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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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Kate Hudson Reminisces About Jewish Grandmother’s ‘Amazing’ Cooking, Gets Emotional Over Jewish Food
Kate Hudson attends premiere of “Song Sung Blue” by FocusFeatures at AMC Lincoln Square in New York, NY on Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Actress Kate Hudson got nostalgic talking about her Jewish grandmother’s cooking, and all the Jewish foods that she loves and makes, during a podcast interview that aired on Wednesday.
The star of “Song Sung Blue” made an appearance on the New Year’s Eve episode of “Table Manners,” a podcast hosted by Jewish mother and daughter duo Lennie and Jessie Ware in which they talk largely about food and family while sharing a meal with their guest. Hudson has Hungarian Jewish roots on her maternal side of the family, and after she did DNA testing, the actress discovered that she is also half Sicilian, she said on the podcast. She also learned that she has German and Swedish roots.
When Hudson was asked at the start of the podcast to share a memorable dish from her childhood, she began by talking about her mother, award-winning actress Goldie Hawn, and her great cooking before mentioning her grandmother’s skills in the kitchen.
“I grew up with a mother that could throw anything into a pot, no cookbook, no nothing, and somehow it tasted amazing,” said the “Running Point” star. “And my grandma was an amazing cook, but she was a very traditional Jewish cook, like challah, amazing matzah balls, brisket – her brisket was to die for – [and] latkes. And she’d make the best challah French toast.”
Later on, Jessie asked the Golden Globe-winning actress to share a “nostalgic taste” that can transport her back in time. Hudson replied by talking about her grandmother’s matzah ball soup. The actress said she makes matzah ball soup too, but nothing compares to her grandmother’s.
“My grandmother made the best matzah balls,” Hudson explained. “Their fluff made them perfect. Perfect matzah ball soup … her matzah balls, nothing like ’em.” She also said that “any Jewish meat,” like her grandmother’s brisket, makes her feel like she’s with her “gram.”
“It makes me emotional, Jewish food,” Hudson added. “And blintzes, for instance. I grew up with blueberry blintzes, and I love them so much. I just with my daughter got some the other day and I got so emotional. You realize no matter how religious you are – we’re not a religious family. It’s not like, we didn’t go to temple. I mean we did when my grandma was alive, but after that, we didn’t really carry the religious part of our Judaism. But the traditions are so amazing and beautiful.”
The conversation then circled back to challah and Hudson shared that she bakes a four-strand challah with the help of a “diagram” but also small challah rolls.
“I still make challah. We pray on the challah bread. We do the whole thing,” she shared. “Every time I do, we talk about what each ingredient, what it represents. There are such beautiful traditions. And my grandma gave that to us, no one else. She was the only one. And thank God for that. Sitting around the table on a Jewish holiday and the food that it represents, just makes me happy.”
Jessie replied by telling her mother, “You never told me what all the ingredients of challah bread represent. You’ve just given me Jewish guilt.” Lennie laughed and replied that she has never baked challah before. Hudson immediately offered to share her challah recipe, saying, “They’re so easy.”
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New York City Woman Punched Over Hat Defending Jews
A New York City subway platform on Oct. 25, 2022. Photo: Jakub Porzycki via Reuters Connect
A woman was punched in the face this week while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F— Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F— Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow on Tuesday afternoon, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
The assault is one of the latest acts of antisemitism on the city’s public transport. Last month, two Black men assaulted two Jewish men on a train in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, with one of them seizing hold of a victim’s neck and shoving him. Not a day later, according to a local NBC affiliate, someone stabbed a Jewish man in the same neighborhood. It has been reported that the dispute began when the would-be stabber uttered an antisemitic comment to the victim.
Beyond public transit, New York City has seen an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). A new report released on Wednesday by the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which was established in May, noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising just 11 percent of the city’s population.
New York City is home to the world’s largest Jewish community outside of Israel.
In a moment of rising neo-Nazism and tensions between Arab Muslims and Jews over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this week’s subway incident highlights antisemitism in New York City’s African American community, which has been the source of much of the recent antisemitic violence.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, in just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In each case, the assailant was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, a man smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2023, an analysis of NYPD data conducted by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA), found that 97 percent of antisemitic hate crimes were perpetrated by members of other minority groups and nearly a quarter by teenagers. Over two-thirds, 69 percent, of the assailants, it added, were Black, the report continued, with most attacks, 77 percent, taking place in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Tensions between Blacks and Jews have limited inter-group cooperation in recent decades, causing the halcyon days of the relationship in the 20th century, when Jewish philanthropy helped sustain the Civil Rights Movement, to seem more like ancient history than a current, lived experience. Black antisemitism increased in volume and visibility in the 1960s, with the rise of the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement, and since then some prominent Black leaders have called Jews “hymies,” stoked a race riot in Crown Heights in which Blacks assaulted Jews in the streets, and promoted the anti-Zionist movement, which aims to dispossess Jews of their homeland in Israel. Most recently, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement blamed Israel for police killings of Black men.
