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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 Black Jewish experience, and Black-Jewish relations, take center stage on Fifth Avenue
The civil rights movement represented a kind of pax romana in Black–Jewish relations — symbolized most enduringly by the image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching beside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.
While many Jewish and Black Americans recall that era with a sense of wistful nostalgia, the relationship has become increasingly strained amid debates over racial justice, Israel and Palestinians.
This week, Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of the country’s most prominent Reform synagogues, is launching a new five-year effort as a contribution toward rebuilding those ties while also foregrounding Black Jews.
Shared Histories, Shared Futures: The Arielle Patrick & Aaron Goldstein Initiative on Black-Jewish Relations promises to bring scholars, activists, and religious leaders to the synagogue for a series of conversations on race, antisemitism and coalition-building. Its first event, set for May 29, will take place during a Friday night service.
“This is not a performance or a gimmick,” said Patrick, the Chief Communications Officer at Ariel Investments, a global investment firm, who endowed the initiative alongside her husband Goldstein. “This is intentionally not during Black History Month, it’s intentionally not on MLK Day. It’s embedded in how we’d like people to think about creating a better society for our children and grandchildren.”
A frayed bond
Patrick, who is a Black Jew, said part of the inspiration behind the initiative came from her sense that the relationship between the two communities is not what it once was.
“I think a lot of Jews felt that their Black brothers and sisters were silent after Oct. 7, and perhaps jumped into the conversation about Palestine versus Israel without having the full context,” she said. “And then I also think that for a long time, the Black community has felt almost deserted by the fact that Jews were enabled to be upwardly mobile from the communities we once lived in and shared because of assimilation.”
In recent years, debates over Israel have fractured many progressive spaces, leaving some left-wing Jews who refused to disavow Israel feeling isolated from circles they once felt a sense of belonging to. Segments of the Black Lives Matter movement have explicitly linked racial justice in America to the cause for Palestinian liberation, and some of its chapters have even endorsed militant resistance to that end.
At the same time, rising antisemitism in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has shifted how some Jewish organizations engage with social justice work. The Anti-Defamation League, which for years invested in broader civil rights and democracy initiatives, pivoted from much of that programming to focus its resources on the rise in antisemitism.
Fostering the relationship is also complicated by divisions within both communities themselves. “When we think about Black-Jewish relations, we have a tendency to assume that everyone who is Black thinks one way and everyone who is Jewish thinks one way,” said Dr. Susannah Heschel, the head of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth and the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Of course, there’s enormous diversity of all kinds: political, cultural, religious,” she added.
Relations in New York City reached a low point in 1991 after a Hasidic driver struck and killed a Black child in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, setting off days of unrest that left a Jewish student fatally stabbed and two communities grieving.
Though strain has reemerged in recent years, particularly during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the war in Gaza, organizations have emerged during that same period seeking to rekindle Black-Jewish dialogue.
“I think a lot of Jews are inspired by the civil rights era, by the fact that so many Jews participated,” said Heschel. “I know that photograph of my father marching in Selma is very important to a lot of people.”
She considers that photo a spur to new generations to continue the work. “The question is, what do you do with a photograph like that?” she asked. “Do you say, ‘Isn’t that great, what we did,’ in the past tense? Or do you take it as a challenge?”
Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism launched a partnership with Hillel and UNCF in 2024 to host unity dinners bringing together Jewish students and students at historically Black colleges and universities.
One might recall the viral Super Bowl ad, sponsored by Kraft’s Blue Square Initiative, where a Jewish boy is taunted by his classmates for being Jewish before his Black classmate fearlessly comes to his aid. The two boys walk off together in an idyllic (and, as critics have noted, somewhat antiquated) display of Black-Jewish solidarity.
Other groups, including Rekindle and CNN commentator Van Jones’ Exodus Leadership Forum, have launched programs aimed at fostering conversations between Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish leaders. And this month, in a significant development, a National Convening on the Black-Jewish Alliance will be hosted in Miami, bringing together representatives from 75 organizations focused on cultivating the relationship.
A recent PBS series, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which came out in February also shed a light on the relationship, leaving many hoping to engage in the present — though also received pushback for not engaging seriously with the perspectives of Black Jews.
