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‘My Friend Anne Frank’ tells the incredible story of how Anne’s best friend survived the Holocaust
(JTA) — One spring morning in 1934, two little girls followed their mothers to a corner grocery store in Amsterdam. The mothers, hearing each other speak German to their daughters, discovered they were both Jewish refugees who had recently fled Nazi Germany. The two girls peeked shyly at each other from behind their mothers’ skirts, one of them slight with dark, glossy hair, the other taller and fairer.
Those two girls were Anne Frank and Hannah Pick-Goslar. One was to become the most famous victim of the Holocaust, whose diary documented two years in hiding before the Nazis found her family and she perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15. The other narrowly survived and made her way to pre-state Israel, eventually enjoying a new life that grew to include three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren.
The day after their grocery store encounter, the girls recognized each other at the Sixth Montessori School in Amsterdam and became instant best friends. They could not predict that their final encounter would come 11 years later, against all odds, at Bergen-Belsen.
Pick-Goslar spent decades telling her story through interviews and lectures, but her recollections have only just been published for the first time in a memoir, “My Friend Anne Frank,” written with the help of journalist Dina Kraft. She did not live to see its publication on June 6: Pick-Goslar died in October, six months into writing the book and two weeks short of her 94th birthday, leaving Kraft to finish her account.
Kraft spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the life of Pick-Goslar, who lived out the future stolen from her dear friend.
The conversation with Kraft, a onetime JTA reporter, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JTA: What was it like to tell Pick-Goslar’s story together with her?
Kraft: It was a remarkable experience being able to work with her. We had these very intense interviews where I was asking her to really dig back into her memory. A lot of Holocaust survivors, a lot of survivors of trauma, tend to tell their story — not on autopilot, exactly — but they have a script. It’s perfectly understandable, it’s a tool of self-preservation.
So I was asking her to dive deeper and look more intensely within, and that was not always easy. There were times we would finish the interview after a couple of hours and she would say, “I’m just exhausted, I need to lie down.” And I would say, “Me too,” because it was just exhausting — we were recounting very hard moments.
It got to the point where she would come in the morning and say, “I’m having bad dreams again,” and I would say, “Yeah, me too, I’m having bad dreams also.” Because it was so much of trying to step into her shoes and step into her mindset, and also reading very intensely — it was very much a research project too.
How did Pick-Goslar remember her childhood and friendship with Frank before the war?
She remembers life before the war as incredibly warm and loving. They were wrapped up in a supportive familial environment. Although both she and Anne were refugees from Germany, they came over very young — Anne was 4 and Hannah was 5.
Their parents had a hard time adapting, especially the mothers. Hannah’s mother was born and bred in Berlin, very much a creature of German culture. Her father was a high-ranking official in the Weimar government, so they lived very close to the Reichstag. On top of being horrified that they had just been kicked out of this country they viewed as home, Hannah’s family went back 1,000 years in Germany. So they were heartbroken about their country taking this terrible turn into darkness.
But for Hannah and Anne, it was a very nice life.
What kind of person was Frank, according to her friend?
She was very spunky. She had lots to say and she exhausted the adults around her. She was always challenging them, asking difficult questions, prodding, restless and impatient. The girls loved to play Monopoly, but Anne would get restless and walk off, which is frustrating for a friend! They would push back furniture in the house and do gymnastics together. Later on, when the Germans invaded and they only had other Jewish girlfriends to play with, they formed a club to play ping pong and go for ice cream.
Anne was such a know-it-all that Hannah’s mother had a phrase about her. She said, “God knows all, but Anne Frank knows better!”
But Hannah really saw her as a regular kid — she was just her friend, Anne Frank. She was not an icon of any kind, and she seemed more ordinary than she seemed extraordinary.
In July 1942, Pick-Goslar found her friend’s apartment empty. Like everyone else, she was told that the Franks escaped to Switzerland — not knowing they had actually gone into hiding nearby. What happened to Pick-Goslar while Frank went into hiding?
Hannah was deported a year after Anne went into hiding. In that year, she went back to school. The anti-Jewish laws meant that you couldn’t sit on benches, go to swimming pools, be on a tram, ride your bicycle — and you couldn’t go to school with non-Jewish children.
So Hannah and Anne were both fortunate to be accepted to the Jewish Lyceum, considered one of the more prestigious Jewish schools in Amsterdam under German occupation. But in the fall of 1942, the deportations had already begun. So every day there was a different student and friend missing from class, and different teachers and administrators missing. They never knew whether it was because somebody went into hiding or because they had been deported.
Another thing happened at this time. In October, when Hannah was 14 years old, her mother Ruth was pregnant. She was determined not to go to a hospital because there were rumors of people being deported directly from hospitals, so she gave birth at home with a Jewish doctor and Jewish midwife. The baby ended up being stillborn and Hannah’s mother died the next day.
