“I’m obliged to tell about the Holocaust. Because the younger people are not remembering anything. And the older ones are not with us anymore.”
January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I’d like to share a memory of a very poignant interview I did about that horrific time in world history.
In 1998, I had the privilege of speaking with a childhood friend of Anne Frank, Hannah Pick-Goslar. In November, 1944, in an extraordinary coincidence, Hannah found herself on the other side of a barbed wire fence from Anne, when they were both in the Bergen-Belsen death camp. She couldn’t see her, but she was able to talk with her.
“It was not the Anna I had known,” Goslar told me. “It was really not the same girl. A little broken girl.”
Anne told Hannah that no one in her family was left, and that she felt so alone. Neither of the girls knew at the time that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had in fact been liberated from the Auschwitz death camp.
“I think if she would have known her father is alive, maybe she had a little more hope,” said Goslar. “Because it was still almost the end of the war.”
Sometime in March, 1945, Anne died. On April 15, the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen. They found about 60,000 prisoners, most of whom were starving and sick, and at least 13,000 corpses.
Hannah Goslar survived Bergen-Belsen and is still alive, at 93. If Anne Frank were alive today, she would be 93 on June 12.
Please take a moment and listen to Mrs. Goslar in this interview, which also includes Cor Suijk, the former director of the Anne Frank House. He had just revealed that he had five pages of Anne Frank’s diary that had never been published.
— Marcia Franklin, Producer and Host
