First Memoir by Anne Frank’s Childhood Friend, Fellow Inmate at Bergen-Belsen Set for Release
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Anne Frank. Photo: Collectie Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam.
Rider, a publishing imprint of Ebury Publishing, will release next year a memoir by Holocaust survivor Hannah Pick-Goslar about her childhood friendship with diarist and Holocaust victim Anne Frank, The Bookseller reported on Tuesday.
“My Friend, Anne Frank,” ghostwritten by journalist Dina Kraft, will be published in hardback and e-book on May 16, 2023. Ebury publisher Andrew Goodfellow acquired world rights for the memoir from the author herself.
“I vividly remember feeling bereft after finishing reading Anne Frank’s diary when I was a girl,” Kraft said. “The loss felt real, as if I had lost a friend. And now I have the privilege of helping tell the story of Hannah, one of Anne’s closest friends, which is, in part, the story Anne did not survive to tell.”
The memoir will share details about Pick-Goslar’s life during the Nazi occupation of Europe, the Frank family’s disappearance from Amsterdam, and Pick-Goslar’s deportation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was united with Frank. The author also describes how she risked her life at the concentration camp to throw food and clothes over a barbed-wire fence to Frank.
“At a time when the world is taking a dark turn and we see millions of innocent people on the move and under attack, alongside a rise of antisemitic hate crimes and Holocaust denial, I feel my personal story takes on new urgency,” said Pick-Goslar. “As a girl I witnessed the world I loved crumble and vanish, destroyed by senseless hatred, and with it, my best friend Anne Frank.
She added, “Anne was able to tell part of her story. I hope my memoir will help illuminate what she, and so many other children like us, endured at the hands of the Nazis, only because we were Jewish. And for those of us who were lucky enough to have survived, I hope my story will shed light on how we rebuilt our lives.”
Pick-Goslar previously shared her experiences in the Holocaust with author Alison Leslie Gold, who published “Hannah Goslar Remembers” in 1998. But, Goodfellow noted, “Hannah’s own history and the light it sheds on Anne Frank’s story has never been fully shared before.”
Kraft explained that the memoir “will tell of the dehumanization and terror of life in a concentration camp and where Hannah, her parents now dead, found the strength to keep herself and her little sister alive and then, at 15 years old, after bearing witness to the unimaginable, to forge an entirely new life.”
