When Nazi officers arrived at the home of 15-year-old Hannah Pick-Goslar, she had her suitcase ready. The Goslars had already narrowly survived one razzia, the name for the systematic roundup of Jews in occupied Amsterdam. After taking the family to a theatre-turned-deportation centre, officials had looked at their papers and, seeing that Pick-Goslar’s father and grandfather were members of the Jewish Council, released them. But this time, on 20 June 1943, there were no such privileges. The Nazis had sealed off their neighbourhood, blocking roads and stationing soldiers on every bridge. Early in the morning, loudspeakers blared in the streets, telling Jewish residents to prepare for departure. Then a member of the green police, the wing of the German army tasked with policing civilians, banged on the Goslars’ door and told them: “You have 20 minutes to pack your things.”
The title of Pick-Goslar’s memoir, My Friend Anne Frank, is misleading and – however unintentionally – does it a disservice. This is not really the story of Frank, who achieved posthumous fame through the diary she kept while in hiding, even though, as a neighbour and close friend of the author, she is a significant presence in the first third of the book. It is, in fact, the vivid and extraordinary story of Pick-Goslar, a Holocaust survivor who, following her arrest in Amsterdam, was imprisoned first at Westerbork, a Dutch holding camp near the German border, and later at the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.
