Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend
Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...
They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations.
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration.
Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not.
And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations.
Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor.
We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience.
Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe.
This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion,
and humanity.
Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued.
Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank,
that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen.
My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came from Frankfurt. They came from Berlin. And then she saw a small girl, this woman, and they started to talk.
And the day after, my mother had to go to the kindergarten first day, without knowing the language, without knowing anybody. And she sees the same girl as she saw the day before in the grocery shop. She was ringing the bells in the kindergarten.
And they saw each other, ran into the arms and began a big, big friendship, till the end.
Then, they had a nice childhood till 1939. And in 1940, the Germans invaded Holland in five days. The families were very much very friendly. So every Shabbat, the Frank family came to my grandfather's home. And every Sunday, my mother used to go to the, what is today, the Anne Frank House. It was the office of Mr. Frank. Mr. Frank decided that all the family will go to hiding in his office. The school, now it was the Jewish school, every day one of the pupils or more were just gone. And you didn't ask what happened. Either they went to hiding, or they were caught by the Germans.
Now in 1942, once again, her mother, my grandmother, had to give birth. And she didn't go to a hospital in Amsterdam, because she was already afraid from the Germans. They could take you from the hospital. So she gave birth at home. And she died two days after the birth. And the baby also died. It was a very hard delivery.
And my mother was at home at that time. And since this day, she was like the mother for her sister. And (she) took her all the way to concentration camps, on and on.
Let's see, they had the Paraguayan passport. And they were also on a list that was named the List of Israel. So as if to be exchanged in the future against German soldiers.
But it didn't help them and they had to go to Bergen-Belsen. The situation was very hard and it became harder every day.
Now, one day there was a rumor that a women from Holland come to the camp. And my mother was very curious to know who are these Dutch women. So somebody told her, you know, your friend Anne Frank is over the fence. My mother was in shock because she thought Anna is in Switzerland. And Anna was in a very, very bad shape. It was after Auschwitz. So Anna said, I have nothing to eat. My mother went to all her friends.
All of them didn't have what to eat. All of them were hungry and didn't have what to wear. But everybody, everybody gave her something. And she made a ball with cracker and a sock and a glove and something. She made it like a ball, came to the fence and said, Anna, be careful. And she threw it over the fence. So it was really the last time that my mother saw Anna when she threw the ball with the food to her. And she didn't know what happened to her.
Afterwards, my mother was liberated. And then after that, Mr. Frank came to visit her and arranged everything, that she can go to Switzerland. And then she went to Israel because this is how she was raised. She was a nurse in Israel. Then my mother got married and had three children. She became a nurse and was doing a very good job.
This story is about an iconic Jewish figure, perhaps the most iconic Jewish figure of our time. So I need to ask you, as you were growing up, how present was Anne Frank in your family life? Not as an icon, not as a historical figure, but as your mother's childhood friend. Tell us briefly about the presence of Anne Frank in your family when you were growing up.
It was from the beginning. From the beginning, when I was one-year-old, my mother went already to the United States to talk about Anna, to talk about the Holocaust with my father. And since then, all the time, it was like a sister of ours, like an aunt of ours. And Mr. Frank was like the big, big uncle that was in the picture all the time with writing and with sending people all the time. It was just one of the family all the time, true today, even for my children and grandchildren.
I can imagine that's true. Dina, as you worked with Hannah on My Friend Anne Frank,
how did she describe the way her friendship with Anne lived on inside her, not just as a memory, but as responsibility? How did it shape how family understood loss and remembrance and moral obligation?
Yeah, I mean, for her, you know, the last time she saw Anna, of course, was at this very dramatic moment where these two girls on either end of a fence, crying in this freezing rain on other, you know, at Bergen-Belsen. And they were still so hopeful. They talked about meeting at school the next fall. That's how, like, sort of, where their heads were. They were still optimistic they would come out of this hell.
