Review: A Small Light

I am once again going to deviate slightly from my usual premise of historical fiction to talk about another sort of historical narrative. I want to talk about A Small Light, the Hulu miniseries about Miep Gies. She was one of the people who hid Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. 

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The hot take: Watch it if you want to see a little-known perspective of a well-told story. Watch it if you want to see how ordinary, decent people rose to the challenge in the darkest times.

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It’s difficult to find new ground to traverse when it comes to Anne Frank. Her diary is the second-best-selling book in the non-fiction category. Of all time. Second only to the Bible. That means pretty much literally everyone knows about her. Probably a lot about her. There are books by and about people who knew her. There are several movies. The Secret Annex in Amsterdam is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world.

So how did they find a new way to tell the story? They found a new perspective. A minor character, without whom we wouldn’t have the story at all.

Miep Gies was a secretary at Otto Frank’s company. She helped the Franks, the van Pells, and Dr. Pfeffer go into hiding. She was their main point of contact. She saw them almost every day. She devoted most of her time to scraping up enough food for them without attracting suspicion.

When the Gestapo came and the Franks were arrested, Miep saved Anne’s diary. She didn’t read it, just put it in a drawer to save for Anne when she came back. She later said she was glad she didn’t read it, because she would’ve had to destroy it to protect the people in it. Can you imagine a world in which is Anne Frank’s diary didn’t survive? I don’t want to.

Miep is a hero of this story. She’s a protector. And I know that I, for one, knew almost nothing about her until this miniseries.

Ordinary people

An aspect that the show covered very well, which many other renditions of Europe in World War II struggle with, is the way normal people reacted to Nazi rule.

So many regular people didn’t like the Nazis, but it was their new reality, and they adapted. They joined the Party so they could keep their businesses. Their own hunger, loneliness, fear, and desires overwhelmed their principles. They wanted to live and be happy and safe. And they told themselves they were powerless to change anything, so it hurt no one to go along. 

Miep shows us that you don’t have to do that. Even if you have to pretend in public, you can still do something. You can do as much as you can.

She was a normal person. A secretary. She is a wonderful example of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in impossible times. 

In the face of the insurmountable struggles that we face in the world, it can feel too overwhelming to even try to make things better. How can we begin to even make a dent in all the problems? But then you look at Miep. She opposed the Nazis, not by becoming a spy or trying to overthrow the government – which would feel too big and scary for most of us to even consider – or making grandiose gestures that would’ve made no difference and only gotten her killed (see A Hidden Life). 

Instead, Miep helped the people around her. She couldn’t save the world, but she worked her ass off to save seven people, to save their whole worlds.

The face

It is devastating that only one of those seven people survived, despite all the risk and heroic effort. But because Otto Frank survived, and because Miep saved in the diary, millions of people have gotten to read it. It’s impossible to know the impact Anne’s diary has had on the world, but we know it has given a face and a soul to the victims of the Holocaust when the numbers are too big to imagine. It makes something unimaginable feel very real. Time and time again, I try to imagine not feeling the sun on my face or breathing fresh air or never really being alone for two years. And I can’t. 

But Anne, an ordinary, bright, imaginative, extraordinary teenage girl, did it. And it is unimaginable to think that she and everyone else in that Annex, after hiding for all that time, then faced the most horrific conditions imaginable in the camps.

I read in the Sisters of Auschwitz that when Anne and her sister Margot were separated from their mother, they lost their will to live. They simply waited to die. For some reason, that is one of the hardest parts for me to hear about the story of her life. The Nazis not only killed her, but they destroyed her spirit first. 

That is something the minseries demonstrates very well: they show how alive and bright and strong Anne was, and then they show her being shoved into a truck and taken away, never to be seen again. It’s horrifying. But I’m getting too dark. I’m sure these are thoughts that we’ve all had.

