‘The Attic’ Looks at Those Who Helped Anne Frank

Television has done its share of stories about those who shaped and abetted Nazism in the Europe of World War II. “The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank” represents a smaller, far nobler constituency, non-Jews who secretly helped Jews designated for the Holocaust.

In this worthwhile CBS movie (9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8), the particular heroine is Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who risked her own life to help eight Jews--including the now-immortalized Anne Frank and her parents and older sister--temporarily elude the Nazi death camps. Gies had been an employee of Anne’s father, Otto Frank.

Gies and others supplied and assisted the Franks, the Van Daan family and a dentist while they secretly lived in an attic above Frank’s business in Amsterdam until being arrested by Dutch agents of the Gestapo on Aug. 4, 1944. Of the attic occupants arrested that day and sent to concentration camps, only Otto Frank outlasted the war. Surviving also, however, were Anne’s notes and papers, found by Gies and later edited into “The Diary of Anne Frank” and turned into a play and movie.

“The Attic” is probably a truer, if narrower account than previous versions of the claustrophobic secret lives of the eight Jews. Written by William Hanley, from the book “Anne Frank Remembered” by Gies with Alison Leslie Gold, it features strong performances by Mary Steenburgen as Gies and Paul Scofield as Otto Frank. And Lisa Jacobs is a memorable Anne, combining the same adolescent childishness and astonishing wisdom that clashed in her writings.

Shooting in Amsterdam and Leeds, England, director John Erman provides powerful sights for us to consider: Dutch Jews being rounded up, and then photographed and fingerprinted with bureaucratic indifference; non-Jews carrying yellow flowers in solidarity with Jews, who were required to sew yellow stars into their clothing. Erman also effectively conveys some of the enormous tensions that Gies and her comrades must have experienced in their perilous roles as saviors to Jews. This is a fine-looking production.

Unfortunately, “The Attic” is also a captive of circumstances. As largely a celebration of Gies and an expression of her bravery and compassion, it is compelled to continue beyond the climactic arrest of the eight attic occupants, taking this otherwise moving story to a meandering, tedious conclusion.