Separated when the Franks went into hiding, the two girls spoke for the last time at the concentration camp in February 1945
Hannah Pick-Goslar, who has died aged 93, was a childhood friend of Anne Frank who recalled how they had met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne’s death.
She was born Hanna Elisabeth Goslar in Berlin-Tiergarten on November 12 1928 into an observant Jewish family. Her father Hans was a journalist, writer and deputy minister in the Weimar Republic government; her mother, Ruth, was a teacher.
In 1933, following the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, the Goslar family fled to Amsterdam where, the following year, Hannah and her mother met Anne Frank and her mother Edith in a grocery shop where the two women struck up a conversation in German.
“After some days my mother took me to the kindergarten,” Hannah recalled. “I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t know this language and I just wanted to say ‘Goodbye, this is not for me’. I saw the back of this little girl from the grocery shop; she was making music on little bells, and she turned around and smiled. I ran into her arms and mother was allowed to go home… From that day on we were friends and through us, so were our parents.”