Centering Black Jews
Rabbi Joshua Davidson, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, grew up in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement and came to deeply value the stories of Black and Jewish communities working together.
“I knew that ultimately it would become an important part of my rabbinate too,” he said.
He says has been engaged in intercultural work for years, cultivating friendships with faith leaders across New York City, including at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
“One doesn’t enter into a relationship with the expectation that you’re going to get something in return,” Davidson said. “There’s a difference between allyship and friendship. The way I approach this is I want to establish friendships.”
Davidson said those relationships have allowed him to stand together with clergy members from those communities during difficult moments. Following the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, for example, he participated in a solidarity service at Abyssinian Baptist Church.
“There are times when a crisis hits, and you need allies, and so you reach out. You have no choice. But if you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to build the friendships when things were calm, you’re in a much better position,” he added, referring to the sense of abandonment many Jews felt after Oct. 7.
“I know around the country there’s been a great deal of frustration that expectations of one community showing up for another during moments of distress weren’t met. I can only say that my own experience has been different,” he said. “When something has happened to the Jewish community, I get the phone call from colleagues of other faith communities, and certainly among the leadership of the Black community in the city.”
The initiative also seeks to foreground Black Jews themselves, whose experiences are often absent from conversations about Black-Jewish relations.
“We have a tendency, all of us, to talk about Black–Jewish relations as if all Jews are white and all Black people are not Jewish,” Heschel said. “It’s gradually dawning on Jews that we have Black Jews in our community.” Estimates suggest Black Jews make up roughly 1% to 2 % of American Jews.
Patrick said she has often encountered those assumptions firsthand.
“When I go to synagogue or when I’m in a social setting, the first thing a person asks me is, ‘Did you convert?’” she recounted. “That’s not a normal question to ask anyone.”
According to a 2021 study by the Jews of Color Initiative, 80% of respondents who identified as Jews of color said they had experienced discrimination in Jewish settings. Another survey, conducted by the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, found that of 104 Black Jewish respondents, 62% reported feeling increased marginalization in Jewish spaces after Oct. 7.
Davidson hopes that bringing Black Jews to the fore, like Rabbi Tamar Manasseh — a Chicago-based activist and community leader known for her work combating gun violence, who will be Temple Emanu-El’s first speaker in the initiative — will encourage more Jews of color to feel at home in the congregation.
“If you don’t acknowledge that there are Jews of color, and if you don’t find opportunities for them to be front and center, then you’re less likely to actually have that segment of the Jewish community join you,” he said.
Temple Emanu-El has committed to the initiative for at least five years — a timeline Patrick said was intentional.
“I knew that just having one fun lecture was not going to do anything,” she said. “It has to be a sustained commitment.”
Still, she hopes the work will continue long beyond that.
“In my perfect world,” she said, “I’m 95 and still doing this.”
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A Yiddish lecture in Munich by literature scholar Nathan Cohen
דעם 17טן יוני וועט נתן כּהן, אַן אָנגעזעענער פֿאָרשער פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור בײַם בר־אילן אוניווערסיטעט, האַלטן אַ רעפֿעראַט אויף ייִדיש בײַם אוניווערסיטעט אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון לודוויג מאַקסימיליאַן אין מינכן, דײַטשלאַנד.
כּהן וועט רעדן וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון דער מאָדערנער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור און די וועגן און אָפּוועגן פֿון איר אַנטוויקלונג אויף די זײַטן פֿון דער ייִדישער פּרעסע, ווי אויך וועגן דעם פֿענאָמען פֿון דער שונד־ליטעראַטור.
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“, ווי מע רופֿט אָט די אונטערנעמונג, איז אַ יערלעכער רעפֿערעט אויף ייִדיש אין אָנדענק פֿון עוויטאַ וויעצקי, ז״ל, וואָס האָט די ערשטע געהאַט דעם שיינעם אײַנפֿאַל מיט 15 יאָר צוריק. „זי האָט אַרויסגעפֿירט ייִדיש פֿון די קליינע דײַטשישע אוניווערסיטעט־קלאַסן און פֿאַרבעטן אַ ברייטן עולם צו הערן אַ ייִדיש וואָרט – און דווקא אין אַקאַדעמישן פֿאָרמאַט,“ האָט דערקלערט דאַשע וואַכרושאָווע, אַ ייִדיש־פֿאָרשערין בײַם אוניווערסיטעט.
