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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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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ex-Yale Law School Professor Dismisses Iran Protests Over ‘Zionist’ Backing, Justifies Regime Oppression
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A former Yale University professor who was fired over her connection to a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organization, has drawn scrutiny again for dismissing anti-regime protests in Iran due to “Zionist endorsement,” defending Tehran’s crackdown on dissent, and castigating US law enforcement.
“In the imperial countries, the police function as the domestic arm of the empire,” Helyeh Doutaghi wrote in an essay published by the far-left Progressive International on Jan. 6. “They suppress dissent, criminalize resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other Peoples of Color.”
Doutaghi then claimed that law enforcement in New Haven, Connecticut, the location of Yale, is “trained by the Israeli military” and that “policing is inseparable from imperial colonial violence.”
In contrast, she argued, Iran’s “Law Enforcement Command,” notorious for atrocities such as killing a young woman who was in custody for not wearing a head covering in accordance with the country’s Islamic dress code, “exists within a radically difference context,” having faced “sustained attempts at regime change operations and color revolution tactics.”
Doutaghi appears to see Jewish maneuvering behind the Iranian people’s efforts to resist their government’s theocratic, authoritarian rule. She argued that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, which erupted in the wake of the regime’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, were commandeered by “Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare” to achieve “regime change.”
The article came out as the Iranian regime began cracking down on a new round of anti-government protests with an unprecedented scale of violence, reportedly killing thousands of demonstrators over the past two weeks.
In a viral post, Paul Mason, contributing editor for The New World, said Doutaghi’s essay represents the “logic of decolonization’ theory,” in which, he added, “Western cops bad; Iranian cops good. Woman rights good — but not if it leads to revolution in Iran.”
Yale Law School (YLS) fired Doutaghi in March after independently verifying a report by Jewish Onliner which exposed her membership in Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network.”
Founded in 2011 in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Samidoun is a “front group” for the PFLP — which gained infamy in the 20th century for perpetrating a series of airplane hijackings — according to the US and Canadian governments. The US and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October 2024, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as PFLP.
Samidoun also described the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.”
Yale noted that Doutaghi was publicly listed on Samidoun’s website as a member.
Doutaghi denounced the inculpatory facts uncovered by the university as “fabricated claims” and lodged counteraccusations which blamed her being outed on Zionists.
“Yale has engaged in bad faith throughout this ‘process,” she wrote in a statement posted on X after being placed on leave. “YLS’s singular concern with maintaining the approval of the Zionist backers who bankroll their complicity in genocide led the organization to pressure me into an interrogation that I had every reason to believe was designed not to uncover the truth, but to justify a predetermined outcome.”
She continued, “What is clear is that YLS actions constitute a blatant act of retaliation against Palestinian solidarity — a violation of my constitutional rights, free speech, academic freedom, and fundamental due process rights. I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.”
Doutaghi is another example of the higher education establishment’s embrace of scholars who promote anti-Israel animus, an issue that is driving the campus antisemitism crisis, according to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).
Fifty percent of survey respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Meanwhile, the faculty’s activism provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the groups said.
Another faculty source of campus antisemitism is the Faculty and Staff for Justice (FSJP) group.
FSJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FSJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, a higher education watchdog, published a study offering evidence that FSJP inspired antisemitic hate crimes, anti-Israel divestment measures, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA found a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Anti-Israel Activist Cameron Kasky Drops US Congressional Bid in New York
Cameron Kasky, former US congressional candidate in New York’s 12th district. Photo: Screenshot
Cameron Kasky, a prominent Gen Z political activist and Parkland school shooting survivor, has withdrawn from the Democratic primary race to succeed US Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, saying he plans to focus instead on human rights in the West Bank.
Kasky, 25, announced his decision on Tuesday in a social media post, ending a short-lived congressional bid that had drawn attention for its sharp criticism of Israel and its appeal to younger progressive voters. He said recent travel to the West Bank had influenced his decision to step away from electoral politics for now.
“Thank you to everyone who supported our human rights-centered campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District,” Kasky posted on X.
“It’s the honor of my life to be walking out of this race with the chance to do what must be done,” he continued, adding that he intends to focus on documenting and opposing what he described as “settler violence” in the West Bank.
His exit marks the latest shake-up in the already crowded Democratic primary to represent one of Manhattan’s most reliably blue districts, which spans parts of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Midtown. Nadler, who has represented the district for decades, announced his retirement last year, triggering a wide-open contest.
Kasky, who is Jewish and rose to national prominence as a co-founder of the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the 2018 Parkland shooting, entered the race late last year with a platform centered on gun reform, progressive domestic policies, and a call to halt US military aid to Israel. He had repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a position that set him apart from much of the Democratic establishment in New York.
Kasky has also accused Israeli leaders of advancing the war in Gaza in service of the “Greater Israel” agenda — a fallacious conspiracy theory which claims that Israel seeks to expand its borders into the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq.
Such views drew praise from some younger activists but also criticism from pro-Israel groups and Democratic leaders in the district, where support for the Jewish state has historically been strong.
During his short-lived campaign Kasky notably vowed to vote against all aid to Israel, including aid to furnish the Iron Dome missile interception system.
With Kasky’s departure, the field remains packed with well-known figures, including New York State Assembly members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, journalist and former cable news anchor Jami Floyd, and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy. Conservative lawyer George Conway, a longtime critic of US President Donald Trump, is also running as a Democrat.
Political analysts have said Kasky was unlikely to emerge as a frontrunner in a district dominated by older, highly engaged voters, but his candidacy reflected broader generational and ideological tensions within the Democratic Party, particularly over US policy toward Israel.
His withdrawal removes one of the race’s most outspoken critics of Israeli government policy, potentially narrowing the ideological range of the debate as the primary campaign accelerates.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for June, with the winner heavily favored to hold the seat in November.