Hannah Goslar Remembers: a childhood friend of Anne Frank

This moving account is by the 'Lies' or 'Hanneli' mentioned in Anne Frank's diary, Anne's best friend from the age of four to 13 when Holland was occupied. Hannah's first memories are of a happy, pre-war childhood with her friend, a sharp contrast to the awfulness of life in the camps --- for she too was deported. While the opening stutters, apparently just an extra to the Anne Frank story, the book becomes more than that, showing again the human facts of this history. Hannah believed that Anne's family had escaped to Switzerland. The desperately poignant, awful coincidence of meeting Anne, unseen but heard on the other side of a dividing fence, brings the two stories together again, providing a glimpse of Anne beyond the Diary and taking us on, through Hannah into the aftermath at the war's end. This book is an extension to the Anne Frank diary and a simply told and moving story in its own right. The photographs, with Anne's well-known face in several, tell the story in their own, powerful shorthand.