On December 20, 1933, when I was five years old, I had just arrived in Amsterdam with my parents, escaping Berlin after Hitler came to power and fired my father, a deputy Cabinet member in the Prussian government during the Weimar Republic. We moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a residential neighborhood, overlooking green trees and neat squares.

One day, not long after our arrival, I walked hand in hand with my mother to a local grocery. There, my mother noticed another woman talking in German to her dark-eyed daughter, who was about my age. The two mothers spoke briefly to one another, smiling, clearly relieved to find some familiarity in this foreign place. I was a shy child and I clung to my mother’s leg, unused to other children but curious about the little girl looking back at me.

Setting off for my first day of nursery school, at the 6th Montessori School, on Niersstraat, I was positively petrified. I cried leaving our apartment and—though usually an obedient child—tried to hold on to the front-door handle as I begged to stay home. For months, my main company had been my mother or other adults. And I hardly spoke a word of Dutch.

“Enough, Hanneli,” Mama said sternly, using the name most of my family called me, while peeling my fingers off the door. “It’s always difficult to start anything new. We are going now, and you are going to be fine. You’ll see.”

We went into a classroom where there were lots of children looking extremely busy. Some sat at small desks, playing with wooden blocks; others traced letters or sat on mats working on their writing. I spotted a girl with glossy dark hair that was almost black. In that moment, she turned around and looked at me. In a flash, we recognized one another. It was the girl from the corner grocery store! We instantly rushed into each other’s arms like long-separated sisters, sentences in German flowing between us like a volcano of connection. My clenched stomach released; my anxiety vanished and I smiled.

“My name is Annelies. You can call me Anne,” said the girl.

New Girls

As two little girls who didn’t know Dutch, we were thrilled to find one another. Anne was also a new girl at the school; her family had recently arrived from Frankfurt.

Anne and I were thrilled to discover we were also next-door neighbors. It took me less than a minute to swoop down from my apartment and race up to Anne’s. Her place was a floor above ours, so I’d ring the brass doorbell, she’d answer, and then we’d bounce up the steep, carpeted staircase inside.

As my friendship with Anne deepened, so did the bond between our families. They often came to our home for Shabbat dinners and Jewish holidays like Passover, and we spent New Year’s Eve every year at the Franks’ home, the adults talking into the night and the children trying to stay up as long as we could. New Year’s at the Frank home became a tradition and always included a sleepover.

Goslar, seated toward the back, far left, and Frank, in a white pinafore, standing to the left of their teacher, in their classroom at the 6th Montessori School, Amsterdam, 1938.

I loved being in their house, on Merwedeplein 37, Apartment 2. It felt an extra notch of elegant with its green velvet curtains, Persian rugs in rusts and reds, and always the aroma of something sweet wafting in from the kitchen. Mrs. Frank, Anne’s mother, was a wonderful baker. To me, the apartment smelled like vanilla and books.

“My name is Annelies. You can call me Anne.”

Mrs. Frank, her dark hair tucked into a matronly bun, was kind, if a little reserved with us children. She and my mother got along very well and were thrilled Anne and I were so close, “like sisters,” they would say.

At school, Anne was a live wire with endless energy, who found creative ways to get attention, including showing off one of her tricks—popping her shoulder out of her socket.

But there was one place she did not want attention: anyone looking at her writing. At recess she’d carry around a notebook, scribbling down stories or thoughts known only to herself. She refused to show anyone what she was writing, even me, holding the notebook close to her chest if anyone approached. Adults often seemed half amused, half exasperated by Anne. Some mornings we would walk to school with our teacher Mr. Van Gelder, and, much to his delight, she’d share with him the silly stories she said she had made up with her father.

Ominous Beginnings

It was Saturday, November 12, 1938, my 10th birthday. Three days earlier, my grandfather had set out from his home in Berlin to go to Hamburg. He had been invited there to give a lecture about Zionism. The mood in Germany was tense. A 17-year-old Polish Jew had shot the German ambassador to France in a bid to garner attention to the plight of Polish Jews in Germany. On November 9, the day of my grandfather’s trip, the ambassador died of his wounds, and the Nazis used the incident as a pretext to attack Jews in the name of protecting Germany’s honor.

In Hamburg, my grandfather saw packs of Nazi Brownshirts, the paramilitary of the Nazi Party, storm Jewish-owned shops in the center of the city, shattering glass storefronts, hurling merchandise onto the pavements, and beating Jewish residents. Hordes of people screamed and chanted while hurling stones through the stained-glass windows of synagogues and setting them alight. Some Jews tried to rescue Torah scrolls from synagogues before they caught fire.