As more and more Jews were deported, Hannah was protected for a while. Her family secured a pair of South American passports, and they were also on the so-called “Palestine list.” The idea was that eventually they would be part of a prisoner swap between the British and the Germans — German soldiers for “exchange Jews” who would be sent to Palestine, which was under the British mandate.
Pick-Goslar survived to have three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. (Eric Sultan/The Lonka Project)
So for a while, Pick-Goslar’s family believed they might be spared. How did she end up at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany?
By the end, the Germans rounded up all the remaining Jews from Amsterdam, including those who had special stamps in their passports. By June 1943, Hannah’s family was in one of the final roundups of Jews in Amsterdam.
First they went to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland on the border with Germany. It was basically a holding purgatory, and from there people were deported either to Auschwitz or Sobibor — in which they were almost certainly killed — or if they were luckier, to Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, which were concentration camps but not death camps. Eventually, after several months in Westerbork, Hannah’s family was deported to Bergen-Belsen.
It was bearable in the first few months and they were still fed, though not much. But by February of 1945, the Russians were approaching in the east and the Germans were trying to move people from outer concentration camps into Germany. So Bergen-Belsen swelled to many times its size and became incredibly overcrowded. There was less and less food and water, and typhus started raging through the camp.
How did Pick-Goslar and Frank find each other again at Bergen-Belsen?
Around this time, a tent camp was erected across from Hannah’s part of the camp. People saw other women speaking different languages — Hungarian, Polish, Greek, and eventually Dutch as well. They were emaciated and skeletal.
The Germans forbade going out to talk at the fence and filled it with straw, so that people wouldn’t see each other anymore. But the women found a way to communicate, and word got to Hannah that Anne Frank was on the other side of the fence. Of course, she didn’t believe it, because the Frank family had left the impression that they were in Switzerland. But she decided to go find out for herself, even though it was extremely dangerous — you’d be shot if you went to the fence.
She crept up quietly and said, “Hallo, anybody there?” Then she heard a voice from across the fence, and by chance it was Auguste van Pels, one of the people who was in hiding with Anne’s family. She said almost casually, “Oh, you must be here for Anne,” and she brought Anne from the tent.
What were their last memories together?
Anne was coming from Auschwitz, so she was a broken shadow of her former self. She was freezing, starving and wailing that she was all alone in the world. She assumed that both of her parents were dead at this point. She didn’t know that just a week or two before, her father had been liberated from Auschwitz.
Imagine two girls on opposite sides of this fence — two very loved, coddled girls, who did not know deprivation, but now were completely in the throes of the worst days of the war, completely dehumanized and mistreated. There they were on opposite sides of this fence, best friends, sobbing.
Anne begged Hannah to bring her some food and Hannah said yes immediately, without knowing how she would get it. She said that she would come back in a couple of nights. And there was this amazing moment of female solidarity: The women in her barrack were so moved by the story of this reunion, they wanted to help — so from under a pillow here, hidden in a suitcase there, they gathered the little they had to give and put everything into a sock.
Out went Hannah again, a night or two later, to the fence. When she threw the sock over, she suddenly heard footsteps and then a scream — Anne had just lost the package to a fellow prisoner who took it out of her hands. She was distraught and couldn’t stop crying, but Hannah said, “Just stop crying, I’ll come back again with food.”
So she went back a few days later again with more food collected from her barrack. This time they triangulated better and Anne caught the package. That turned out to be the last time they ever met.
How did Hannah remember the end of the war?
At the very end of the war, the Germans forced everybody who could still walk at Bergen-Belsen onto a couple of different trains. These trains were meant to go to Theresienstadt, where they would be killed.
Hannah was put on a train with her little sister Gabi, whom she was trying to keep alive. It was a harrowing 13-day ride throughout the eastern German countryside. The people were very sick and starving, with no food or water for the journey. There was one especially awful moment when the man next to Hannah tried to spill his bowl of diarrhea outside the door of the train, but instead it splashed all over her.
She was so ill with typhus that she eventually passed out around day 13. When she woke up, people were already off the train. She asked what was going on, and someone said, “Don’t you know? We were liberated by the Russians.”
What did Pick-Goslar make of the tremendous legacy left by Frank’s diary? Did she feel that her friend was correctly understood?
For her, reading the diary was a revelation. She felt like she was sort of reunited with this old friend, which was a very powerful feeling, but also very sad. She saw a girl developing into a young woman whom she would still like to know. She was very grateful that Anne’s diary had been recovered, that so many people got to know her story, and that her diary became a gateway to learning more about the Holocaust.
I think she was a little upset by the sanitized version of Anne Frank. She spoke often about the famous passage in her diary, which is repeated and painted on walls and put on postcards: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Hannah said that if Anne had survived the hell of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she did not think she would stand by that statement anymore. I think she was concerned about some level of oversimplification.
