seven years. I was a very highly trained first responder. So if there’s an accident, I’m going to call 9 1 1. I don’t think about it, but not everybody thinks I need to do something. And Miep really stepped up.

Tony Phelan:

These people were her friends. One of the amazing things about Amsterdam is how much of a kind society it was. From the 1600s, Amsterdam had been a haven for Jews across Europe. Not only Jews, but also LGBTQ people. Real people in Amsterdam could not wrap their heads around the fact that this was happening to them and their society. One of the things that we weren’t able to tell, but I thought was really interesting was after the Nazis invaded and took over the country, the Dutch were the only occupied people to launch a general strike against the Nazis. They basically said, you’re doing this to our Jewish friends and neighbors. We are gonna shut everything down and just not participate.

The Nazis couldn’t believe that this was happening. They expected the Dutch to welcome them with open arms being fellow arians. And they brutally put this general strike down to the point of leading the leaders of the general strike out into the street and just shooting them, which stopped the general strike. But that spirit was always there. When the Nazis first imposed Jews having to wear yellow stars, there were Dutch citizens who started to wear little orange flowers or little crosses to depict that they were Christians in defiance of the Nazis. If you’re going to label the the Jews as Jews, we are going to label ourselves as well. These little acts of defiance were pretty remarkable for the time. But yes, Miep did these acts of resistance, and at the same time, not knowing how many other people were doing them since everybody had to be very secretive about what they were doing.

Lisa Niver:

At the Federation event, you and your wife spoke about how this story chose you, that you were with your family in Amsterdam.

Tony Phelan:

We were with our family in Amsterdam. There’s a wonderful documentary about Miep called Anne Frank remembered that came out in the nineties, won the Academy Award for best documentary. That was the first time we ever saw her. And she was well into her nineties and was talking about Anne and finding the diary and her relationship to Anne. Then we took our kids to Amsterdam about seven years ago. While we were there, we were going through the Anne Frank Museum and reading the signs, and we were reading a sign about Miep. Our son had just graduated from Columbia, very smart, but hapless. He was just starting out in life and he was figuring out things. We read about Miep’s age when she first started working for Otto.

Tony Phelan:

And we thought, she’s just this young woman who does not know how anything works. And all of a sudden she has all these lives in her hands. So the act of figuring things out is the story. She and Jan were not super spies. They didn’t know what they were doing. They had to cobble it together as they went. And then, we left the museum, rented bikes, and we rode the route from the hidden annex to the Frank’s apartment about 45 minutes. We got there and we saw the Frank’s apartment building, and then we were going to get ice cream. We turned around and we saw there’s a park across the street from the Frank’s apartment, and we saw these 10 year old girls doing cartwheels. And we had this revelation of that’s Anne.

Anne was just a 10 year old girl doing cartwheels when history overtook her. The desire to make these people human and relatable became our stated goal. Many times when I watch historical dramas, the language and the way that they’re shot, there’s a real barrier between the viewer and the people. They speak in a different way. They wear different clothes. We wanted to clear all that out and have them speak in a more contemporary way and shoot it in a more realistic, grounded way so that barrier wasn’t there, so that the audience could really immediately relate to these people, and put themselves in the shoes of the characters and say, what would I do?

Lisa Niver:

There’s a interesting parallel that this story found you through your family, and you are a successful creator working with your spouse. How did you and your spouse find each other and find your way into being writing partners?

Tony Phelan:

We first met in 1988 in New York. I was a young theater director, and Joan was an actress. We met through mutual friends. Joan was always complaining about the fact that she hated auditioning. She wasn’t having much success. We would go to parties together. I would watch her tell these incredibly humiliating stories about her dating life before me. I finally said to her, that’s a show –you telling these humiliating stories is a show. Don’t wait for somebody to give you a job. We can create a job for you. We started writing together, and we went into rehearsal space with a tape recorder and recorded her telling these stories and then transcribing them. And then that was a script. Gradually over time, she started doing these shows and found a lot of success doing them.

We toured them around the country, and she had regular sit downs at various theaters and, and got a following for doing these. Over time we got some grants to write. I got a grant through the Williamstown Theater Festival to first write a play, and then do it. Once again, I had no idea how to write a play, but what I would do is I would find people on the street and say, can I have 10 minutes? We’d sit down and I’d press play on the recorder, and then I’d tell the story of the show. In telling the story over and over again, I found that I started deepening the characters and discovering connections between them. We all have that capacity. We’re all storytellers, but many of us have fear of actually taking a pen putting it to paper.

In telling, I got over that fear, and we started doing these adaptations of novellas. That’s how we started. And by the early two thousands, we were playwright /director/actors in New York. And were pulled out to California because we did a reading of a play that we’d done off Broadway that had had some success. And at this reading in LA nobody came except a few of our friends. It was very disappointing. After this woman walked up to us, at intermission of the reading and said, have you ever thought about writing TV because the dialogue in your play is really great. And we had not ever think of that. And she said– just stay an extra day, meet my boss and see if it’s something you’re interested in.

