'Not everyone wants to hear about the Holocaust. It’s easier to read Anne’s diary.’ As a survivor of the Shoah, Hannah Pick-Goslar was acutely aware of this piteous truth. She made the statement during a 1998 interview marking the release of a children’s book about her close friendship with Anne Frank and her own remarkable survival. For the countless readers familiar with Frank’s diary, Hannah (referred to as Lies, a pseudonym linked to her nickname) is a recurring presence. There are diary entries in which a distressed Anne, rightly assuming that Hannah is not in hiding, beseeches God to watch over her friend so that she may live to the end of the war. In history and this book’s wake, these passages are rendered even more bitterly tragic.

My Friend Anne Frank is Hannah’s memoir. The publisher’s marketing and titling of the book is disingenuous, perhaps even duplicitous. It is an approach that compounds the bleak reality of Hannah’s statement and works against honouring her as a formidable personality whose story has much to teach us. Written by journalist Dina Kraft, the book is a fascinating, wide-ranging witness statement which takes in a childhood in Berlin and then Amsterdam before and during Occupation, survival at the Westerbork transit camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, postwar physical and mental recovery, immigration to Mandatory Palestine amid a time of upheaval, and life in the formative years of Israel. Hannah’s story extends our understanding of Anne and the Frank family and resists the idea of her friend as a sacred, inscrutable symbol of the Shoah.