Across Germany between November 9 and 10, similar scenes of chaos and destruction played out. Our former synagogue in Berlin was burned to the ground along with 1,000 others across the country. Firefighters were instructed by the authorities not to put out the fires of burning synagogues unless they endangered adjacent buildings. It was first referred to as a “pogrom,” the name used for attacks on Russian Jews during the time of the czars. But soon it was called Kristallnacht, “the Night of the Broken Glass.”

My German friends and I heard our parents discussing Kristallnacht, reeling from what felt like a blow to their last shreds of hope that Germany might wake up from its stupor and return to being the decent, cultured place to which they felt so deeply connected. We learned that around 100 Jews had been killed or died later of injuries inflicted by the mobs. We were all very worried for our family and friends who had remained.

It was first referred to as a “pogrom.” … But soon it was called Kristallnacht, “the Night of the Broken Glass.”

I woke up in the pre-dawn darkness of my bedroom, confused by a low rumbling sound, growing louder, building to a roar. Is it thunder? I thought. It must be thunder.

The noise was not thunder. “It’s planes,” my father said.

I looked at my parents. They were people of action. Yet in that moment, they appeared paralyzed.

We were glued to the radio. It became clear that the Dutch military, outgunned and outmanned, was having an impossible time staving off the overwhelming force of the German assault. Rotterdam was under heavy bombardment that day, and it sounded like it would be completely flattened. A whole city. There were reports of casualties and even a rising number of dead. All of the Netherlands shuddered.

My parents’ anxieties were compounded as they glanced at my mother’s rounding belly. They had always wanted more children and, despite everything, hoped their dream of a big family might still come true. I had always wanted to be a big sister and had been thrilled at the news. But also I understood that the future suddenly looked especially uncertain.

Frank and Goslar play on the streets of Amsterdam, May 1940.

Five days was all it took for our small country with its insufficient army to be overrun. It rippled through the crowd: the Dutch had surrendered.

“Does this mean we are now part of Germany? We aren’t free?,” I asked my mother. I saw she had tears in her eyes. She looked like she’d just seen a ghost.

I felt sick to my stomach when I saw the first German soldiers on our streets. I rushed back inside and, from the window, I stared at the rows and rows of young men—gray-uniformed, helmet-wearing Wehrmacht soldiers, rifles in hand, marching through Rivierenbuurt in precise step. I felt ashamed we came from the same country.

There was a feeling of unreality to those days. We felt the Germans’ presence everywhere, but, at the same time, life went on. Despite the eerie normality, there was an air of desperation among everyone in our community. The adults were all working every lead, every connection around the globe, hoping to find an exit route. What I didn’t know until after the war—but my parents did—is that while my grandparents and parents were scrambling for a way to get out of Holland, pulling every well-placed connection they had, so were the Franks.

A new law came out which decreed that Jews were barred from going to cinemas. “Cinemas?” I groaned, hearing the news. How could that be? What did we do wrong? Anne and I adored going to the pictures. We could rattle off the names of Hollywood movie stars and swooned over their photos in magazines: Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Rudy Vallée. The films were our escape to other worlds of gauzy musicals and unlikely heroines finding true love. Anne—ever ready with grand plans and big ideas—talked about wanting to be a famous actress herself one day, though she also talked about being a famous journalist or writer.

Five days was all it took for our small country with its insufficient army to be overrun. It rippled through the crowd: the Dutch had surrendered.

Even after the Nazis arrived and we were full of fear as to what life would be like under occupation, we didn’t predict the draconian rules to segregate us from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors that it seemed were constantly being brought in and made harsher. In the spring of 1942, the walls of separation grew higher when we were ordered to sew a mustard-colored Star of David with the word “Jood” (Jew) written in its center onto our clothes.

Sometimes it felt as if there was not much more they could take away from us, without evicting us from our homes or sending us to prison. But then another rule was issued to chip away at our smallest remaining freedoms. Soon Jews were not even allowed outside after sunset. By June 1942, Jews had to turn in their bicycles.

One morning, I was standing on the street whistling our usual whistle under the window of Anne’s apartment. I saw Anne flying out of the door. She pressed an envelope into my hands with my name on it.

“What’s this?,” I asked. She smiled and watched me open it. An invitation to her 13th-birthday party, on Sunday.

What I didn’t know until after the war is that while my grandparents and parents were scrambling for a way to get out of Holland, so were the Franks.

“I typed them on my dad’s typewriter—aren’t they great?” she gushed. On the invitation there was also a cinema-style ticket with my seat number. “Father’s renting a film projector again so we can watch Rin Tin Tin!”

“I can’t wait to come,” I told Anne.

On the Friday morning of Anne’s birthday, I did our usual whistle under her apartment and waited for her to come down. “Happy birthday!” I shouted as soon as I saw a beaming Anne rushing down her front stoop.

“I was so excited I woke up at six,” she told me and then rattled off a list of gifts that had been waiting for her on the dining-room table. There were books and a new pair of shoes, and most prized of all was the red-cream-and-beige-checkered notebook with a pretty metal clasp she had pointed out to her father at Blankevoort, our local bookshop. She told me she was going to use it as the diary she’d always wanted.

