Childhood friend of Anne Frank met her again in final months at Bergen-Belsen

Hannah Pick-Goslar, who has died aged 93, was a childhood friend of Anne Frank who recalled how they met again in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne’s death.

She was born Hanna Elisabeth Goslar in Berlin-Tiergarten into an observant Jewish family. Her father Hans was a journalist, writer and deputy minister in the Weimar Republic government; her mother, Ruth, was a teacher.

In 1933, after the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor, the Goslars fled to Amsterdam where, the next year, Hannah and her mother met Anne Frank and her mother Edith in a grocery shop where the two women struck up a conversation in

German.

‘‘After some days my mother took me to the kindergarten,’’

Hannah recalled. ‘‘I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t know this language [Dutch] and I just wanted to say, ‘Goodbye, this is not for me’. I saw the back of this little girl from the grocery shop; she was making music on little bells, and she turned around and smiled. I ran into her arms and mother was allowed to go home . . . From that day on we were friends and, through us, so were our parents.’’

In her famous diary, Anne wrote of her friend ‘‘Hanneli’’ that she was shy in the presence of other people but mischievous at home, while Hannah recalled Anne as ‘‘a spicy girl’’ who was proud of her pretty hair, collected pictures of the Dutch and British royal families and always wanted to be in the middle of things: ‘‘My mother, who was very religious, once described Anne with a sentence: ‘God knows everything. But Anne knows everything better.’ ’’

After the invasion and occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, the girls were forced to leave their kindergarten, along with other Jewish children, and to continue their studies at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum. In October the same year, Hannah’s mother gave birth to her younger sister, Gabi.

Hannah and Anne lost touch in 1942 when the Frank family went into hiding. The Goslars were unable to go into hiding because Ruth was pregnant again and 2-year-old Gabi would bring risk to any family hiding them.

Hannah was told that the Franks had escaped to Switzerland and she recalled how she and her friends would joke about Anne being somewhere ‘‘up in the Swiss Alps sipping hot chocolate . . . probably in love with a handsome boy’’. But she had misgivings: ‘‘I also knew that it was difficult for Jews to get to Switzerland . . . We were very worried.’’

Ruth Goslar died giving birth to her third child, who was stillborn, and Hannah and Gabi were placed in an orphanage for a short period before the two girls, along with their father and grandparents, were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. They were initially deported to the Dutch concentration camp at Westerbork before being sent to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944.

In October that year Anne and her sister Margot arrived at the camp with others from Auschwitz-Birkenau. To accommodate the new arrivals, a section of Bergen-Belsen was divided into two with a barbed wire fence and, at the beginning of February 1945, Hannah heard that Anne was in the other section. At considerable risk, she made her way to the fence one night and called out Anne’s name.

Awoman who had hidden with the Franks heard her and brought Anne to the fence. ‘‘I couldn’t see her,’’ Hannah recalled, ‘‘it was dark . . . [but] it was not the same Anne I had known; she was a broken girl. She began to cry immediately and told me: ‘I don’t have parents any more.’ ’’

Anne told her Margot was seriously ill, they had nothing to eat, no clothes for the cold, and her head had been shaved. ‘‘She always loved to play with her hair. I remember her curling her hair with her fingers. It must have killed her to lose it.’’

Hannah collected a few scraps from her fellow prisoners – a piece of hard bread, some dried plums, a few items of clothing – and the next evening, at the risk of being shot, she met Anne again and threw the package over the fence, only to hear Anne scream as it was grabbed by another woman.

‘‘I tried to calm her and said I would try again another time . . . We spoke only once more, perhaps two or three days later, and I was able to throw over a packet and she managed to grab it.’’ Soon afterwards, Anne was moved to another part of the camp.

In April, Hannah and Gabi were liberated from the camp, the only members of their family to survive, and in July 1945 she returned to Amsterdam, where she met Anne’s father Otto. ‘‘I was very happy to tell him that I had been able to talk to Anne. I told him that she might still be alive. But he told me himself that she was not, that his two daughters were dead. It was a very sad thing.’’

In 1947 Hannah Goslar emigrated to Palestine, where she trained as a children’s nurse and married Walter Pick, a doctor, with whom she had three children and survived to become ‘‘a happy grandmother in Israel’’.

In 1957 she began travelling the world to give lectures about her experiences during the Holocaust. Her friendship with Anne Frank became the subject of films and documentaries, including The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1988) and the Dutch drama My Best Friend Anne Frank (2021).

Hannah Pick-Goslar’s husband predeceased her and she is survived by her children.

‘‘It was not the same Anne I had known; she was a broken girl. She began to cry and told me: ‘I don’t have parents any more.’ ’’