Spitfire

Sometimes I became frustrated with how hotheaded Miep is. You can’t just yell at Nazis in public and expect to stay alive. And she was not in a situation to be taking those risks, when so many people were depending on her for survival. I wonder if the real Miep was like that, or if her fiery spirit was played up for dramatic affect. She seems too smart to be letting herself get so carried away in dangerous situations. But it’s a fact that Miep marched into Nazis headquarters the day after the arrest and tried to bribe the Nazis to release the families. It didn’t work, obviously. What a bold, almost suicidal move. Yet she survived.

The day after the arrest, Miep marched into Nazis headquarters and tried to bribe the Nazis to release the families. It didn’t work, obviously. What a bold, almost suicidal move. Yet she survived.

And because of all these moments of chance and grace and risk, this story survived. And because of it did, we have a little bit of hope that we too can be a Miep. Anyone can, if they decide to be.

PART 3: The long-awaited research trip to Germany

The last time I talked about my novel, I mentioned that thing came to a standstill while I was waiting for Germany to open its borders.

Reader, I finally made it.

In late June of 2021, the borders opened. I left in early July for just shy of a month and crisscrossed the country by train.

Lebensborn homes

The first Lebensborn home I visited was an hour or so train ride outside of Munich, and I met with the two people who now run the place, which is, in a turn of events that is ironically redemptive, a home for the mentally disabled. They shared some gems of information about Lebensborn, like a copy of the daily schedule the mothers-to-be followed.

Only one building from the Nazi regime remained, and it had been highly remodeled. But the room that had been used as a cafeteria was mostly unaltered, so I stood in there for a while and tried to get as creeped out as I could.

The other home I visited is now a boarding school for teenage boys in a historic village in central Germany. I didn’t get a response to the emails I sent in advance, so I just showed up and used Google Translate to get the cook to show me around. She was pretty weirded out by it/me, but I appreciated her help nonetheless.

Only the original building remains, heavily remodeled. But I like to think the grounds were unchanged. There was a picnic table, a gazebo, and for some reason a kiln.

I also visited a villa that served as administrative offices for Lebensborn (plus maybe some other, more secret stuff), and is a significant location in my novel. I just walked right up to the front door and knocked until a nice theater student let me in and allowed me to wander the creaky, Art Deco-style halls, which seemed largely unchanged.

I imagined Gregor Ebner, medical administrator of Lebensborn — a real creep who got away with everything — living and working here.

Dachau

I visited Dachau, a sobering experience. I also walked the 1.5 kilometers or so to the experimental herb garden that prisoners referred to as The Plantation, where one of my characters is assigned as a forced laborer.

It’s eerily pastoral, given that this was the site of one of the worst work details a person could be assigned to.

Archives

In the Lebensborn archives located in a teeny tiny (adorable) town called Bad Arolsen, I spent two days sifting through archives and downloading thousands of Lebensborn documents — none of which I could read since I don’t know German — to later decipher with the help of the internet and translator.

The employees there were wonderfully helpful, and said that no one there had ever downloaded as many documents as I did. Not to brag or anything.

I also spent many an hour in the Bremen archives, looking at letters, logs, reports, photos, objects that the people I wrote about wrote and used.

Wewelsburg Castle

I spent a night in Wewelsburg Castle, formerly the occult HQ of the SS, which is also a setting in the book. There’s a youth hostel in it now, in addition to being a historic site with a museum on the SS. (I had to pay extra to stay there on account of no longer being a youth.)

What strikes me about these locations is how fastidiously Germany has scrubbed its locations of, well, everything. The few historic buildings that weren’t leveled by bombs have been cleaned and remodeled so they feel new. It’s note like Spain or Italy or England, where many buildings have a feeling of oldness when you walk into them. You know without being told that lots of shit happened here. Not so with Germany — which isn’t a bad thing, but a tad inconvenient for me.

Bremen and Lena

Up north in Bremen, I serendipitously met Lena, a retired teacher and history buff in Bremen who volunteers at the genealogical society there. 

Lena met me at the train station when I arrived in Bremen, the port city in northern Germany where my main character is from. Lena answered my endless questions and told me stories of her family.

She gave me an itinerary she’d planned, with visits to various museums and sites, and guided tours of relevant neighborhoods. That included a surprise visit to a home in my character’s neighborhood that was built in the 40s, which the owner graciously opened up to let me nose around in. Afterwards she showed me her family’s photos from that time.

