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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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13-Year-Old Boy Brutally Assaulted in Paris in Second Antisemitic Attack in Less Than a Week
Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
In a shocking second antisemitic attack in less than a week, a 13-year-old boy in Paris was brutally beaten Monday by a knife-wielding assailant, prompting authorities to open a criminal investigation and step up security amid a rising tide of antisemitism.
On his way to a synagogue in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, the schoolboy was physically attacked by a group of five assailants who beat him, pressed a knife to his throat, called him a “dirty Jew,” and stole his belongings, the French news outlet Le Parisien reported.
According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, the victim was walking to a synagogue, clutching his kippah in his hand rather than wearing it for fear of being recognized, when five attackers confronted him; stole his AirPods, sneakers, and coat; and forced him to empty his pockets.
The boy also told authorities that he was shoved, punched in the face, and threatened with a knife to his throat before his attackers stole his belongings, shouting antisemitic remarks throughout the assault.
Local police have arrested and taken an 18-year-old suspect into custody after he was recognized during the assault by someone on a video call with the victim. The four other attackers remain at large as of this writing.
The prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into armed robbery and armed violence, committed as a group and aggravated by discrimination, as authorities continue to work to identify and apprehend the remaining suspects.
This latest antisemitic attack marks the second such incident in less than a week, underscoring a growing climate of hostility as Jews and Israelis face a surge of targeted assaults.
Over the weekend, three Jewish men wearing kippahs were physically threatened with a knife and forced to flee after leaving their Shabbat services near the Trocadéro in southwest Paris’s 16th arrondissement, European Jewish Press reported.
As the victims were leaving a nearby synagogue and walking through the neighborhood, they noticed a man staring at them. The assailant then approached the group and repeatedly asked, “Are you Jews? Are you Israelis?”
When one of them replied “yes,” the man pulled a knife from his pocket and began threatening the group. The victims immediately ran and found police officers nearby. None of the victims were injured.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, France has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Last week, a Jewish primary school in eastern Paris was vandalized, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged, prompting a criminal investigation and renewed outrage among local Jewish leaders as targeted antisemitic attacks continued to escalate.
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Over 90% of American Jews Feel Less Safe After Recent Antisemitic Attacks, Survey Finds
A friend organized a vigil for Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, both Israeli embassy workers who were allegedly murdered by an anti-Israel activist, in Washington, DC on May 22, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Nearly all Jews in the United States feel less safe after a recent wave of antisemitic attacks, and the majority have changed their behavior over the last year as a result, according to a major new survey.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) on Tuesday published its annual State of Antisemitism in America report, revealing a growing level of fear among American Jews — especially the 31 percent directly targeted by antisemitic hate themselves in the past year. Of those who reported being the target of antisemitism, 80 percent said they changed their behavior in response.
“We need Americans to wake up to the reality of what their Jewish neighbors are experiencing,” AJC CEO Ted Deutch said in a statement announcing the report.
The AJC’s researchers found that 91 percent of American Jews feel more unsafe in the country following last year’s antisemitic attacks against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence in April and pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado in June, in addition to the slayings of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky at the Capital Jewish Museum in May.
Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said they feel less safe as a Jewish person in the US because of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel. During the onslaught, Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists perpetrated the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages.
“Right now, in America, when Jews gather, whether at synagogue or a community event, it’s routinely behind metal detectors and armed guards,” Deutch said. “No one in America should have to change their behavior because of what they believe, but that’s how most Jews are living their lives. What we’re asking for is what every other minority group expects in America: the freedom to be who we are without fearing for our safety.”
The report documents that 55 percent of Jewish respondents to the survey said they changed their behavior in response to fears of antisemitism, while 17 percent noted they have considered leaving the US in the past five years as a result of rising hate, an increase from 13 percent in 2024.
Majorities of American Jews are attuned to the threats of online hate and the dangers of the popular large language model (LLM) chatbots marketed as so-called “artificial intelligence,” including SpaceX’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude.
Seventy-three percent of American Jews who were surveyed said they have experienced online antisemitism, and 65 percent expressed concerns at either the “very” or “somewhat” levels that LLM chatbots will spread more bigotry against Jews.
In addition, 69 percent of American Jews worry that information and misinformation from LLMs will inspire antisemitic incidents, according to the data.
More American Jews surveyed in 2025 said they saw antisemitism on social media platforms than those in 2024. Jews reporting seeing antisemitism on billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook social media website rose from 47 percent in 2024 to 54 percent last year, while those experiencing the hate on his Instagram photo-sharing app shot up from 32 percent to 40 percent.
American Jews seeking to enjoy online videos also reported rising bigotry targeting them on Alphabet’s YouTube (increasing from 27 percent to 38 percent) and Oracle’s TikTok (up from 18 percent to 23 percent).
The picture of life for younger American Jews is much more dire than for the middle-aged and elderly, with 47 percent of respondents 29 and younger saying antisemites had personally targeted them in the last year. This compares to 28 percent for Jews 30 and older.
The survey also affirms reports in recent years of increased antisemitism at the outposts of American academia.
Among Jewish college students, 42 percent said they experienced antisemitism while on campus, and 25 percent reported feeling or being excluded from a group or event because of their Jewish identity.
Jewish institutions remain widely under threat, with 28 percent of respondents saying that antisemites had targeted at least one synagogue, Jewish school, or community organization where they affiliated.
