“The fact that I survived and she didn’t is just a cruel accident,” Pick-Goslar previously said.
Anne Frank's childhood friend Hannah Pick-Goslar died on Oct. 28 at her home in Jerusalem at the age of 93. Her friendship began with Frank when they were in kindergarten together in Amsterdam in 1933. Their friendship was not only mentioned in Anne Frank's book The Diary of a Young Girl but also in the 1999 book Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend as well as the 2021 Dutch film My Best Friend Anne Frank.
Hannah Pick-Goslar, whose close friendship with Anne Frank was memorialized in what became “The Diary of a Young Girl,” died in October. She was 93.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 4, 2022
The young women spoke for the final time through a fence at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.https://t.co/4RPpvEVbhH
Pick-Goslar last saw her friend through a barbed-wire fence at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Their meeting was an emotional one with Pick-Goslar hearing her friend's familiar voice tainted by illness and malnutrition. At one point she even tossed her friend scraps of food in a sock. Sadly, another inmate stole the food. “Anne was crying and crying,” Hannah remembered years later, according to the New York Times. “It ended up being their final meeting,” Dina Kraft who wrote Pick-Goslar’s memoir My Friend Anne Frank said in a phone interview. “Hannah talked about the incredible solidarity of the women in her barracks who retained their humanity by helping Anne.” Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus just two months before the camp was liberated in April 1945, reports the Washington Post.
We were sad to learn of the death of Hannah Pick-Goslar today at the age of 93. Hannah, or #Hanneli as Anne called her in her diary, was one of Anne Frank’s best friends; they had known each other since kindergarten.
— Anne Frank House (@annefrankhouse) October 28, 2022
More: https://t.co/cBy3od7Iv1 pic.twitter.com/y53AFbCF4y
“The fact that I survived and she didn’t is just a cruel accident,” Pick-Goslar said, according to the Anne Frank House website. Speaking of their last encounter, she recalled, "Anne came to the barbed wire. I couldn't see her because the barbed wire was stuffed with straw. The lamps weren't very good. I may have seen a glimpse of a shadow. It wasn't the same Anne that I had known. She was a broken girl. I probably was, too, yet it was terrible. She began to cry right away and told me, 'I don't have any parents any more. My mother is dead.'" Her mother Edith Frank died of exhaustion in Auschwitz in early January 1945. "Anne thought that her father had been gassed, too. But Mr Frank still looked very young and healthy and the Germans didn't pay any attention to the age of those they wanted to gas. They made their selection based on appearance. I always say that if Anne had known that her father was still alive she would have had the strength to survive, because she died right before the end. It was just a matter of days."
Ms. Pick-Goslar said she often felt Anne was with her when she spoke about their lives. She offered her testimony in the hope that it might “fill in what really happened — as horrible as it was — to my friend after the diary ends.” https://t.co/UvwRqjsUMM
— The Wiener Holocaust Library (@wienerlibrary) November 4, 2022
References:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/11/03/hannah-pick-goslar-anne-frank/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/world/europe/hannah-pick-goslar-dead.html
Cover Image Source: Anne Frank House Website