Things started to feel magical. I couldn’t believe the access that was given without me even asking.

Interviews

Lena arranged interviews with three women in their 90s and 100s who were alive during the Nazi regime. This was the best part of it all.

We met at cafes and ate cake and drank coffee, which is the thing to do on a German afternoon. It’s not even optional.

There was Frau Rennert, who remembers going to the roof to watch Allied bombs fall on the city and thinking they looked like Christmas trees lights. She talked about fish a lot — selling the fish her grandfather caught, eating it pickled so the bones would be soft, how sick everyone was of salmon. Maids would put it in their contract: they would have salmon in their meals no more than three times per week.

There was Frau Rolfs, who was kicking it in a retirement community and living her best life. I’m pretty sure she was the queen of the complex. She grew up in the same working class neighborhood as my main character and had tons of stories about her childhood. She wanted to be a ship builder and loved reading books about seafarers. In winter, the little lakes around town froze and everyone ice skated on them. And when she got sick, her grandmother tied an onion to her neck as a remedy…

And there was 100-something Frau Söhnlein, whom we met at her home. She used to be a potter and served us coffee out of her handmade pot and mugs. She told Lena that if we brought a cake, to make it a fruit cake, and so we did. From her I learned about the Bremen boating culture, how she fell out of a boat when she was small and didn’t yet know how to swim, and her favorite dress, which was forest green with silver trim and looked like a hunter’s dress.

The insights I gained from Lena and the women and the local historians I met were invaluable. Many of them made their way into the novel.

What Lena, these three women, the archivists, and so many other people did to help me out with this project stuns me with gratitude every time I think about it. But it wasn’t for me—it was for this book. It really takes a village.

In the next installment: revision revision revision.

Lady herbalists

Ever since I wrote a book about a woman who’s into herbs, I’ve been noticing them all over the place. I love that they often have excellent, nature-inspired covers. People seem to have a thing for them, and I like them, too (obviously, which is why I wrote one). 

So I’ve compiled a list of the best lady herbalist books, ranked by level of witchiness (1 being the least witchy).

1. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

When the plague comes to your village and you all agree to quarantine yourselves from the rest of the world for a year and your resident herbalist dies, someone has to take up the mantle and figure out the witchy ways to try to keep people alive. That’s what happens in Year of Wonders. It was a great read overall, though sadly herbs didn’t seem to do much for the bubos. This is one situation where antibiotics come in handy.

2. Nefertiti by Michelle Moran

This book is told from the POV of Mutnodjmet, the overlooked sister of ancient Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti. Mutnodjmet’s thing is — guess what — herbs, and she supplies the women of the palace herbs for their various ailments.

Some of her discoveries, like the uses of chamomile and aloe, are pretty standard today. But I should keep in mind that this novel takes place almost 3,000 years ago and they discovered things back then that have become commonplace now.

3. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

When I was first looking for herbs with certain effects and the internet wasn’t being helpful, I looked up what Outlander had to say on the subject. It had the answers I needed and unlocked my research. Gabaldon knows her plants and I’ll go out on a limb to suggest that her protagonist Claire is one of the most resourceful characters in literature, so it’s always an adventure to see what she comes up with.

Claire’s not a witch, but is accused of being one, so she gets a middle ranking for witchiness.

4. The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

I think this book gets to the heart of why herbs have been so essential for women through the millennia—and then takes it to a really extreme place. This apothecary uses her powers to poison men who hurt women. Herbal vengeance is always a good time.

There’s no magic in this book, but the way business is conducted through a whisper network of women who want to poison the men in their lives gives it strong witchy vibes.

5. Weyward by Emilia Hart

This recent and quite popular novel centers around a little cottage in rural England, and three women who occupy it, but centuries apart. Spoiler: they’re all witchy. Similar to The Lost Apothecary, it captures the intense ways women have used herbs to take some power and control over their bodies back from the men in their lives. This concept is what drew me to herbalism when writing my novel, and what keeps me coming back to it when I’m deciding what to read next.

