Beyond this account of their tragically curtailed friendship and their brief, painful reunion, My Friend Anne Frank, written with Dina Kraft, is as much Hannah’s story as it is Anne Frank’s ... Pick-Goslar certainly has a story, and she tells it here with great clarity and conviction. In many ways her experience parallels Anne Frank’s ... Much of Pick-Goslar’s account may seem familiar to those who have read widely about Frank. So, I suppose the question arises: Do we really need another Anne Frank book? To which I would offer an unequivocal yes ... She has a story, a piece of history, and she tells it straightforwardly and well. She describes, touchingly, and as very people few could, what it was like to read Anne’s diary after having known its author.
The title of Pick-Goslar’s memoir, My Friend Anne Frank, is misleading and – however unintentionally – does it a disservice. This is not really the story of Frank, who achieved posthumous fame through the diary she kept while in hiding, even though, as a neighbour and close friend of the author, she is a significant presence in the first third of the book. It is, in fact, the vivid and extraordinary story of Pick-Goslar ... Pick-Goslar, who was increasingly frail and would speak for two hours at a time before stopping to nap, died last October, just two weeks shy of her 94th birthday. In finishing the book without her, Kraft has done her proud.