She was very gratified that Anne’s voice never died and still lives on through her words, but she also wanted people to have a richer and more contextual understanding of the slaughter of millions of people that was the Holocaust.
—
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The Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed.
A stabbing outside a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dozens of swastikas painted on a Brooklyn playground. A Queens synagogue desecrated with feces and motor oil.
Combined with an unprecedented call by New York’s mayor to protest Israel’s prime minister, the recent rash of crimes against Jews in New York City has the community on edge.
So after Larry Montes, 46, was charged with hate crimes for attempting to disrupt Central Synagogue’s Friday night Shabbat service, striking a congregant and spitting on a security guard, many online rushed to blame Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his rhetoric against Israel. The incident seemed to fit into the political narrative held among Mamdani’s fiercest critics.
“The attack at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue is a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement,” Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, posted to X Saturday morning. “I warned that words would turn into actions, and that is exactly what is happening.”
The details that have emerged about Montes complicate that conclusion. A Forward analysis of the attacker’s social media and statements from his family paint a very different picture of Montes: a pro-Israel Republican who wanted to convert to Judaism.
In June, Montes reposted two videos critical of Mamdani: one comparing the mayor to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and another accusing Mamdani of having “betrayed” the city’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. In 2024, Montes posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” He also reposted a video featuring Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
If anything, Montes may have believed that the Reform congregation was too progressive. After his arrest, Montes called the congregants “fake Jews” in statements to the police, according to the assistant district attorney on the case, Ali Fazal.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said in an interview that the suspect appeared to have a “a deeply, frankly, disturbing worldview when it came to Jews that was simultaneously both philosemitic and antisemitic.” Conflating the suspect’s worldview with Mamdani’s, she added, “harms the fight against antisemitism.”
Online influencers place the blame on Mamdani
The attacker’s background and stance on Israel didn’t stop influencers and longstanding critics of Mamdani from piling on. “Do you think your non-stop demonization of Jews could have anything to do with it?” said Brianna Wu, an activist who has become a vocal critic of the progressive left, on X in response to Mamdani’s condemnation of the attack.
“It’s your fault Mr. Mayor,” Loay Alshareef, an activist who advocates for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel, posted to X on the night of the attack. “You allowed this to happen.”
Others didn’t name Mamdani but quickly attributed the attack to increasing animus toward Zionists — even as the attacker’s social media suggests he was Zionist himself.
“American politics has become so obsessively antagonistic toward ‘Zionists’ that even a synagogue is seen as fair game for disruption and desecration,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, on X.
Why exactly Montes attacked one of New York’s iconic synagogues is still unclear. Montes’ aunt, Myriam Montes, told the New York Post he was “mentally traumatized” because of his desire to be Jewish — suggesting he may have wanted to convert to Judaism but was rebuffed.
Mental health may also have been a factor. Montes was arrested three times for violent robberies between 2019 and 2023, police said, and he was a known “emotionally disturbed person.”
Some have argued that outsized attention on Israel can make Jews a natural target especially for people in the throes of a mental health crisis.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political consultant, said the suspects’ anti-Mamdani views don’t weaken the case against the mayor. “There are crazy people that take cues from what they hear and what they read,” Sheinkopf said.
Spitalnick disagreed. “There are absolutely things the mayor has done that further reinforce concerns about Jewish safety,” she said. At the same time, “it’s disingenuous and unhelpful to blame him for all antisemitism in New York, which long predates him and which, as the evidence in this specific incident shows, is far more complicated than that.”
All that’s to say Montes could have had any number of motives for attacking a congregant during Shabbat services, including but not limited to warped philosemitism, a mental health crisis and prejudice against Reform Jews.
Playing into Netanyahu’s campaign
Blaming hatred of Israel and local political rhetoric for the attack could have an ulterior motive and political consequences halfway around the world. As Netanyahu and the ruling Likud Party, of which Israeli Consul General Akunis is a member, face a tough reelection fight in the Israeli Knesset elections in October, Mamdani has become a campaign target.
Last month, Netanyahu incorporated Mamdani’s video address encouraging New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader into his own political campaign. In a campaign clip, he portrayed Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. Mamdani had initially threatened to arrest Netanyahu in September when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly, but the city’s legal department determined the mayor did not have the authority to do so.
Footage of Mamdani’s call to protest has now expanded to billboards and digital clips to rally Israeli voters on the right.
“They want Netanyahu to lose,” the new Likud campaign reads, placing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. “Don’t let them win.”
The political logic is straightforward. Portray Mamdani as the symbol of a hostile movement against Israel. Cast Netanyahu’s political survival as part of the larger fight against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
Both Spitalnick and Sheinkopf facetiously called Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu an “in-kind contribution” to the Netanyahu campaign. Spitalnick said the Israeli leader “thrives by being able to point to that as opposed to talking about his own policies and record.”
