Thread by @thetimes

Hannah Pick-Goslar was childhood friends with Anne Frank in Amsterdam until the Frank family went into hiding in 1942.

Now aged 92, she recalls their close bond and the moment when the two girls met one last time in Bergen-Belsen. thetimes.co.uk/article/my-fri…

Anne Frank’s diary is the most translated Dutch book of all time.

For Hannah, its author is simply “my fiery Anne” – her precocious, boy-crazy next-door neighbour, of whom Hannah’s late mother used jokingly to say, “God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.”

Hannah and Anne – their names rhyme when pronounced the Dutch way – had been inseparable since their first day at kindergarten.

Anne, recognising Hannah from a grocery shop frequented by their respective mothers, “ran straight into my arms – and that was it”, says Pick-Goslar.

After a period of separation, the pair met one last time in Bergen-Belsen.

Anne sounded inconsolable at the loss of most of her family. “She said, I have nobody to live for any more,” recalls Pick-Goslar.

Pick-Goslar thinks that, under normal circumstances, Anne would have achieved literary greatness “at the age of 30 or 40.”

What preoccupies her, she says, is the idea that the Holocaust, in killing six million Jews and their descendants, has robbed the world of countless “special people, big thinkers, the kind who could have developed vaccinations against the coronavirus”.

And, “All over, antisemitism is growing again,” she says.

Read more: thetimes.co.uk/article/my-fri…