This book describes the experiences of Hannah when taken by the Nazis, She was a friend of Anne Frank but despite the title there is not much about Anne in the book.

One thing that is frustrating about is that there are two authors – Hannah and Dina Kraft, but we are not informed as to who has written which parts of the book.

Hannah tells us about her childhood in Berlin. We’re informed about her mother, who had been an elementary school teacher, and her father.

The latter was one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the government but in 1993 after the Nazis took power, he was put in “indefinite suspension”.

Owing to the danger for Jews after Hitler’s coming into power, the family moves, first to London, then to Amsterdam, where it seems to be safe.

Here Hannah attended a Montessori school, where she met Anne Frank. They were also next-door neighbours,

The Germans invade the Netherlands and the first Anti-Jewish restrictions are ordered. Things in Amsterdam deteriorate.

Hannah’s baby sister, Gabi, is born at this time too.

At one point, Anne and her family are nowhere to be found, and Hannah understands that they have fled to Switzerland.

At this time the mass deportation of Jews from the Netherlands to their deaths begins.

Hannah’s family is eligible to go to Palestine in exchange for German prisoners of war being held by the British, and they look forward to that.

But this does not happen and the day comes when Hannah and her family are put on a train bound for a labour camp.



H’s mother and grandfather die. Gabi gets ill.

At first, the children stay at an orphanage but later they are sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is rumoured to be an “ideal” camp.

As previously indicated, there is not much about Anne in the book. But later Hannah encounters her in Bergen-Belsen, and it is here that she learns that they never went to Switzerland but were hiding in her father’s office.

All in all, this is an engaging, well-written story about Hannah’s fate.

The Bergen-Belsen camp was not that great after all, but the story is less horrifying than Primo Levi’s account of his imprisonment in Auschwitz.

The book contains many photos of Hannah and her family and is well worth reading. ( )

Hannah Goslar’s story of her friendship with Anne Frank put a new perspective on the well known Anne Frank legacy. Anne is, in fact, not in most of this memoir. Hannah’s life is described during much of the time Anne and her family are in hiding in Amsterdam all the while supposedly having escaped to Switzerland. Anne reappears when she and Hannah meet for two very brief encounters in the concentration camp they were both trying to survive. The conditions Hannah describes are especially heart wrenching because we can transfer them to Anne, something we can’t do when we read Anne’s famous diary. This is an important book for everyone to read. It is essential as a companion book to Anne’s diary. I used to teach “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” when I taught ninth grade high school English. If I were still teaching, I would definitely add Hannah Goslar’s book to my syllabus to read with the diary. ( )

I loved this book. It’s well written and well told and engaging and I was always disappointed when I had to put it down and do something else. I’d intended to read four books at once: continuing to read a history of stand-up comedy in the San Francisco area, reading a vegan cookbook, and reading a middle grade novel, the other three all appealing, but once I started this book it was all that I was interested in reading and I put the other three books aside until I could finish this one.

This autobiography stands on its own, even if the author hadn’t known Anne Frank. Reading about Anne from the author’s perspective and learning more about what their lives were like made it especially interesting. This is a great coming of age memoir.

The most devastating part of this book for me was a three page long section titled Elegy for Hannah and Anne’s Classmates. It includes over half of Anne and Hannah’s class members. It lists 16 teens, all of whom were murdered by the Nazis. A bit about each of them is written, including what happened to them and their family members, a physical description, and for most of them what Anne said about them in her diary. Heartbreaking and devastating. An immeasurable loss.

I’ve read hundreds of Holocaust books and maybe a couple of dozen where Anne Frank is the author or somehow appears and for the first time I 100% understood why Anne loved her father so much. I fell in love with Otto Frank because of Hannah’s memories of him. Completely in love! What a great father and what a great person he was!! I wish I’d known everything included about him in this book when he was still alive. I would have wanted to write to him, not about his daughter and he was used to tons of mail about her, but to praise him. He had a great personality and he was a true mensch.

Hannah was also a truly wonderful person.

I appreciate what humor there is in this book. One of the things that Hannah’s mother would say (with fondness) about Anne “God knows all but Anne knows better.” cracked me up each time (twice I think, maybe three times) this was mentioned in the book.

The narrative does a brilliant job of relating the details of normal, ordinary, everyday life in Germany prior to 1933 and in Amsterdam prior to 1940 and also of the changes that came with the Nazi occupation, and what happened to people because of it and some of the postwar time too for those who survived and those who knew survivors.

I greatly appreciated the photos but could have done without the stock photos. The personal photos are wonderful though. I’d seen many of them in other books but some I viewed for the first time in this book.

There is helpful additional information by the coauthor Dina Kraft in the back of the book. Included is an important and informative Afterword, her Acknowledgments, and an interesting Selected Bibliography.

5 full stars.

I still always recommend the chapter about Anne Frank in the book People Love Dead Jews and I put a link to that essay in my review of that book. Reading it forever changed my outlook about reading about Anne Frank. ( )