Disney+ has ordered a scripted National Geographic limited series about the Dutch woman who risked her life to shelter Anne Frank’s family from the Nazis for more than two years and then preserved Anne’s diary.
Titled A Small Light, the project is produced by Grey’s Anatomy alums Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, Susanna Fogel, ABC Signature and Keshet Studios.
Written by Rater and Phelan, the story follows the twenty-something Miep Gies, who din’t hesitate even for a moment when her boss Otto Frank came to her and asked her to hide his family from the Nazis during World War II. For the next two years, Miep, her husband Jan, and the other helpers watched over the eight souls (Otto Frank, his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot as well as four others) in hiding in the Secret Annex. And it was Miep who found Anne’s Diary and kept it safe so Otto, the only one of the eight who survived, could later share it with the world as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust.
Gies died in 2010 at the age of 100. The title of the series is inspired from something Gies said late in her life: “I don’t like being called a hero because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
A Small Light is produced by ABC Signature in partnership with Keshet Studios. Rater, Phelan and Fogel executive produce alongside Keshet Studios’ Peter Traugott, Keshet International’s Alon Shtruzman and Keshet Media Group’s Avi Nir.
Casting for the seven-episode series is currently underway. Filming is slated to begin in Europe in the upcoming months. Notably, the project marks the second Nat Geo scripted series for Disney+ after The Right Stuff.