Sunday, the day of the party, was an unusually warm day. I arrived to see the Franks’ living room had been transformed into a cinema. I spotted the projector in a back corner and noticed the rows of chairs lined up as if it were the real thing. I looked at Anne and, as usual, admired how confident and carefree she seemed. Her face was aglow, and she fluttered like a butterfly between guests. Her hair looked especially pretty. Anne spent a long time brushing it every night and tried to coax it into curls (without much success) using pins and curlers.

Otto Frank and Anne Frank, center, and other guests attend the wedding of family friends, July 1941.

It was such fun being outside of the classroom and chatting, sipping lemonade, and joking around with one another, about to watch a film together—a rare treat. It was to be the last party where we were all together. One of the last happy, carefree times for us as children on the cusp of our teenage years. Or at least it was for me.

The Disappearance of Anne Frank

The deportations and arrests were disorienting to digest. The only information we had was that people were being sent to work camps in “the East”—either Germany or Poland. What exactly a work camp entailed we didn’t know. Factory work? Farming? We hoped they would return soon and that there would be no additional deportations. But weeks turned to months, and the hundreds of Jewish men who had been arrested and deported didn’t come home.

On July 5, a Sunday, word quickly began to spread around the neighborhood that policemen had been knocking on the doors of certain families, brandishing call-up notices with the names of teenagers living there, as young as 15, demanding they report for work camps in Germany. Those called up were told to report to Amsterdam’s central train station at a particular time—two A.M.! That seemed crazy to me. Why in the middle of the night?, I wondered.

On Monday, July 6, my mother was going to make strawberry jam and sent me to ask to borrow Mrs. Frank’s scale. When I got to Anne’s door, I rang the bell, but there was no answer. I buzzed again.

The door finally opened, and I was startled to see Mr. Goldschmidt, the Franks’ boarder.

“What do you want?” he grumbled.

“I’m here to borrow a scale from Mrs Frank. And, umm, is Anne home? I wanted to see if she can play,” I stammered.

“The Franks are not here,” he said. “Don’t you know that the Frank family went to Switzerland?”

Switzerland?

“They seemed to have left in a hurry,” he added.

I was so bewildered. I walked down the stairs, holding on to the cool metal of the railing to steady myself. My mind just couldn’t make sense of this information. Why did Anne never mention they were going to Switzerland?

I rushed home to my parents. Mama and Papa seemed as shocked as I was. Our parents were close, but it seemed the Franks had kept their planned flight secret from everyone, even them.

But as confused and shocked as I was, I soon concluded that I was happy for Anne. I imagined her going for walks in meadows under the shadow of the Alps, and, come winter, she’d be sitting in a warm kitchen, snowflakes falling outside, sipping a big mug of hot chocolate.

My parents heard that Anne’s older sister, Margot, aged 16, was among those who had got a call-up notice to report for transport to one of the work camps.

Starting around midnight on July 15, nine days after Anne left, the shadowy figures of teenaged boys and girls, most of them German Jews, backpacks on their backs, bundles of blankets in hand, could be seen from our windows walking alone across squares, streets and bridges, making their way toward the train station. Their parents, banished from the streets because of the curfew, were not allowed to escort them. We did not know then that those walking toward the Amsterdam Centraal train station in the middle of the night marked the beginning of the mass deportation of Jews from the Netherlands to their deaths.

“Don’t you know that the Frank family went to Switzerland? They seemed to have left in a hurry.”

The days turned to months. What none of us knew on an early morning in June 1943 was that, while the city slept, German and Dutch police offices had been sealing off parts of Amsterdam—all the way from Ringvaart, in the East, to Linnaeusstraat, in the West. German tanks blocked roads, and armed soldiers and police stood guard on every bridge, forming a military ring around the neighborhoods that comprised the bulk of where Jews still lived in the city, including our own. No one was permitted to cross in or out. There would be no escape.

In our apartment, we were startled by the sudden blaring of loudspeakers echoing up and down the street and throughout the neighborhood: “Jews, prepare for today’s departure.”

As our little family walked down our street, I thought of Anne’s front door, closed and silent. Almost exactly a year ago, I had knocked and knocked, wondering why there was no answer. Lucky Anne, I thought again, as I had so many times since that day. You are safe in Switzerland. But why did you never write to me?

A Short-Lived Reunion

From June of 1943 to April of 1945, Hannah Golsar fought for her and her little sister’s survival at the terrifying, disease-infested camps, first at an orphanage in Westerbork, in the Netherlands, and then at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in Germany.