We’ve been banging our heads in New York for 12 years and met some success, but not as much as we’d like, so we thougth why don’t we try this? We moved out here with a three-year-old and once we got out here, met with a lot of open doors and a lot of encouragement. That’s how we did it. Those 12 years in New York were really instrumental in teaching us how to rewrite ourselves, how to work with actors, how to be open. Since TV is such a collaborative art form it is perfect for us. We’ve been very lucky. We’re at a point in our career now where we can really determine what kinds of shows we want to do. When we were first talking about Fire Country, the thing that drew us to that show was the fact that in California there’s a program for prison inmates to work on fire crews, and by doing that, they work time off their sentence. That felt like a great way to tell a family story about redemption and essentially retell the story of the prodigal son.

Lisa Niver:

All of your stories are focused on what we spoke about the night when I met you was about educating to activate and how does content shape culture. I definitely feel that as a theme in A Small Light and Fire Country and some of the themes in the early Grey’s Anatomy that you were part of. Another thing that’s really resonates for me is that you spoke about with Meip that after all that she did, that she still felt like a failure.

Tony Phelan:

In her mind, the people who she was in charge of were arrested, and only one of them survived. Despite her best efforts, despite her walking into Gestapo headquarters to try and bribe them free. She really genuinely resisted people calling her a hero because she just felt like she did what anybody would do. The thing that made her unique was she famously said that if she hadn’t done what she did, she didn’t think she would be able to live with herself. Something that we can all adopt, especially now that we live in such a divided country and a divided world, and especially now that we see the rise of antisemitism again. When I was growing up myself and many of the people that I was growing up with thought that anti-semitism was something that happened only in the past.

Anti-semitism is on the rise again, and it’s being weaponized by people to take power and frighten people. We have to be vigilant and we have to educate and we have to reach people at a young age. One of the things that I’m most excited about is the fact that A Small Light is on Disney+, which means that it has a worldwide reach and that it has a reach to young people who can access it, even if they might be in a community or even in a family where the ideas and aspirations of A Small Light might not necessarily be in vogue.

They can have access to it. I think that’s exciting. The other thing that we talked about the other night was when you and I were growing up, I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors. I had the opportunity to meet them, talk to them, hear their stories, and know when you would see people’s grandparents or parents who had tattoos know what that meant. That living testament was right there in front of you. And unfortunately, now that generation is leaving us. It’s incumbent upon us to figure out how do I keep the story alive? How do I reach that next generation who isn’t going to be able to speak to those people one-on-one? In its own little way, A Small Light can reach that generation and bring these stories to people in a way that they find accessible and they find terrifying. But relatable.

Lisa Niver:

I agree that it is at times terrifying, but incredibly relatable. Those small moments where it becomes clear that people knew what was going on–when he shows up with extra potatoes and the special strawberries. It’s clear that people knew and they wanted to participate in their way. They might not have been able to take the leap that Miep did instinctively.

Before we close, I am asking all my guests related to my book about feeling brave and taking challenges. Obviously we know that you and your wife have had this incredible experience with this story that chose you. But is there something additionally that you’re most proud of or something where you’re still reaching for a brave choice or a challenge, a story that you really want to bring to the world next, or something personal?

Tony Phelan:

The challenge is that you find a story like Miep’s that is so compelling. And it sets a high bar. We are talking about a couple projects that we find exciting. The story of Meep and Jan and the Dutch resistance is a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But we will certainly continue to tell stories that celebrate the human spirit and celebrate people in very real situations, having to make difficult, gray moral choices. Because it’s very easy to make a black and white choice. To make choices that go on day after day that take a toll and that are gray is much more challenging. And that’s certainly what I aspire to both in my work and in my family too.

Lisa Niver:

I, myself, and I know a lot of other people, really appreciate that you’ve brought into our homes, Grey’s Anatomy, Fire Country, and now this incredible, A Small Light. I loved what it said about Miep that we make choices every day and we can choose to do something good. And I love the quote that the title comes from Miep, that anybody can turn a light on, a small light on in a dark room. I really do think that’s what you’ve done with showing people what was it like day to day there during the Holocaust, during the war, and that people can make a choice to really help someone else in the community.

Tony Phelan:

That is Miep’s lesson — you don’t have to be special and even a secretary or a teenager, I mean, Anne always knew she was going to be a writer, but had no idea the impact that her diary would have, and she did it because she loved writing.

Thank you, Lisa for having me on the show. I hope your audience will check out A Small Light because it’s a show that we’re very proud of.

Lisa Niver:

Everyone can watch on Disney+, Hulu and NatGeoTV . Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

Tony and Joan speaking at Stephen Wise Temple

I met Tony Phelan and Joan Rater at The Jewish Federation’s Entertainment, Media & Communications (EMC) Professionals Network and Sylvia Weisz Women’s Philanthropy exclusive screening of A Small Light, the inspiring, real-life story of Miep Gies, who played a critical role in hiding Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam. Following the screening, there was a conversation with Creators/Executive Producers Tony Phelan & Joan Rater and Executive Producer Peter Traugott.

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Lisa’s book: Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty

Sharon Spira-Cushnir and Lisa Niver at A Small Light screening at UTA