Dina Kraft: ‘This is the story that Anne Frank didn’t live to tell’

In this episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, writer and journalist Dina Kraft tells the story of Holocaust survivor Hannah Pick-Goslar and her childhood best friend, Anne Frank.

Hannah and Anne met in Amsterdam as young girls and spent many happy years playing together, before the ravages of war tore their lives apart.

Their moving story is told in the new memoir ‘My Friend Anne Frank’ co-written by Pick-Goslar and Kraft. It details the special bond shared by the pair, their final meeting on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 and Pick-Goslar’s own story of survival.

“I look at this story as the story that Anne Frank didn’t live to tell,” Kraft tells Róisín Ingle on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast. “We think of Anne Frank and her diary, but we don’t get to see the aftermath,” she continues.

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Kraft maintains that in a world where “anti-semitism is on the rise and hate crimes are on the rise”, this book serves as “a cautionary tale that we still need to hear today”.

“People have forgotten the story that millions of people were slaughtered, and Anne Frank was one of them,” she says.

Kraft explains that Pick-Goslar, who died late last year, felt “very strongly that people needed to know that Jews were killed because they were Jews and that was the only reason”.

The 93-year-old’s death in October came just as the pair’s collaboration on the memoir was coming to an end. “We were doing our interviews last spring, and by the summer she started ailing… it was almost like this split screen moment, especially in the early Fall, she was literally on her deathbed and I was writing as quickly as I could,” says Kraft.

You can listen back to the full interview with Dina Kraft in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.