Of course, Anne didn't come out of this hell. And she only, and she didn't get to tell the story of, really, before or after the Annex. She told the story of being inside the Annex. And that's a very kind of, like, small prism. Of course, you'd read into Anne's, like, deep inner world. But all of that life that came before, that incredibly rich dynamic of a German Jewish enclave in Amsterdam, where they lived as the daughters of German immigrants, and the games they played, and the life that they lived, and the shadow of this war that was approaching all the time.
And then, of course, afterwards, you know, what was happening outside, the roundups, and being taken first to Westerbork, and then to, and then in Anne's case to Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and in the case of Hannah, all of that horror Hannah witnessed and was able to tell, because she lived to tell the story.
So, she felt this obligation to sort of carry on, you know, where Anna couldn't. And I think because, you know, from very early on, the diary became a huge success, and then it was a Broadway hit, and there was a film…she had cache because of Anne's story. She had legitimacy. So at a time when people didn't even have a name for the Holocaust, as Ruthie referenced, her mother went off in the 1950s on an 18-city tour, speaking tour of America, talking about her experience in Bergen-Belsen, and talking about her friendship with Anna. It was a time when there wasn't even a name Holocaust or Holocaust survivors. I think she was probably one of the very first survivors to publicly tell her story. And it was always very, very important to her to share that story and tell the world. And until she was, you know, I was interviewing her when she was 93 years old. She was using oxygen to breathe. She wasn't in good health, but she was very, very sound of mind. She was incredibly sharp and incredibly funny still, as well, I might add. And she felt this obligation to keep telling her story, even though these were like her last days.
Why do you think, that already being beyond 90 years old, that Hannah felt it was essential to tell her story now to this generation?
Well, you know, it was interesting. It wasn't her idea to tell the story. It was a Netflix film came out, based on her life, and that generated a lot of interest and conversation. And then a publishing house in London reached out to her, and that's how this began. From our very first meeting, she would say, "Who is going to be interested in my story? You know, who's going to be interested?" I think the answer came in the fact that it became a New York Times bestselling book. It's in over a dozen languages, from around the world now.
But she was so modest. I think she couldn't really imagine the reach that it was, you know, she wasn't just writing on the tales of Anne Frank's story. She herself had an incredibly rich and interesting story to tell, you know, from the very beginning. From her father, who was one of the few Jews in the Weimar government in Berlin, and a very outspoken force against Hitler, and had to flee, to the story of what it was like growing up, and again, in this very close-knit, beautiful place, that felt very safe in Amsterdam.
And, then she always talked about how that safety and that feeling of being cocooned was suddenly washed away, you know, as a Nazi grip got tighter and tighter.
And you live with her. I mean, part of the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it, you know, it was not to write it from the point of view of a 93-year-old woman looking back, but being with her in real time as the noose was tightening and tightening all the time around, not just her, but the Jews of Amsterdam.
You know, as Holocaust denial continues to grow exponentially, this narrative is extremely important. I was in a used bookstore this past summer in the Berkshires, and I found an old Life magazine from the early 1950s with artist's renditions of what Anne Frank went through. This is such an important historical document that we have to keep alive.
Now, let me ask you, you've said that Hannah's accent was familiar to you. Tell us about your family's Holocaust experience and how hearing Hannah's accent affected you.
Well, she immediately reminded me of my own grandmother who was born in Salzburg in Austria, ended up, was living in Italy, in her 30s. And that's where she was when the war broke out, before the war broke out, as the Nazis began to take over Europe. And my family, they were living in Italy, but they were not citizens of Italy. And according to Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws, all Jews that were not of Italian descent had to leave the country. Of course, this was sort of a blessing in disguise. They couldn't wait around and hope for better times. They had to figure out what was what. And so my grandmother furiously wrote for affidavits and letters and visas across the world. And the one place they finally got a visa to was a place that my grandfather had singled out in a map of the world. He saw that New Zealand was the furthest place in the world from Europe. And he said, "I'd like to go there." And indeed, they got a visa to New Zealand. And they left shortly before the war broke out in Europe. They arrived in September 1939, just days before the war broke out, and had this safe refuge in New Zealand. But very, very far away, and very cut off from the rest of the family, and didn't know for years what happened to the fates of their own families back in Europe.
