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My Friend Anne Frank
Hannah Pick-Goslar
Rider, $34.99
This book is well worth reading. It is deeply moving, beautifully written and, yes, you will need a tissue or two to get through it. But if you are one of the few people who have never read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, then you should read it, or re-read it, before opening Hannah Pick-Goslar’s remarkable memoir.
On the face of it, it seems absurd that a book by a living author called My Friend Anne Frank could have been written and published in the past two years. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 – almost 80 years ago.
Hannah Pick-Goslar (right) and her childhood friend Anne Frank during a game of hopscotch in Amsterdam before the war.Credit: AP
So who is this person writing in 2022, purporting to be her “friend”? When I first saw the title, I recoiled at the suspicion of a hack trying to squeeze a quid out of one of the 20th century’s most touching and tragic tales. The Diary of a Young Girl remains an astonishing collection of adolescent reflections on self and circumstance. It is made all the more poignant in that it is one of those rarest works of non-fiction when the reader knows the ending before they begin, but the writer never does.
But My Friend Anne Frank is the real deal, unlikely as the timing may seem. Pick-Goslar’s was indeed a friend of Anne’s, both Jews born in Germany (Anne in 1929, Hannah a year earlier), their families fleeing Nazism separately to the “safety” of Holland in 1933. They went to school in Amsterdam together, enjoyed the same birthday parties, and Hannah, dubbed as Hanneli, or Lies, appears several times in Anne’s diary. (Anne had a deep respect for privacy, even in this most secret file, and hid the identities of both close friends and irritating pests in a slew of pseudonyms.)
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It is this overpowering, bittersweet foreknowledge of what is to come that any reader of Anne’s diary finds so overwhelming, inspiring and yet so awful. How many of us have wept at her dreams of a romantic and intellectually adventurous future, all beginning with the words “… after the war”?
Pick-Goslar’s autobiography was written well after the war. Born in Berlin in 1928, she died aged 93 in Jerusalem last October. This story, very much her own, was co-written and edited with deft compassion and diligence by journalist Dian Kraft. It is as moving as Anne’s because not only did they play together as children, but Hannah knows how it ends.
The dreadful, transitory reunion of the two girls at Bergen-Belsen, days before Anne’s death, with Hannah throwing a sock stuffed with bread across a barbed wire fence for what was possibly Anne’s last meal, is truly heartbreaking.