The rift is often cited as a missed opportunity for a permanent solidarity between two historically oppressed groups. However, that has not stopped Black and Jewish leaders from attempting to revive the Black-Jewish alliance of lore.
In 2019, Black and Jewish members of Congress launched the Black-Jewish Congressional Caucus and “relaunched” it in 2023 with the help of the National Urban League, American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League.
“It’s an incredible and positive development,” Darius Jones, CEO of the National Black Empowerment Council, told The Algemeiner during the relaunch event in 2023. “Fighting antisemitism and racism has inspired a resurrection of the Black-Jewish relationship at the community level, and it’s great to see it happening and even better that national leadership is stepping up to move it along.”
Several members of Congress delivered remarks during the event, including co-chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-NY), who said that both Jews and Blacks are equally reviled by white supremacists.
“Jewish tradition teaches that it is incumbent upon us to speak out and act against injustice. African American and Jewish communities have a long, shared history of confronting discrimination and racism in the United States, and the recent rise of white supremacy, bigotry, and antisemitism poses a direct threat to both our communities,” Schultz said. “This caucus will build upon our historic fight for a better, more peaceful world, while also raising awareness in Congress about the common issues facing our communities.”
In 2024, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), a nonprofit which promotes academic freedom and free speech, partnered with South Carolina State University and Voorhees University — two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — to host a series of student and faculty seminars on the history of “Black-Jewish solidarity,” from the creation of Rosenwald Schools for Black children following the abolition of slavery to the present day.
“Recent surveys and studies show a disturbing rate of antisemitic attitudes among Black Americans, especially young people,” AEN executive director Miriam Elman told The Algemeiner at the time. “HBCUs have a critically important role to play as allies with the Jewish community to counter antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Community in Spain Condemns Online Map Labeling Schools, Businesses as ‘Zionist’
The children’s bookstore in Sant Cugat, Spain, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and slogans, prompting outrage from the local Jewish community. Photo: Screenshot
Members of Spain’s Jewish community have filed complaints against a French online platform over a map pinpointing Jewish-owned businesses, schools, and Israeli-linked companies in Catalonia, warning it revives Europe’s darkest antisemitic practices and dangerously promotes harassment and violence.
According to the local Jewish outlet Enfoque Judío, the interactive map — known as Barcelonaz — was launched by an unidentified group claiming to be “journalists, professors, and students” on the French-hosted mapping platform GoGoCarto.
As a publicly accessible and collaboratively created online platform, the map marks over 150 schools, Jewish-owned businesses — including kosher food shops — and Israeli-linked as well as Spanish and international companies operating in Israel, labeling them as “Zionist.”
“Our goal is to understand how Zionism operates and the forms it takes, with the intention of making visible and denouncing the impact of its investments in our territory,” the project’s website states.
Users are also encouraged to donate and to submit additional locations that meet the criteria set by the map’s creators.
Jewish leaders in Spain have strongly denounced the initiative, warning that it fosters further discrimination and hatred against the community amid an increasingly hostile environment in which Jews and Israelis continue to be targeted.
Several community organizations have filed complaints with GoGoCarto, demanding the site’s removal and arguing that it violates French laws against hate speech and discrimination, Enfoque Judío reported.
The newly unveiled project “clearly has an antisemitic and discriminatory character, as it seeks to identify and stigmatize a population based on its real or perceived religious affiliation,” the complainants wrote in a letter obtained by Enfoque Judío.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, Spain has become one of Israel’s fiercest critics, a stance that has only intensified in recent months, coinciding with a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents targeting the local Jewish community — from violent assaults and vandalism to protests and legal actions.
Last week, Israeli mural artists Hodaya and Dudi Shoval were physically assaulted in Barcelona while working on a project that turns existing murals into pro-Israel messages, confronting a rising tide of antisemitic and anti-Israeli graffiti throughout the city.
While working in the city center, a group of unknown individuals approached them and started shouting antisemitic insults before turning violent.
As the Shovals and their camera crew tried to flee the scene, the assailants began throwing objects, including a glass bottle that smashed against their photographer’s head.
Amid this increasingly hostile climate, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has faced growing backlash from political leaders and the Jewish community, who accuse him of fueling antisemitic hostility.
As part of its anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state internationally, the Spanish government announced earlier this week a ban on imports from hundreds of Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights — making Spain the second European Union country to implement such a policy in its ongoing effort to boycott Israel.
Spain’s newly implemented measure marks its latest attempts to curb Israel’s defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, as ties between the two countries continue to deteriorate amid ongoing tensions.
In September, Spain also passed a law to take “urgent measures to stop the genocide in Gaza,” banning trade in defense material and dual-use products from Israel, as well as imports and advertising of products originating from Israeli settlements.
On Tuesday, Spain’s consumer ministry ordered seven travel booking websites to take down 138 listings for holiday homes in Palestinian territories, warning they could face sanctions if they continue advertising Israeli-owned properties in those areas.
Earlier this year, the Spanish government also announced it would bar entry to individuals involved in what it called a “genocide against Palestinians,” block Israel-bound ships and aircraft carrying weapons from Spanish ports and airspace, and enforce an embargo on products from Israeli communities in the West Bank.