Hannah Pick-Goslar, a Holocaust survivor and one of Anne Frank’s best friends, died at 93-years-old.
Pick-Goslar died just two weeks before turning 94. She is survived by her three children, 11 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren.
The Anne Frank Foundation paid tribute to Pick-Goslar for helping to keep Frank’s memory alive by telling stories about their youth. Pick-Goslar is mentioned in Frank’s famous diary about her experience hiding from the Netherlands’ Nazi occupiers.
“Hannah Pick-Goslar meant a lot to the Anne Frank House, and we could always call on her,” the foundation said in a statement.
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The foundation said Pick-Goslar “shared her memories of their friendship and the Holocaust into old age. She believed everyone should know what happened to her and her friend Anne after the last diary entry. No matter how terrible the story.”
Pick-Goslar was born in 1928 in Berlin-Tiergarten, according to the Anne Frank House Museum. She and her family left for London, England, in 1933 when the Nazis came into power.
She and her family later moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, where she met Frank’s family. The two girls attended kindergarten together and became close friends.
But the friends were separated when the Frank family went into hiding in 1942.
About a year later, Pick-Goslar and her family were deported to Camp Westerbork. Dubbed the “gateway to Hell,” Westerbork was a transit camp before victims were taken to any of the bigger concentration camps.
Pick-Goslar and her family were transferred in 1944 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she would reunite with Frank the following year, shortly before Frank died there of typhus. Pick-Goslar and her younger sister Gabi were the only members of her family to survive the events of Bergen-Belsen.
In 1947, after being freed, Pick-Goslar emigrated to what is now Israel, where she would become a nurse and get married.
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She recounted her friendship with Frank in a 1997 book by Alison Leslie Gold titled “Memories of Anne Frank; Reflections of a Childhood Friend.” The book was turned into a film released last year, called “My Best Friend Anne Frank.”
Pick-Goslar is referred to in Frank’s diary as Hanneli, the name Anne called her.
“Hanneli and Sanne used to be my two best friends. People who saw us together always used to say: ‘There goes Anne, Hanne and Sanne,'” Frank wrote on June 14, 1942.
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