Unlike the previous books on this list, the women in Weyward have familiars (crows, of course), and a strong connection to nature that allows them to do actual magic. They’re officially witches. There’s even a witch trial.

6. Circe by Madeline Miller

This novel is the witchiest of them all. Circe is a real-life mythical witch/nymph/goddess who lives in exile on an island. She uses her witchery to do things like turn horrible men into pigs and then keep them in her sty forever (which I personally find kind of funny). This book will make you love herbalism if you don't already. It’s beautifully written.

Nonfiction shoutout: Physica by Hildegard von Bingen

This book on the medicinal uses of plants plays an important role in my novel. Hildegard was a 12th century German nun, mystic, composer, and healer. She was super stealth in sharing her findings — she constantly belittled herself for being a woman, and people (men) paid attention to what she had to say since they believed it came straight from God.

It’s hard to believe now that no one accused her of witchcraft, but back in the 12th century, the distinction between science and magic/miracles wasn’t as pronounced as it later became.

Realer than real characters

A little while ago I read Gone with the Wind (which I will stop gushing about someday, but today is not that day). And then I watched Daisy Jones and the Six. Both stories followed me around afterward and I got to thinking about why.

They both have one thing in common. Ok, two things — but I don't want to talk about the tried-and-true soulmates-who-just-can't-work-it-out-until-it's-too-late thing. 

Both stories have characters who are realer than real. They're rich and vivid and complex. It's these characters, who want so deeply, who never stop trying, whose flaws keep them from getting that thing, who experience the world so intensely, that make these stories stick with me.

Scarlett O'Hara and Daisy Jones make real people look like the shadows in Plato’s cave. We pale in comparison to them. So when I’m done reading and I’m back to looking at the shadows again, of course I end up with a book hangover.

Not that I would want those characters to be real. I for sure wouldn’t want to be friends with them. They're better on the page (or screen).

In Gone with the Wind, there must be at least 200 pages dedicated to studying Scarlett. Like, the narrative grinds to a halt, and we just hang out for a bit, dwelling on what’s going on with Scarlett, why she’s doing what she’s doing, how other people perceive her, etc etc. Those are some of my favorite passages. Because even though she’s a pretty terrible person, she’s never boring. I so badly wanted her to get her life together and stop making the same terrible mistakes for the stupidest of reasons — even though I know the story and knew what would happen.

Then there’s Rhett Butler, and he gets probably 100 pages, and I was at least as on board for those pages as I was for Scarlett’s. He had a lot going on that didn’t make it into the movie. It’s like knowing someone for years and finally getting access to their journal, their therapist’s notes, and a survey of everyone who knows them, all at once. Juicy stuff.

Part of this character study business is re-traversing ground we’ve already covered. Yes, we know why the character wants this, but now she’s thinking about it again so we are, too. There are layers to motives and thoughts, and they deepen, change, become more nuanced over time. A character can realize something they already kind of knew but had never acknowledged before. And if I’ve been there for it, I’ll feel it just as keenly as they do, even though I knew, too.

It’s not just about knowing the characters — they have to be interesting, too. I’ll pass on a character study of a normal person. I use that term broadly, because there’s no such thing as a normal person, but you know what I mean — I don’t want to spend 200 pages reading the life story of Joe Schmo. At the very least, they need a rich inner life, and preferably deep desires. They need to believe contradictory things and grapple with them.

When I look at most of the good books I’ve read, every so often the story hits pause and we hang out with the characters for a while. It’s what is most interesting to me. It’s what makes me care.

I loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt for that. Every time there’s a break and we get the five-page backstory of a secondary character, I got so excited. (See Francis: a character who lifts right out of the story without affecting the plot at all. He’s just there, and he’s great.) All of Tartt’s characters are realer than real. If you haven’t read her, what are you even doing?

I believe a story without rich characters falls flat. The more vibrant the characters, the more unputdownable the story. The more I can feel how much they want something, the more I will stick with them as they try to get it.