It was February 1945. A whole year had passed since we left Westerbork and Dutch soil. Coming up to two since we were deported from Amsterdam. I could never have dreamed the war would have gone on this long or that I would ever be living in such conditions. Amsterdam felt like another planet, though one I visited often in my daydreams, wishing I was back there with Anne and our other friends.

“There are Dutch women among the new transports,” a woman announced in our barracks one day. “I heard Dutch being spoken amid the Polish-speaking women.” This sent us all into a flutter. We all wanted to know if there were relatives or friends—people we last saw back in Westerbork or our hometowns.

Soon, a woman who had known my family back in Amsterdam came to find me. I would never, ever have dreamed what she told me. Anne Frank was among the Dutch women and girls on the other side of the fence.

My mind tried to process this information. It felt impossible. Anne was in Switzerland, safe, warm, living in a heated home, going to school, doubtlessly breaking some boy’s heart, and enjoying life with her family. Anne had been spared this torment. This is what I had believed to be true since the day I came to her home and found it empty, on that impossibly faraway warm July day in 1942. How in the world would Anne have wound up here? And if she was part of the transport arrivals, that meant she had been in a concentration camp in Poland. None of it made sense to me.

But if Anne really was only yards from me, I had to try to see her.

I opened the door into a frigid, windy night. My cheeks stung from the rain that had just begun to fall. I pulled my worn wool coat closer to me. Its sleeves rose above my bony wrists. In the almost two years since I folded it into my suitcase, I’d grown taller even as my weight continued to drop. I’m sure I looked as emaciated as everyone else in the barracks.

Anne Frank was among the Dutch women and girls on the other side of the fence.

The mud-clogged path was slippery, and I focused on not falling. As I carefully made my way closer to the fence, I was still trying to digest that I might soon be seeing Anne.

“Hello? Hello?” I called out in a soft voice when I arrived at the barbed-wire fence separating my area from Anne’s barracks. “Is there anyone there?”

A voice answered back, also in Dutch.

“Yes?”

It sounded familiar.

“My name is Auguste van Pels,” I heard the woman say.

Mrs. van Pels! She and her husband and son Peter would sometimes visit the Frank family in Amsterdam. They lived on our street, and I knew her husband worked with Mr. Frank.

“It’s Hannah. Hannah Goslar here,” I told her.

Right away she replied, “You must want to speak to Anne. I’ll bring her. Margot is here, too. But she’s too sick to come.”

My heart was thumping so loudly I’m almost surprised I could hear the small, quiet voice that suddenly called out: “Hanneli? Hanneli, is that actually you?”

“Yes, yes, Anne, it’s me!” I answered.

We both instantly broke into tears, the same cold rain falling on us on opposite sides of this cursed fence. We didn’t have much time, so through tears I managed to ask: “How is it that you are here? Why aren’t you in Switzerland?”

She told me they never went to Switzerland. I noticed her voice was fainter, weaker. It was not the boisterous, confident chirp I knew.

Goslar, who fled to Israel, where she lived until her death, last year, holds a picture of her friend Anne Frank.

“We were in hiding in my father’s office, upstairs in rooms behind a secret door. We were there for over two years. Two years I never stepped outside,” Anne said, her words now rushing out. In hiding, she told me, they had been safe from the Nazis, from deportation and the camps. But in August someone betrayed them. They were arrested and sent first to Westerbork then to Auschwitz.

“They took my hair,” she said, her voice still full of disbelief. And she was freezing, she told me, dressed only in rags. I shuddered thinking of her totally exposed to the freezing wind and rain blowing around us.

Margot was sick with typhus, too ill to move from bed, she reported. She told me the terrible news that her parents were dead. Surely gassed to death, she said.

“I have no one,” she said, words that landed like a knife.

We were both sobbing now. Two terrified girls under a rain-soaked night sky, separated by this barrier of barbed wire. How had it come to this?

Hannah Goslar managed to procure enough food to hurl over the fence to her friend Anne Frank in the frigid winter of 1945. On April 10, Hannah and her little sister were boarded onto a train headed for Czechoslovakia that never reached its destination. It would later be referred to as “the Lost Train.”

By the end of the war, Hannah’s parents and grandparents were dead. Hannah made contact with Otto Frank, who informed her that his wife had died of illness and exhaustion at Auschwitz, and that his daughters had both died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen, just one month before liberation. Anne would never know that her father was one of the tiny minority of Jews over the age of 50 who survived the Holocaust.

Eventually, Hannah and her sister managed to reach Jerusalem, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Hannah Goslar died on October 28, 2022, two weeks shy of her 94th birthday.

In the epilogue to Hannah’s memoir, her co-author, Dina Kraft, writes:

Among the most oft-quoted lines from Anne Frank’s diary is this one: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Hannah told me, “I’m not sure she’d stand by that after witnessing Auschwitz.”

Adapted from My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds, by Hannah Pick-Goslar with Dina Kraft, to be published on June 6 by Little, Brown Spark