Hannah Pick-Goslar in 2012 at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam Photo: AFP
From BZ/dpa
Holocaust survivor Hannah Pick-Goslar, Anne Frank’s best friend, has died aged 93. This was announced by the Anne Frank Foundation on Friday evening at its headquarters in Amsterdam.
The two Jewish girls knew each other from kindergarten and attended the same schools in Dutch exile. They last saw each other again in 1945 on German soil in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – shortly before Anne Frank’s death. Her diary is one of the best-known documents from the Nazi dictatorship in the world.
According to the foundation, Pick-Goslar died on Friday at her home in Jerusalem. She kept reporting about her experiences with the persecution of the Jews and her friendship with girls until she was very old. She called it her duty, “because I survived and Anne didn’t.” In her diary from hiding from the German National Socialists in Amsterdam, Anne Frank also wrote about Hannah – about “Hanneli”, as she called her.
The foundation recognized Pick-Goslar’s commitment. “Everyone should know what happened to her and her friend Anne from the moment Anne’s diary ends, horrifying as that story is,” the foundation writes on its website. There are also books and films about the friendship between the two Jewish girls. The Dutch film My Best Friend Anne Frank came out just last year.
Pick Goslar was born in Berlin in 1928. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, her family emigrated first to London and then to Amsterdam, where Hannah met Anne. Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in 1942, were discovered in 1944 and deported. Only the father Otto Frank survived.
Hannah was deported with her family in 1943 and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1944. After the liberation, she emigrated to what is now Israel in 1947.