Hannah Pick-Goslar, whose shut friendship with Anne Frank was memorialized in what turned “The Diary of a Younger Woman,” the document of Anne’s life in hiding from the Nazis, died on Oct. 28 at her house in Jerusalem. She was 93.
Her son Chagi Choose confirmed the demise.
The 2 ladies’ friendship started after they had been in kindergarten in Amsterdam in 1933. Twelve years later, Mrs. Choose-Goslar (then Hannah Goslar) spoke to her pal for the ultimate time by a barbed-wire fence full of straw on the Bergen-Belsen focus camp and tossed her scraps of meals in a sock.
Revealed in 1947, after Anne Frank’s demise, “The Diary of a Younger Woman” has offered thousands and thousands of copies all over the world. It impressed a 1955 Broadway play, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which gained the Tony Award for finest play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and a 1959 movie of the identical title.
Mrs. Choose-Goslar’s memoir, “My Buddy Anne Frank,” written with Dina Kraft, will likely be revealed subsequent yr on June 12, which might have been Anne Frank’s 94th birthday.
The 2 ladies’ friendship was additionally the topic of a e-book, “Recollections of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Buddy” (1999), by Alison Leslie Gold, and a Dutch movie, “My Best Friend Anne Frank” (2021).
Hannah was an occasional determine in Anne’s diary. In her entry from Nov. 27, 1943, Anne advised of getting a waking nightmare about Hannah, whom she known as Lies.
“I noticed her in entrance of me, clothed in rags, her face skinny and worn,” Anne wrote. “The eyes had been very large and he or she appeared so sadly and reproachfully at me that I may learn in her eyes, ‘Oh, Anne, why have you ever abandoned me? Assist, oh, assist me, rescue me from this hell!’”
A month later, Anne wrote with fear about Hannah.
“And Lies, is she nonetheless alive?” she wrote. “What’s she doing? Oh, God, shield her and produce her again to us. Lies, I see in you on a regular basis what my lot might need been. I preserve seeing myself in your home.”
By then, Hannah, alongside along with her sister, Rachel, her father and her maternal grandparents, had been taken to the Westerbork transit camp within the Netherlands. (Her mom had died giving beginning to a stillborn daughter in 1942.) They’d be deported to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944.
In early 1945, Hannah realized that a few of the ladies in a bunch of prisoners who had been moved to Bergen-Belsen from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is likely to be from the Netherlands.
At some point, Hannah stood on the barbed-wire fence that divided elements of the camp.
“Is anyone there?” she known as out. She bought a response from Auguste van Pels, whose household had gone into hiding with the Franks. She advised Hannah that Anne was alive and introduced her to the fence.
Hannah quickly heard her pal’s acquainted voice, weakened by sickness and malnutrition. At finest, she may discern a shadow of her by the fence.
Anne advised Hannah that she had nothing to reside for, that she now not had mother and father. (Her father would survive, however she sensed, accurately, that her mom, Edith, had died in Auschwitz.) She requested for meals.
Hannah solicited scraps of bread from different ladies in her barrack and stuffed it right into a sock. She threw it over the fence. However one other inmate stole it.
“Anne was crying and crying,” Hannah recalled years later.
Hannah put collectively one other small care bundle just a few days later, which Anne obtained.
“It ended up being their remaining assembly,” Ms. Kraft, Mrs. Choose-Goslar’s co-writer, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “Hannah talked in regards to the unimaginable solidarity of the ladies in her barracks who retained their humanity by serving to Anne.”
Anne and her older sister, Margot, died quickly after.
Hannah Elisabeth Goslar was born on Nov. 12, 1928, in Berlin. Her father, Hans, was a journalist who was the director of the federal government press workplace of the Prussian authorities earlier than the Nazis got here to energy. Her mom, Ruth (Klee) Goslar, was a trainer.
Confronted with antisemitism within the early days of the Third Reich, the household moved briefly to London after which to Amsterdam. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in Might 1940.
After kindergarten, Hannah and Anne had been classmates once more at a Montessori faculty and later at a faculty for Jewish college students. They performed within the workplace and warehouse the place the Franks, the van Pels (Auguste; her husband, Hermann; and their son, Peter) and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist pal of Mr. Frank’s, would later cover within the annex till they had been found and arrested in 1944. The women known as one another on the telephones within the constructing’s rooms and squirted water at individuals from the home windows.
In June 1942, Anne wrote that Hannah “is a bit on the unusual facet,” including: “She’s normally shy — outspoken at house, however reserved round different individuals. She blabs no matter you inform her to her mom. However she says what she thinks, and these days I’ve come to understand her an ideal deal.”
Quickly after Anne’s sister obtained a discover in July 1942 to report for a piece camp in Germany, the Franks knew it was time to cover. At some point, quickly after the Franks had left, Hannah and a pal got here calling for Anne on the house the Franks had deserted; a lodger advised the ladies that the household had fled to Switzerland. That’s the place Hannah thought they had been, till her heartbreaking encounter with Anne at Bergen-Belsen.
Within the waning days of the warfare, the Germans put Hannah, her sister and plenty of different prisoners on what has come to be known as a “Lost Train,” which meandered for 10 days however by no means reached its vacation spot, believed to be the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia. When it was liberated by the Crimson Military, Hannah weighed solely 66 kilos.
Hannah recuperated within the Netherlands and with an aunt and uncle in Switzerland In 1947, she immigrated to what would turn out to be Israel; her sister arrived two years later.
Hannah turned a pediatric nurse and in 1950 married Walter Pinchas Choose, a colonel within the Israeli Military who specialised in army intelligence and was later a senior editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica.
Along with her son Chagi, Mrs. Choose-Goslar is survived by a daughter, Ruth Meir; one other son, Yochanan Choose; her sister; 11 grandchildren; and 31 great-grandchildren. Mr. Choose died in 1985. Her second husband, David Cohn, died within the Nineties.
For a few years, Hannah spoke broadly in regards to the Holocaust — and he or she had a cleareyed sense of who Anne Frank was.
“Right now everybody thinks she was somebody holy, however this isn’t in any respect the case,” she told The Associated Press in 1998. “She was a woman who wrote fantastically and matured shortly throughout extraordinary circumstances.”
“Not everybody needs to listen to in regards to the Holocaust,” she added. “It’s simpler to learn Anne’s diary.”
