Hanneli 'Hannah' Pick-Goslar, a close childhood friend of Jewish diarist Anne Frank has died in Israel aged 93.
Born to observant Jewish parents in Berlin, her father Hans, was a top civil servant in the department for domestic affairs during Weimar Germany.
After being forced to resign from his post upon the election of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor in 1933, the family fled to Amsterdam.
The family became neighbours to the Frank family, who had also left Germany due to the rise of the Nazis. The two young girls attended school together and struck up a friendship.
Ms Pick-Goslar recalled her friend receiving her famous red and white checkered diary at her 13th birthday party just weeks before she went into hiding in the central Amsterdam secret annex above her father’s business- with friends believing they had escaped to Switzerland.
On Tuesday, the Anne Frank Foundation offered a tribute to Ms Pick-Goslar who is frequently mentioned in Frank’s famous diary.
"Hannah Pick-Goslar meant a lot to the Anne Frank House, and we could always call on her," the charity said in a statement.
The pair were briefly reunited in February 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, after managing to have several conversations across a barbed-wire fence. Anne died of typhus shortly after, just two months shy of the Allied liberation of the camp.
Pick-Goslar described her friendship with the late diarist in a book written by Alison Leslie Gold titled "Memories of Anne Frank; Reflections of a Childhood Friend,” later adapted into the 2021 documentary film "My Best Friend Anne Frank."
"Hanneli and Sanne used to be my two best friends. People who saw us together always used to say: 'There goes Anne, Hanne, and Sanne',” 13-year-old Anne Frank wrote in June 1942.
The Foundation said Ms Pick-Goslar "shared her memories of their friendship and the Holocaust into old age.
“She believed everyone should know what happened to her and her friend Anne after the last diary entry. No matter how terrible the story."
"She always loved to play with her hair... I remember her curling her hair with her fingers. It must have killed her to lose it,” she reflected in an interview with the Associated Press.
Ms Pick-Goslar and her younger sister Gabi were the only Shoah survivors among their family and the pair emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, shortly before it became the state of Israel in 1948.
She worked as a nurse and married, becoming a grandmother of 11 and a great-grandmother of 31 and settling in Jerusalem, telling interviews about her sizeable family, "This is my answer to Hitler."
Hannah Pick-Goslar died at her home in Jerusalem surrounded by her family.