I deviated a little from historical fiction in this post, so I’ll make up for it by sharing a list of historical novels that have realer-than-real characters:

• Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (she is herself a goddess)

• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

• The Revolution of Marina M. duology by Janet Fitch

• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I can’t stop myself, so here are some non-historical novels:

• Any Tana French book (but especially The Likeness)

• Any Donna Tartt book (especially… all of them)

• Bunny by Mona Awad (In this one, the characters are realer than real, but they don’t want anything, so it’s a weird one. Maybe the weirdest book I’ve read. You should check it out.)

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (This may surprise you, but go back and look. Katniss is a truly great and complex character.)

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Though historical now, it doesn’t meet the definition of histfic, so it goes here.)

TV shows (all based on books, which I don’t think is a coincidence):

• Normal People

• The Queen’s Gambit

• Daisy Jones and the Six

• Alias Grace

Bizarre things I want you to know (about Lebensborn)

There’s an astonishing amount of research that goes into writing a historical novel. If I were to put everything I learned in my book, it would be at least a thousand pages long. 

A lot of fascinating historical information just doesn’t do enough to serve the narrative of my particular book. Things that were too bizarre and twisted to be real, and yet they were.

Now I know these things, and I can’t un-know them, and I can’t just not tell people, so I’m sharing them with you.

Here are the weirdest, most surreally disturbing anecdotes from Lebensborn, the Nazi maternity program.

“Every mother of good blood must be sacred to us.”
—SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler

Lebensborn was started in 1935 as SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s pet project. He was also in charge of running the Holocaust.

Many Lebensborn pregnancies originated when the boys and girls on Hitler Youth camping trips managed to have rendezvous. The same happened when young men and women went to their Landdienst or required one year of “land service,” where they worked on farms.

Contrary to what a lot of people assume, there was a mix of married and unmarried mothers in Lebensborn. People have asked me — really really often — why a married mother would enter the program. Usually, it was to suck up to Himmler. Other times, it was because they believed they would get superior care and enjoy a staycation vibe.

These perks were especially appealing when rationing took effect — Lebensborn was one of the few places where coffee, chocolate, butter, and pretty much any food that was available in the 1940s, could be found. For everyone else it was potatoes potatoes potatoes. With linseed oil.

What looks to be a pretty standard (and gross) mating ritual — SS officers getting with teenage girls from the Hitler Youth.

Later in the war, married women sought refuge in Lebensborn homes as Allied troops advanced, since they were away from the cities and equipped with better food — and better everything in the face of massive shortages.

Some mothers kept their babies, while others left them to be adopted by SS families. When a mother decided to keep her child rather than giving it up for adoption, Lebensborn documentation called it “taking their parcels home with them.”

Many of the homes were properties stolen from Jewish people. One was the former home of Thomas Mann; he was appalled at the use it was put to.

There were ten homes in Germany. In total, 8,000 children were born in these homes.

Babies got two hours of fresh air in the afternoon, rain or shine. They were also bathed twice a day.

Because of Lebensborn’s poor reputation in the early years, many SS families refused to adopt Lebensborn children. This led to overcrowding in the homes, with substandard care (like nails and wires somehow ending up in broth) and high infant mortality rates (8% when the norm was 6%). Lebensborn covered all this up.

Unmarried mothers were sent to homes in different parts of the country than where they were from to prevent them to protect their reputations.

Babies were given candlesticks at their baptisms. The candlesticks were made by Dachau prisoners.

In the early years, mothers would sneak into town with their babies to have them christened. Lebensborn had a baptismal ceremony of its own and had no interest in its elite babies being Christians. This was part of the reason why outings were restricted in the later years. Another reason was that people hated Lebensborn mothers. In one incident, two women were badly beaten by townspeople. After that, visits were restricted.

Lebensborn ran until the very end of the war. The original home, Steinhöring, was located in Bavaria, making it one of the last Nazi strongholds.

When American soldiers arrived at Steinhöring, they were shocked to find the attic of a large house filled with neglected babies and toddlers and one or two nurses who were not happy to see them.

Most of the Lebensborn employees had fled beforehand, hoping to avoid affiliation with a Nazi program.

