While the story of Anne Frank and what happened to her is well known, Gies - who died in 2010 at 100 - largely stayed out of the limelight.
They were living in a modern world and they couldn’t believe, in this modern world that they were living, that these things could happen,” Rater said.
“These people, they had washing machines and toasters. “It didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume,” she added. But “A Small Light” didn’t feel that way. “Period pieces for me sometimes feel a bit sepia-toned, and that makes you feel distanced from them,” Powley said. Much of the first episode follows Gies living life as a modern young woman, meeting friends and going out dancing. She finds employment with Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) - a stern, fellow German-speaking immigrant - and meets her future husband, a social worker.
While the show opens with Gies, who wasn’t Jewish, trying to dodge a Nazi checkpoint, the first episode quickly takes the viewer back to 1934, when Gies was single and living with her adopted Dutch family. “When we started this project,” Phelan said, “it certainly didn’t feel as relevant as it feels now.” Since then, they said, the moral question at the heart of Gies’s story - whether to do the right thing, the wrong thing or nothing at all - has only become more important, given how war, nationalism and antisemitism have once again been spreading across Europe. Walking around the museum and listening to tour guides, they learned that many people don’t really know the story of the Frank family anymore, let alone the story of the people who helped them, Rater and Phelan said in a recent video interview. Work on “A Small Light” began six years ago, after its showrunners Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, a married couple who used to be producers and screenwriters for “Grey’s Anatomy,” visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
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