Literally at the end of the world.
The very end of the world. The very end of the world. And it was extremely stressful. They were treated as enemy aliens because they spoke German. Their mail was gone through by the government and censored. And in fact, it was only in 1944 when Italy was liberated. And one of my cousins whose name is Jana and is 98-years-old, and lives in Tel Aviv to this day. And I'm actually working on a book with her about her life now. She's actually a year older than Hannah. And she was a 17-year-old girl, and spotted a New Zealand soldier in the square in Florence the day that Florence was liberated. And she went up to him and said, "I have an aunt in New Zealand. Can you please pass on word that our family is alive and well?" And that is the first news that my family got, that part of their family survived.
You said in The New York Times article about Hannah…this is the quote, "When you look at history backward, she was living history forward." What did you mean by that? And how does it relate to Hannah's enduring friendship and memories of Anne Frank and her own family who perished?
Yeah, I meant by that is, you know, we look at history and we know how it ends, you know, or you know how the story unfolds. She didn't know how the story was unfolding. And she had to live every single day sort of in that sort of, as I was saying, this noose tightening, that sort of gradual understanding of what was going on for her. And so keeping, you know, she lost her parents during the war. And she was like the guardian of her little sister, who's only four years old. Imagine she was taking care of her little sister basically from the age of two to four in the most horrific of conditions. And so, she was living it forward and not knowing what one day would bring to the next. And that was sort of, you know, in the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it captivating to people to make it sort of feel like a thriller as it was and keep people's attention. I wanted to keep the camera as it were on Hannah as she was experiencing it, as she was going forward and not knowing what was going to be what was happening, not knowing what was going to be next.
But Hannah had incredible determination and focus. And also she talks a lot about, you know, survival was a group activity, you know, as it is today. You know, as we saw now in the stories of the hostages coming out of Gaza and those that were with others, you know, really talk about how they leaned on each other and the story, you know, of real, like female solidarity. And the barracks at Bergen-Belsen that when she sees Anne Frank and her friend Anna, you know, cold and shivering and starving in Bergen-Belsen and begging her for some food, she goes back to the barracks and is able to collect food from all the people who had barely had no food themselves, but had hidden a little crust of bread here and a little bit of dried fruit there and a wool sock here. And they were able to sort of together, you know, help this young woman they didn't even, who they didn't even know. So I think, you know, part of the story of survival is community and how Hannah found community even when her own blood family was gone.
So this is for both Ruthie and Dina.
Anne Frank's story, of course, is for many people, the story of the Holocaust. As we all know, that story ends too soon to fully embrace the horror. And I'm wondering, to what extent do you now see yourselves as guardians of not Anne's iconic story, but the human story?
I think, first of all, that you cannot separate the iconic and the regular life.
She was just this. She was Anna and she was the best friend of my mother. And my mother wanted, really to tell about her, and that everybody will know her, will know her life and really her legacy, because she was not the regular girl. She was very, very talented. When she was very small, she wrote lovely stories. I don't know why it is not so famous, but she wrote the tales from the secret Annex. And she wrote about poor people, about really how the life is hard for them. And she did it so nicely with such messages that we really should go on with all that she wrote about the poor people.
And of course, about all that she wrote about, all the, she is the symbol of all the children in the Holocaust. One and a half million. Millions. So as my mother used to say, you cannot perceive six million. You cannot perceive one-and-a-half million. But when you see one story, and of course, if you see some more stories, but when you see one story, you can identify with all that happened.
I understand. Dina, how about for you?
Yeah, I mean, I think this story, what I got from Hannah is a sort of feeling of passing of a torch in a way, passing on a story. It was difficult when she died. She died before the book came out. And I felt like I was doing, wrapping up the interviews with her.