I find this image especially disturbing for some reason. I don’t know if these were mothers or nurses — but mothers were almost never photographed to preserve their anonymity, so my guess is nurses.

Another time, I’ll tell you about the fathers — called “originators”— the employees, the children, and the homes outside of Germany.

Hope you’re as creeped out as I was!

PART 2: Writing a novel about a breeding program in a fascist regime

A little while ago I told you about how I got the idea for my novel set inside Lebensborn, the secretive Nazi breeding program. Here’s what happened after that…

Research research research

One of the many street fights Hitler’s SA (aka Brownshirts or Stormtroopers) initiated… because that’s what they did.

You may recall that I was unemployed, and I took advantage of that to spend the first six months researching and planning the novel as my full-time job.

I learned plenty about the bizarre microcosm of Lebensborn. And I learned about the Third Reich, and what it meant to be an everyday German at the time. I found chilling similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States today.

Enough about the heroes, the victims, and the villains

I didn’t want to write about war. I didn’t want to tell stories I’d read a million times before about Resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors.

Those stories have great value — but there are so many others that remain untold.

To many people, Nazi Germany is synonymous with World War II, with Holocaust. But it’s not as if Hitler came to power one day and started invading countries and setting up extermination camps the next. It happened over the course of years. 

I wanted to write about people who didn’t want to be a part of atrocities, but also don’t want to die. People who didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. I wanted to explore how people awakened to awful realities and then had to reckon with their complicity in them — all while staying alive.

Because, of course, those people became victims, too.

The story

The novel I decided to write follows an eighteen-year-old, working class, aspiring herbalist named Ilse. She’s pregnant, her baby’s father is Jewish, and she has nowhere to turn.

A good haul. It’s always a thrill to check out / buy a big stack of books at once. Yes, one of those books is in German and no, I do not know German.

When she learns about the secretive maternity home for “racially valuable” mothers called Lebensborn, she believes it’s her only way out. She lies about her baby’s heritage and enters the program — only to find it’s the most dangerous place for herself and her child.

It’s a story of what happens when bodies are controlled by the people (men) in power. It’s the story of how one woman reckons with her own indoctrination and fights to reclaim her body and her identity.

The first draft

With November coming up, I decided to try out NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.

It went okay to start. I tried to write all day, even though I was only productive after 4pm. I consumed a steady supply of gluten-free sandwich cookies, Kettle salt-and-pepper chips, and (after 5pm), Omission beer.

Whenever I see any of those things, I’m back there, wringing a first draft out of myself, again.

Then, halfway through the month and 20,000 words in, I simply couldn’t make the words come. I was disgusted by how much my sentences sucked (even though that’s normal for a first draft).

I stopped writing for a whole week and a half. That’s a long time when you only have a month.

Paper sitter.

I spent that week and a half adding an additional 4,000 words to my novella set during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 80s. I spent a lot of time listening to “Los peces en el río,” a Salvadoran Christimas song. I find it hauntingly sad, but I think I’m the only one.

Then I wrote a short story that was supposed to be an allegory for long COVID.

Then I decided to allow myself to bring Jane Eyre into the Lebensborn novel and somehow that allowed me to work on that project again, with gusto.

On the last day of NaNoWriMo, I wrote 6,000 words, doubling my previous record for most words written in a day.

I wrote a total of 61,000 words that November. I spent months trying to heal the gnarly carpal tunnel / tennis elbow combo I developed. (Check with me for tips.)

I continued to work on the first draft for a couple more months, until I didn’t know how to make it any better. That’s how I know a draft is done.

The main reason I couldn’t make the first draft any better was because I couldn’t dig deeper and get more honest.

I couldn’t be more honest because I needed to go to Germany. To soak up the sights and smells and sounds. To be in the same rooms the characters had inhabited. The sift through archives and meet people who had lived the experience I was writing about.

Too bad it was still the height of the pandemic and Germany’s borders were closed, with no sign of opening up.

So I researched what I could. With carpal tunnel keeping me from taking notes, I took poorly lit photos of relevant passages and plopped them right into my Google docs.

And I prepared for the trip I knew I would take. More about that next time…