"A Small Light" May Be Deeply Insulting And Revisionist: A Trailer Reaction
We all know by now that when press releases talk about a new film making a story relevant “for modern sensibilities,” there’s a good chance that the new film may be woke.
It’s so inevitable nowadays for wokeness to at least attempt to slime into everything that it’s almost normal, except that it never is, which is why a lot of people have walked away from beloved IPs such as Star Wars, and don’t get me started on “sensitivity readers” calling for the writings of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and others to be “updated.”
Just in case anyone’s wondering, yes, I know what wokeness is. Wokeness is a religion similar to political correctness but with heavy doses of LSD and PCP. It flatters itself that it’s kind, gentle, loving, inclusive, enlightened and progressive when it actually is perpetually offended, eternally immature, deeply spoiled, willfully dishonest and profoundly thirsty for control of others. What it lacks in perception, wisdom, morality, ethics and respectfulness it more than makes up for with tyranny, authoritarianism, idiocy, racism and hatred. “Niceness” won’t subdue it, and ignoring it is ineffective, because while it is cowardly, it’s too delusional to know when it’s beaten and it loves to gaslight anyone who challenges it or even merely questions it. It has to be attacked and subdued at its weak points, of which it has many, or it will do nothing but grow.
Now it seems Jan and Miep Gies may be the woke religion’s latest casualties, if the new trailer for A Small Light is any indication. Produced in conjunction with ABC and National Geographic and set to premiere on Disney+ and Hulu on May 1st with an encore presentation on Freeform on May 6th, the eight-part series focuses on the Gies’ struggles protecting the occupants of the Secret Annex during the Second World War.
Well, it mostly focuses on Miep protecting the Franks. Jan is the guy Miep drags along with her while constantly screeching at him about how important it is to fight evil and hatred.
I hate to judge a film or series by its trailer, but I have no problem judging the trailer itself, and while the acting appears decent and it gets some of the basic details right, particularly the look of the Annex, it is mostly disrespectful crap. Jan was never, ever, ever, ever against Miep helping the Franks. He knew darned well what was at stake and worked just as hard as Miep did to protect the Annex inhabitants.
Jan and Miep knew the Franks for almost a decade before they went into hiding. They were regulars at the Franks’ Merwedeplein apartment on Sunday afternoons for coffee and cake, where the grownups discussed politics as long as Anne and Margot weren’t around. When the Nazis made it illegal for Jews to own businesses, Jan lent his last name to Opekta for their DBA and no one was the wiser. The night before the Franks went into hiding at 263 Prinsengracht in 1942 they called Miep and Jan, who, despite the dry summer heat, came over to the Merwedeplein in trench coats so they could smuggle out various items without detection.
For the next two years Jan would visit the eight Annex residents at lunchtime on workdays to hang out and bring library books. As a social worker Jan had underground connections that allowed him to procure forged ration books for the eight in hiding.
The Gies’s resistance efforts even went beyond the Secret Annex. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, Miep and Jan hid a college student in their home who had refused to sign a loyalty agreement for the Nazis. Jan also carried out secret tasks for the Resistance that he didn’t tell Miep about because he didn’t want her to worry.
When the Nazis arrested the eight in hiding on August 4, 1944, Jan spirited the illegal ration books and Bep Voskuijl, another one of the helpers, out of the Prinsengracht. A little later he watched helplessly from afar as his friends were loaded onto an Army truck and driven away, not knowing if Miep was with them. She wasn’t; Karl Josef Silberbauer, the arresting officer had taken pity on her out of personal sympathy, as he and Miep were both originally from Vienna.
After the war was over, Jan went down to the Centraal Station on a daily basis to hand out vouchers to returning Jews and other prisoners of the Nazis, and every day he asked about the people of the Secret Annex. He was overjoyed when someone finally told him that he had seen Otto Frank and that he was coming back. Frank would live with Miep and Jan for seven years after his return before remarrying and moving to Switzerland. He and the Gieses would remain close friends until Frank’s death in 1980.
August fourth remained a “terrible day” for Jan and Miep for the rest of their lives. In her memoir, Miep wrote,
“…Jan and I stay at home all day. We act as though the day were not happening. Neither of us will look at a clock all day. I stand at the window all through the day, and Jan, on purpose, sits with his back to the window. When we sense that it’s about five o’clock, that the day has passed, we experience a sense of relief that the day has finished.”
—Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold, Anne Frank Remembered, pgs. 249-250
This is a little bit of who Jan Gies actually was, yet apparently to the showrunners of A Small Light, Jan was an unserious flake. Meanwhile Miep, according to “modern sensibilities,” has to prove at every turn that she’s what YouTuber Victor van Doomcock calls “the bestest evahr,” to men who are only allowed to be toxic or incompetent.
While it’s common to slightly change and condense historical accounts for dramatic purposes, A Small Light appears to have gone too far, and I hope the series is better than the trailer, I really, really do. The idea of the Annex helpers being so grossly disrespected is incredibly galling and infuriating, especially since the series is under the National Geographic banner. National Geographic used to stand for accuracy and integrity, and seeing as history isn’t taught adequately in schools nowadays, if at all, there will be those who see A Small Light and accept its revisionism without question.
This is dangerous because Holocaust denial is still alive and well today. As those who were personally connected to the occupants of the Secret Annex die off, there will be fewer and fewer people who know enough to call out bad faith presentations and that is a very sobering thought.
For further reading:
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped To Hide the Frank Family. Miep Gies with Allison Leslie Gold. Originally published in 1987 by Simon and Schuster, copyright renewed in 2009.
Anne Frank: The Biography. Melissa Muller. Second edition published by Picador in 2014.