“Hanneli Goslar, or Lies, as she is called at school, is a bit of a peculiar child,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary about her best friend Hanneli. ‘Hanneli’ is Hannah Pick-Goslar. She died on Friday at the age of 93 in Jerusalem. Goslar was of great significance for the historiography of Anne Frank.
Anne Frank’s best friend: Goslar felt the duty to continue telling Anne’s story, because she survived the war and Anne did not. She wanted people to know what happened to her and Anne from the moment the diary ends. Until her death, Goslar was closely involved with the Anne Frank Housewho could always “call on her.”
Anne and Goslar played together a lot as children. Goslar told the foundation that her mother described Anne well. He said: ‘God knows everything, but Anne knows better’. Much is known about Anne’s life thanks to Goslar’s testimonies.
Interviews with Goslar often talked about her friendship with Anne Frank, but rarely about herself. Goslar’s life story is at least as poignant as it is tragic. She was born on November 12, 1928 in Berlin-Tiergarten. After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, she emigrated, then four years old, with her family via England to the Netherlands. There she came to live in a three-room apartment on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. Besides the Frank family.
She grew up with her father Hans, mother Ruth and younger sister Gabi in a religious Jewish family. The girls received religious Jewish education, went to the synagogue on Saturdays and learned Hebrew on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings. Although Anne had a less religious upbringing, the two became friends. They went to kindergarten, primary school and the Jewish Lyceum together.
Compared to Anne, Goslar was shy, good-natured, and quiet. Where Anne liked to be the center of attention, she stayed in the background. In 1942 Anne writes in her diary that she appreciates Goslar for her “open opinion”.
Until the German invasion in 1940, Goslar’s life was ‘very idyllic’. In the many interviews she gave in her life, she talks with a strong German accent about the years that followed. Goslar, often smartly dressed in a neat blouse with a small hat on her head, spoke remarkably soberly about the war years.
When Goslar was thirteen years old, her mother died in childbirth at the age of 41. It is 1942, in the same year the Nazis in the Netherlands started deporting Jews to concentration camps. The Goslar family escaped deportation for quite some time, thanks to an uncle in Switzerland who managed to arrange a Paraguayan passport for her, her father and sister. Nevertheless, they were arrested in the summer of 1943 and transported to transit camp Westerbork in Drenthe, where Goslar cleans toilets in the orphanage. Six months later, the three were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. There Goslar sees Anne again for the first time in years. It will also be the last time the two will see each other. Anne dies in Bergen-Belsen. Goslar’s father also dies in the camp. Of the Goslar family, only she and her sister survive the concentration camps.
‘My answer to Hitler’
Two years after the liberation, Goslar emigrated to what was then Palestine (now Israel), where she lived in a youth village and trained as a nurse. There she married Walter Pick in the 1950s and together they had three children. Goslar leaves behind eleven grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren. She called her large family her ‘answer to Hitler’ to the Anne Frank House.
In 2021 a film about Goslar’s life in World War II was released, a film adaptation of the book published in 1997 with the same title: My best friend Anne Frank.
Goslar is buried in Jerusalem.
Also read: The faces of survivors