Friends to the end

The girlhood bond that sustained Anne Frank

In 1934, when she was still in kindergarten, Anne Frank made an instant friend in fellow German Jewish refugee Hanneli (Hannah) Pick-Goslar.

Long before Frank became a worldwide symbol of the Holocaust’s tragic losses with “The Diary of a Young Girl,” written while she and her family spent two years hiding in an attic, she was a normal kid, readjusting to life in her adopted city of Amsterdam. Pick-Goslar was her neighbor and best friend at the local Montessori School, and the two girls played hopscotch, gossiped about boys and set up a ping-pong club called “The Little Dipper” — all in the midst of Nazi occupation and an increasingly hostile Europe.

Torn apart by war

Their beautiful and complex friendship is the subject of the new film “My Best Friend Anne Frank” (streaming on Netflix Tuesday), based on the 1997 book “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend” by Alison Leslie Gold.

While Frank did not survive World War II, Pick-Goslar did, and the now-93-year-old greatgrandmother, who lives in Jerusalem, still cherishes the memory of her childhood playmate.

In an interview with Scholastic in the late 1990s, Pick-Goslar shared that her friend was always an avid writer — constantly scribbling in her journal — who could also command a room. “Everybody would ask her ‘What are you writing?’ and the answer always was ‘It’s none of your business,’ ” Pick-Goslar said.

In the film, Pick-Goslar is played hauntingly by Josephine Arendsen. She and Frank (Aiko Beemsterboer) love star-gazing, and in one scene, Hannah points to a constellation and tells her little sister: “That saucepan over there has seven stars. One of those is me and the biggest one is Anna.”

In real life, the close confidantes were suddenly torn apart in July 1942.

Pick-Goslar, who thought the Franks safely escaped to Switzerland, didn’t know the family’s true whereabouts: They were still nearby in Amsterdam, cramped in the attic of a house eventually called the “Secret Annex.” There, the anguished teen pined for her friend. “Last night, just as I was falling asleep, Hanneli suddenly appeared before me. I saw her there, dressed in rags, her face thin and worn,” Frank wrote in her now famous diary on Nov. 27, 1943.

Less than a year later, in August 1944, the Franks were discovered.

Anne and her older sister, Margot were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

With the SS hunting Jews door to door throughout Holland, Pick-Goslar was arrested in June 1943 and sent to a transit camp, then also transferred to Bergen-Belsen.

Their final moments

Soon, she found out that a desperately frail Frank was on the other side of the heavily guarded barbed wire fence in a different section of the camp.

“I was waiting — and I suddenly heard somebody calling me,” PickGoslar recalled of finding Frank in the 1995 documentary “Anne Frank Remembered.” “It was Anne. We cried. Then she said she had nobody anymore.”

It was the winter of 1945. Knowing she would be killed if she were caught, Pick-Goslar assembled a modest care package for

Anne, including a sock, dried prunes and some bread donated from fellow inmates. In the middle of the night, the two teens met on either side of the barrier. Pick-Goslar threw the package — only for it to get intercepted by another prisoner, who stole it and fled.

Pick-Goslar tried again soon after. “This time she caught the package and it was the last time I saw her,” she later said. In February 1945, just weeks before British soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen, 15-year-old Anne, thought to be infected with typhus, died.

“I thought we’d be liberated and be together,” Pick-Goslar told Scholastic. “You hope and you don’t know which will happen quicker — that the English will save us or that we will die.”

The film’s screenwriter, Paul Ruven, told The Post that Pick-Goslar’s tale unlocked a new angle on the Anne Frank story. “We were immediately moved by Hannah’s story,” he said of himself and cowriter Marian Batavier. “What amazed us the most during our research is the

strength and courage of these young girls in wartime, especially Hannah’s effort to save her best friend from

death.”