And it was her health sort of deteriorating, even more after that. And I felt this sort of almost like guilt, like, oh, my gosh, like, is she stopping to tell the story? Is this sort of the beginning of her descent? And then someone, from actually Yad Vashem, told me maybe she felt like now that her story was in good hands, she could she could have her final rest, as it were.
And I hope that is somewhat, somewhat true. And I felt like this sort of like, you know, she's not there to tell it anymore. The whole Holocaust sort of like, you know, memorial project is so built on survivors and survivor stories. So now we have this challenge of what happens when the survivors aren't there anymore. So now we are here to tell their stories and in different forms, you know, whether it's through books and novels or plays.
We're speaking and the message I got from Hannah was very much that, that racism kills, that hatred kills, that ignorance and intolerance kills. And in the case of the Holocaust, the hatred was targeted against the Jews. And she was very specific about this was specifically an anti-Jewish hatred. This was not some sort of, you know, anything else.
But it was, but it was part of a bigger story of hatred and racism. And that is, that is a lesson that we have to take with us, you know, not just in this time of occurring anti-recurring and rising anti-Semitism, but just xenophobia and hatred and intolerance and ugliness. And we're just seeing a lot of bullying going around in the world, you know, from the leadership as well across the world. And this is a time where people have to remember their humanity.
And Hannah ended almost every, every speech she gave in all the many years that she spoke, she talked about how we are all created in God's image, every human being. And that is something I feel like it has been tragically forgotten in the various conflicts of the world, that we are all human and all lives do matter.
And if you are not the same and if you are with another color, with another religion or whatever, you should respect each other and you should live in peace together.
Ruthie, that, of course, is the universal lesson of this. And I'm wondering what emotional atmosphere did growing up in a survivor's household create for you? Safety, urgency, silence, gratitude, fear?
I must say that, as I know, a lot of survivors never talked about what happened to them. They said, oh, we don't want that, our children will suffer even by hearing what we we have endured. But my mother was talking about her story, as I remember, myself. So it wasn't like that. And my mother was a happy woman. She was full of life. She was very energetic. She was doing all this, all the time something, and helping someone. And so I think we grew, let's say, in a normal house. I must say there were the anxieties, you know, when you go somewhere and tell me when you come and like this, but not something very, very not normal, let's say, as I look at this. We had a really happy house. I think the resilience of my mother gave me a lot of strength.
Dina, in your conversations with Hannah, did Hannah ever express guilt about being the one who lived to tell the story?
You know, she didn't have survivor's guilt. She didn't have guilt. We talked about that. And I think she felt that God was with her. She was also a religious Jew. It's important to note. And her faith was always sort of like a North Star for her.
And so I think she sort of saved time, as it were, you know, sort of psychologically. In fact, that she didn't have the survivor's guilt. That she felt like she had a mission. She had a purpose. She had to take care of her sister, which she did very admirably and very beautifully.
And so she was sort of spared that agony, I think, of survivor's guilt. And I think also having this very clear vision of her life passed down from her father, who was an ardent Zionist, that the land of Israel, that was the goal.
And then she came to Israel as a young woman, and she built up her life and career as a nurse. She was always giving back. She also was very much the story of Israel's creation and Israel's development, working as a nurse specifically for young children and for babies and for immigrant families from all over the world, and was part of that melting pot story. So she always had meaning and purpose. And she had a very good marriage, and she had a beautiful family, and she poured her heart and her love into that. And again, I think because she was sort of singled out early on as this friend of Anne Frank's and was sort of given this mission from Otto Frank to tell the story that Anne wasn't there to tell anymore, that that gave her meaning and purpose. And so she was unburdened with that terrible burden of survivor's guilt.
Dina, what do you hope our listeners, and especially the children and the grandchildren of survivors, will take away from Hannah's story? How can stories like this help counter denial and antisemitism? What's its role?
