'It stuck with me, how safe their life felt': A conversation about 'My Friend Anne Frank'

In a special podcast in honor of Israel’s annual Book Week celebration, Haaretz Weekly is spotlighting two female Israeli journalists turned authors: Dina Kraft, co-author of Hannah Pick-Goslar’s memoir “My Friend Anne Frank”; and Ruth Marks Eglash, a journalist who reported from Israel for the Washington Post for eight years before writing her debut novel, “Parallel Lines.”

The world knows Anne Frank as a spirited teenager through her diary recounting her years in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. But her childhood friend Hannah Pick-Goslar knew her entire story from its hopeful beginning to its tragic end.

“My Friend Anne Frank” – currently a New York Times best-seller – was written by Pick-Goslar and Kraft. In an interview with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Kraft recounts her experience interviewing the 93-year-old Holocaust survivor during the last six months of her life. Pick-Goslar died in 2022, before the book was completed.

Kraft shares how Anne and Hannah met as young children in Amsterdam, after their Jewish families fled Hitler’s Germany, and were inseparable friends as they grew into teenagers. Until one day, following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, when Hannah went to see her friend and was “completely shocked to see breakfast dishes still in the sink and beds left unmade, which was never the case in a very orderly Frank household.”

Years later, as Kraft describes, the two friends had a heartbreaking reunion at the fence separating them in Bergen-Belsen. Pick-Goslar remembered finding her once-vivacious friend “freezing, starving, with just a filthy blanket to keep her warm.”

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Also on the podcast, Ruth Marks Eglash tells the story behind her novel “Parallel Lines,” which follows modern-day Jerusalem life and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the eyes of three young women: one Jewish secular Israeli, one ultra-Orthodox Jew and one East Jerusalem Palestinian, who live side-by-side but in entirely different worlds.

Her book – inspired by having to make sense of the roller-coaster of conflict and violence in Israel’s capital to her own teenage daughter while working as deputy bureau chief for The Washington Post – focuses on “how this conflict that we write about as journalists and that we read about as adults is impacting young people.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.