FILE – Anne Frank’s childhood friend Hannah Pick-Gosler, 69, is interviewed by The Associated Press at her apartment in Jerusalem on February 4, 1998. Pick-Gosler died at the age of 93, at the Anne Frank Museum on Saturday, October 29, 2022. ( Associated Press Photo/Jacqueline Larma)
Associated Press
The Hague
Hannah Pick-Gosler, one of Anne Frank’s best friends, has died at the age of 93, the foundation that runs the Anne Frank House museum said Saturday.
The Anne Frank Foundation pays tribute to Pick-Gosler, who is mentioned in Frank’s famous diary about his time in hiding from Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands to keep his friend’s memory alive with stories from his childhood.
“Hannah Pick-Gosler meant a lot to the Anne Frank House and we can always count on her,” the foundation said in a statement. He did not give details about the cause of death.
Pick-Gosler grew up with Anne in Amsterdam after both families emigrated from Germany with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Friends parted ways in 1942 when Anne’s family hid in an attic, but reunited at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, shortly before Anne died of typhus.
Before World War II, the two families were neighbors in Amsterdam and Anne and Hanna attended school together.
Pick-Gosler remembers attending his friend’s 13th birthday and looking at the red and white diary that Anne’s parents had given him as a gift. Anne fills the diary with her thoughts and disappointments while hiding from the Nazis in a secret contract in Amsterdam. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, published the diary after the war.
Pick-Gosler recounts friendship in a book written by Alison Leslie Gould, titled Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections on a Childhood Friend. The book was adapted for the cinema in the film “My Best Friend Anne Frank”.
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, she said of her friend, “Nowadays, everyone thinks she was a saintly person, but she wasn’t.”
“She was a child who wrote beautifully and grew up quickly under extraordinary circumstances,” said Pick-Gosler.
The diary mentions Pick-Gosler, under the name Anne called him: Hanelli.
On 14 June 1942, Anne wrote: “Hanelli and Sanne were two of my best friends. People would look at us together and say, ‘There they go, Anne, Hanne and Sonne.’
The Anne Frank Foundation stated that Pick-Gosler “shared his friendship and memories of the Holocaust well into his old age. He believed that after the last page of the diary everyone should know that he and his friend Anne What happened with the