Jewish leaders and local politicians have called for lowering the temperature. Micah Lasher, the Democratic nominee for the 12th congressional district that includes Central Synagogue, told The New York Times after the attack that the political climate must be taken into consideration at a time like this.
“You can’t divorce the dramatic increase in violence targeted at the Jewish community,” he said, “from the political climate and the tone and tenor of the discourse around Jews and Israel.”
The post The Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know
When Audrey Glickman heard about the Friday night attack at Central Synagogue, a prominent congregation on Manhattan’s East Side, she had a visceral, immediate reaction.
“My first thought with anything like this is: they’ve been invaded,” she said. “And I know how that feels.”
Glickman, 69, survived the October 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history that killed 11 worshippers. She was leading services when she heard the rat-a-tat of gunfire. She grabbed fellow congregant Joe Charny, then 88, and raced up the stairs into a small room filled with bags of clothes to be donated to those in need. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls until it was over.
In New York City this weekend, an attacker struck a congregant and a security guard, then was arrested and charged with hate crimes. Police said no one was seriously hurt.
“You never shake that feeling that somebody came into your space and invaded your safety, and you can’t undo it,” Glickman said. “My heart goes out to them.”
The suspect in New York, Larry Montes, 46, was charged with felony hate crimes and told police afterward that the attack was religiously motivated, citing hostility toward Jews and Black people. Montes, who has two prior misdemeanors, was granted bail at his Saturday night arraignment and is due back in court Thursday.
The attack landed amid a citywide surge: New NYPD data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York rose 8.5% during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first seven months in office and made up 57% of hate crimes citywide, with July alone seeing a 53% jump from a year earlier.
Glickman said she hopes New York officials can eventually give the congregation answers. A federal jury sentenced the Tree of Life gunman, Robert Bowers, to death in August 2023.
“I hope they have the kind of investigators that we had here to figure out what went on,” she said. “When you can close up the case, it feels a lot better.”
But Glickman said every targeted congregation eventually has to answer a harder question: How do you stay open to strangers, newcomers and the unaffiliated, while keeping the people inside safe?
For that answer, she said, members of Tree of Life turned to a friend: the Rev. Eric Manning of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black worshippers during a Bible study in 2015.
Manning and then-Tree of Life’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers leaned on each other. Myers invited Manning to speak at the funeral of Rose Mallinger, the oldest of the shooting victims, and the two clergy have stayed close in the years since. Manning’s advice to Glickman’s congregation has stayed with her: “You can’t close your doors.”
Nearly eight years later, Glickman still goes to shul most mornings, and still worships on Shabbat with Tree of Life, which continues to meet in borrowed space while its building is rebuilt.
Her message for the congregation in Manhattan: “We’re here, and we know how they feel,” Glickman said. “It’s not a good feeling, and we shouldn’t have to live with this. We are in a time of biblical proportions.”
‘The walls will never be high enough’
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, 50, has an unusually direct connection to Central Synagogue. In January 2022, a gunman held Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, after Cytron-Walker let him in from the cold and offered him tea.
The gunman, Malik Akram, had done his research, the FBI later found: He’d chosen the synagogue because it was the closest one to the federal prison holding Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to 86 years for attempted murder and other felonies. Akram demanded her release and ordered Cytron-Walker to get America’s equivalent of a chief rabbi on the phone. He’d seen photos of Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, with President Barack Obama and insisted that Cytron-Walker call her.
Cytron-Walker didn’t know her personally; he tracked down a number and left her a voicemail.
The 11-hour standoff — caught in its entirety on the synagogue’s security cameras — ended with all the hostages escaping unharmed. Authorities shot and killed Akram on the scene.
“While it was sad to hear that there was an attack at Rabbi Buchdahl’s congregation, I was very grateful to hear that the security protocols they have in place minimized any disruption,” Cytron-Walker said.
He was struck by how quickly the congregation returned to prayer. “You always have to weigh, when there’s a disruption, what the community needs in that moment,” he said. “What the community needed was not to let what turns out to be a minor incident ruin the night — to be able to celebrate Shabbat as a community despite the disruption.”
Cytron-Walker, now the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said Jewish congregations have to hold two values at once. “We have to live our values of loving the stranger,” he said. “Judaism has always been a part of the world, even when we try to isolate ourselves from it. The walls will never be high enough.”
At the same time, he said, “it is also a Jewish value to protect our own lives, to value our own lives. We should employ that with the rational part of our brain, not the emotional part. We shouldn’t panic, but we should be prepared.”
Just like Glickman, Cytron-Walker said he hopes Central Synagogue receives the kind of support that helped his own congregation heal.
“The Jewish people are not only receiving hate,” he said. “We’re also receiving love and support. It may not always be as much as we want, and when we do receive it, let’s offer gratitude and allow that to help with our healing.”
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
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