In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”

Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.” “A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate. Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family. On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” - featuring the only known footage of Anne - to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001). The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S.

( JTA ) - The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers.

The library of the unwritten series