יעדעס יאָר האַלט אַ היסטאָריקער, שפּראַך־וויסנשאַפֿטלער, ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשער אָדער שרײַבער אַ רעפֿעראַט פֿאַרן ברייטן מינכנער עולם אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש. „אין עולם זיצן אי ייִדיש־קענער אי אַזעלכע וואָס ווייסן גאָר ווייניק וועגן דער שפּראַך, אָבער האָבן דעם מוט זיך אײַנצוהערן און זיך לאָזן טראָגן פֿונעם ייִדישן וואָרט, וויסנדיק אַז זיי ריזיקירן ניט צו פֿאַרשטיין דעם מיין אָדער צו פֿאַרשטיין אים פֿאַלש,“ האָט וואַכרושאָווע געזאָגט.
פֿאַראינטערעסירטע קענען בײַזײַן די לעקציע אָדער אויפֿן אָרט אין מינכן, אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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Hundreds of Jewish leaders call on Israeli ambassador to apologize for attack on J Street
(JTA) — More than 500 rabbis, cantors and Jewish communal leaders have signed onto a letter calling on Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, to rescind and apologize for remarks describing J Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community.”
The letter, which J Street shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday, accused Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, of using language that “dehumanizes fellow Jews” during his remarks in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
J Street is the leading liberal pro-Israel lobby, and has increasingly staked out positions that have departed from other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last month, the group announced its opposition to continued U.S. military aid to Israel, which Leiter decried in his remarks.
The signatories wrote that while Judaism embraces vigorous debate, disagreements must be conducted with “humanity, humility and respect for the dignity of every Jew.”
“At this painful and polarized moment in Jewish life, leaders on both sides of the ocean bear a heightened responsibility to lower the flames rather than fan them further,” the letter read. “We therefore call on you to retract your remarks and issue a public apology to the many American Jews, rabbis, cantors and communal leaders who have been hurt by them.”
Among the signatories were New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, former U.S. ambassadors to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and Tom Nides, National Council of Jewish Women CEO Jody Rabhan, Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami told JTA that his initial reaction to Leiter’s comments was “simply dismay on behalf of Israel and on behalf of the Jewish community.”
“It’s a shame, because Israel, right now, needs all the friends it can get, and it really needs diplomats who seek to open doors and not slam them in people’s faces,” Ben-Ami said.
The Israeli Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.
The comments from Leiter follow a long history of criticism of the lobby from pro-Israel officials. In 2017, former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman called the group “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jews who aided the Nazis during WWII.
While Ben-Ami said that the latest attack was “not new,” he felt spurred to craft a communal rebuke of Leiter’s rhetoric because he felt it was “breaking” not just the US-Israel relationship, but the relationship between the “American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish community.”
“Within 24 hours we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I think it just shows what a raw nerve Ambassador Leiter has touched here, and just what a big mistake it is for the Israeli government to write off the majority of Jewish Americans who are deeply critical of the government but supportive of the state and the people,” Ben-Ami said of the number of signatories.
While Ben-Ami said that J Street had long been invited to meet with former Israeli ambassadors, he claimed that since Leiter arrived, the group had been “blacklisted by the Embassy, and there’s been no engagement whatsoever.”
The letter comes as J Street has also faced scrutiny from across the political aisle, with the Zionist Organization of America calling for Hillels, Jewish Community Relations Councils and federations to cease relations with the group, while the student government of Sarah Lawrence College rejected an application to form a chapter of the group on its campus.
“There’s going to be people to our left who are intolerant and you know engage in similar tactics to folks on the right who are intolerant and try to shut out those they disagree with, and that is just as disturbing,” Ben-Ami said.
Looking ahead, Ben-Ami said that he hoped the letter would serve as a reminder that Jewish leaders need to make room for ideological differences rather than treat dissent as disloyalty.
“The message more broadly here is, we need to embrace the diversity of opinion,” Ben-Ami said. “We need to embrace our disagreements and recognize that that is indeed part of Jewish tradition.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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