Anne Frank affectionately called her best friend “Hanneli” in her world-famous diaries. Hannah Pick-Goslar has died at the age of 93. The Holocaust survivor shared her war experiences into old age. Her 31 great-grandchildren were her “answer to Hitler”.
Anne Frank’s school friend Hannah Pick-Goslar is dead. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor died on Friday at the age of 93, the Anne Frank Foundation said. Born in 1928, Goslar’s family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in Amsterdam. There she met Frank. Contact broke off when the Frank family went into hiding from the Nazis in 1942. In 1943 the Goslar family was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Bergen-Belsen the following year. There she met Frank again in February 1945 shortly before her death.
Hannah Goslar and her sister Gabi were the only survivors in their family. Goslar later moved to Jerusalem, where she married and had three children with her husband Walter Pick. She had eleven grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren. “That’s my answer to Hitler,” Pick-Goslar used to say, according to the Anne Frank Foundation.
“Hannah, or Hanneli, as Anne called her in her diary,” was one of Frank’s best friends, the foundation explained on its website. As “Anne, Hanne und Sanne” they formed a close friendship with Anne Frank and Sanne Ledermann from 1934. “Hannah shared the memories of their friendship and the Holocaust into old age,” it says. “She believed that everyone should know what happened to her and her friend Anne after the last diary entry. No matter how horrible the story is.”
Anne Frank became known through her diary entries, which she wrote down in her family’s later hiding place in Amsterdam. The family lived there until they were betrayed in August 1944. Anne Frank died in 1945 at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her subsequently found diary was published and became one of the most widely read books in the world.