The survey also found that the protest slogan “globalize the intifada,” which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israelis and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand such violence, provokes fear among 88 percent of Jewish respondents, with 27 percent saying they would feel “very unsafe” hearing the words. Among the general public, only 13 percent of respondents said they knew the phrase while 32 percent had heard the similar controversial war cry “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
More Americans (73 percent) knew the “Free Palestine” chant. The AJC noted that the alleged killer of Milgrim and Lischinsky “is reported to have shouted ‘Free Palestine’ during the shooting. The alleged attacker in Boulder is also reported to have yelled ‘Free Palestine’ as he threw a Molotov cocktail at the crowd of people gathered to support hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, ultimately leading to the death of 82-year-old Karen Diamond.”
In a parallel survey the AJC conducted of the American general public, researchers found that 70 percent of respondents called antisemitism a problem, 63 percent said it had increased since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, and 45 percent had seen or heard an antisemitic incident in the last 12 months.
Deutch on Tuesday highlighted some of the key findings in an op-ed published by the New York Post announcing the report.
“Among Americans who know a Jewish person, only 54 percent said they had personally seen or heard one or more antisemitic incidents in the last year,” Deutch wrote. “Among those who don’t know any Jews? Thirty-two percent.”
Deutch continued, “I am not advocating for special attention or treatment for my community. I’m calling for, rather, the same care, awareness, and collective outrage we would rightly see if these daily assaults were being made against members of any other religious or ethnic group in the United States.” He warned that “the fortress of metal detectors and bulletproof glass we’ve built around the Jewish community is a physical sign of the deep cracks undermining the foundation of our society.”
Holly Huffnagle, the AJC’s director of antisemitism policy, warned in a statement that tolerating the spread of antisemitism “corrodes social trust, legitimizes extremism, and weakens the democratic institutions that protect everyone, making a clear, dedicated government response not just optional, but necessary.”
The AJC’s survey took place between Sept. 26 and Oct. 29, 2025. Researchers drew data from responses provided by 1,222 Jews, ages 18 and up, as well as 1,033 adults in the general population. The margin of error for Jewish respondents was +/-3.7 percent while for the general population it was 3.4, at a 95 percent confidence level.
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China Played Key Role in Iran’s Digital Crackdown on Protesters, Report Shows
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The Iranian regime used Chinese and Russian technology to silence dissent during recent nationwide anti-government protests, imposing near-total internet shutdowns and disrupting satellite communications to suppress public scrutiny, according to a new study.
On Monday, the international human rights organization Article 19 released a new report examining digital cooperation between China and Iran, detailing Beijing’s role in expanding Tehran’s digital repression apparatus.
“In its pursuit of total control over the digital space, Iran borrows directly from the Chinese digital authoritarian playbook,” Michael Caster, head of Article 19’s Global China Program, said in a statement.
“From Chinese companies embedded inside Iran’s infrastructure, to Iran’s support for China’s ‘cyber sovereignty’ principles based on censorship and surveillance, both countries align in their ambition to disconnect their populations from the open, global internet,” he continued.
According to the report, China has provided material and technical support to Iran since at least 2010, bolstering its surveillance and censorship capabilities as Chinese firms including ZTE, Huawei, Tiandy, and Hikvision continue operating in the country despite international sanctions.
“Emulating China’s infrastructure of oppression helps Iran entrench power, sidestepping accountability and exercising full control over the information environment,” Article 19’s head of resilience, Mo Hoseini, said in a statement. “That way, dissent is not just silenced, it is prevented from ever surfacing.”
The study also explains that Iran is seeking to replicate China’s “Great Firewall” through its National Information Network, a system designed to restrict access to the global internet while centralizing censorship and embedding surveillance deep within national infrastructure.
As international scrutiny over the regime grows, new estimates show that tens of thousands of people were killed by Iranian security forces during an unprecedented crackdown on nationwide protests last month.
Two senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials told Time magazine that as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone. Some reports have put the figure even higher, suggesting the regime could have perpetrated one of the deadliest crackdowns in modern history — all under cover of digital darkness.
With authorities enforcing an internet blackout for weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.
According to Craig Singleton, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, surveillance technology supplied by Chinese exporter Tiandy Digital Technology Co. has strengthened Iranian security forces’ ability to identify and track protesters.
The equipment, including network video recorders, has been deployed during both the current unrest and previous waves of nationwide protests.
Chinese surveillance firm Tiandy is helping Iran track, identify, and repress innocent protesters—moving from street cameras to knock-on-the-door arrests.
This is digital authoritarianism in action.@SecScottBessent @HowardLutnick @Secrubio @BrendanCarrFCC @FDD
Short
— Craig Singleton (@CraigMSingleton) January 13, 2026
China expressed support for the Iranian regime last month amid the protests, hoping Tehran would “overcome” the unrest and “uphold stability.”
If the regime in Iran was seriously weakened or potentially collapsed, it would present a problem for a strategic partner of Beijing.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing
Iran’s growing ties with China come at a time when Tehran faces mounting economic sanctions from Western powers, while Beijing itself is also under US sanctions.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
The extent of China’s partnership with Iran may be tested as the latter comes under increased international scrutiny over its violent crackdown on anti-regime protests.
However, as The Algemeiner previously reported, Iran’s relationship with China has proven weaker than official statements from both countries would suggest, filled with limits and skepticism even as Tehran faces unprecedented military challenges from both the US and Israel.