THE HAGUE (HPD) — Hannah Pick-Goslar, one of Anne Frank’s best friends, has died at the age of 93, the foundation that runs the Anne Frank House Museum said Saturday.
The Anne Frank Foundation paid tribute to Pick-Goslar, who is mentioned in Frank’s famous diary about her time in hiding from the Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands, for keeping her friend’s memory alive with stories from her childhood.
“Hannah Pick-Goslar meant a lot to the Anne Frank House and we could always count on her,” the foundation said in a statement. He did not provide details on the cause of her death.
Pick-Goslar grew up with Anne in Amsterdam after both families emigrated from Germany with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party. The friends were separated when Anne’s family went into hiding in an attic in 1942, but met again, albeit briefly, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany shortly before Anne died of typhus.
Before World War II, the two families were neighbors in Amsterdam and Anne and Hanna attended school together.
Pick-Goslar recalled attending her friend’s 13th birthday and seeing the red-and-white diary that Anne’s parents gave her as a gift. Anne filled the diary with her thoughts and frustrations as she hid from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, published the diary after the war.
Pick-Goslar recalled the friendship in a book written by Alison Leslie Gold titled Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections on a Childhood Friend. The book was adapted into a film titled “My Best Friend Anne Frank.”
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, she said of her friend, “Nowadays, everyone thinks she was a saintly person, but that wasn’t the case.”
“She was a child who wrote beautifully and grew up quickly under extraordinary circumstances,” Pick-Goslar said.
Pick-Goslar is mentioned in the diary, under the name Anne called her: Hanneli.
On June 14, 1942, Anne wrote: “Hanneli and Sanne were my two best friends. People would see us together and say, ‘There they go, Anne, Hanne and Sanne.’
The Anne Frank Foundation stated that Pick-Goslar “shared his memories of their friendship and of the Holocaust well into his old age. She believed that everyone should know what happened to her and her friend Anne of her after the last page of the diary. It doesn’t matter how terrible the story was.”