I think its role is to tell a very gripping and very real story through a child and then sort of an adolescent's eyes. So again, it's sort of making it feel more real and more immediate and not sort of some sort of abstract thing. You know, when you hear about, for example, you know, she witnesses an older woman being deported, you know, being deported, being taken off the streets and thrown into the back of a Nazi vehicle, you know, and she's seeing her neighbors disappearing. And I'm sorry to say that like today we have, you know, in America, for example, we have people being disappeared into ICE vans.
And I think, you know, when I was growing up, this sort of this time felt very distant and very far away that we were in this sort of era of progress and liberalism and the world was going, had sort of, had learned the lessons of this terrible, you know, this terrible, you know, unprecedented slaughter, right, of millions and millions of people. And now we're in an age where, you know, totalitarianism and wanton destruction are sort of, you know, the warning calls around us, right? So I hope this sort of tells the story of what happened before and the brave people who did speak out and the people who did help each other out in different ways.
And it reminds us that, you know, the Holocaust wasn't something that was some sort of, you know, a blip, some sort of historical accident, like people can do this, people can do terrible, terrible things to each other, you know. We have to be on guard and we have to be vigilant all the time. It's not paranoia to be vigilant. It's important to know our own history. If we don't, if the grand, yes, but the grandchildren, the children of Holocaust survivors, like, this is a legacy nobody asked for, right? Nobody wanted this sort of very heavy history to have to like, drag around you like a ball and chain, but it has doesn't have to be a ball and a chain. It can be like this is, this is your sort of gift to the world, just be able to tell people how low humanity can go. And it's important for you to be able to tell the story, so others can't twist it and doctor it. And we're seeing in the age of social media, these sort of quick clips in this terrible antisemitism being spewed by various influencers that has incredible reach.
And it's really important to know that our story, but this is also a human story. This is also a broader story, you know. Genocides don't only happen…Jewish people aren't the first and the only people to experience a genocide. So we have to be very, very vigilant and very, very on guard. But we also have to be, we have to be proud of the survivors that risked so much both to survive and to tell their story, so people will know. Hannah has told her story so people will know and we can't throw that away. We have to do something with that legacy.
I'm very curious. How did being a third generation descendant influence the way you listened to Hannah's story, not only as a descendant, but also I'm very curious as a journalist and as a writer.
I mean, I felt, I guess as a third generation, you know, it felt like I was able to sort of have this conversation with Hannah that was so, it was a really beautiful task. It was a really hard task. It was really painful at times. You know, sometimes Hannah and I would meet and we would both describe how we'd had nightmares the night before. And it was almost like our, you know, she was re-conjuring up these stories and I was hearing them and I was sort of taking them on.
And it was very different task than being a regular journalist as a journalist, the story, you have a certain remove, you're telling the story in second person, you know, third person, you know, this happened to this person and this happened to them and she said, and he said, now I was not just asking Hannah questions and interviewing her and maybe I want to go to very, very deep detail with her. But I was also having to inhabit her story when I was on the, at the computer writing. I had to become Hannah in a way. I had to, sort of imagine, I was to take on her emotions and her feelings and her impressions and sometimes imagine them and she couldn't even imagine them. She had trouble sort of tapping those emotions herself.
And so it was painful and it was difficult. I remember one particular time I'd come across, you know, in my internet sleuthing, a list of all the children that were at the birthday party at Anne…I call her Anna because that's what Hannah called her. They were Anna and Hanna, and they had another good friend Sanne. They were Hannah, Anna and Sanne. And Sanne was also murdered in the Holocaust.
And so Sanse was one of the girls that was at this birthday party and girls and boys, and this list on the internet described the fate of each of these children, which very much mirrored the fate of Dutch jewry -- 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. That was the biggest number in Western Europe.
And there's a lot of, we can go and go into sort of why and how that may have happened. And of course, that story was glossed over by the story of Anne Frank. Even Hannah didn't realize until recent years that the actual data, you know, the actual numbers behind it and, you know, the story of people, think, oh, the Dutch just were constantly hiding people. No, Anne Frank's family story was a complete anomaly. Most Jews were not hidden, you know, in Holland or protected by their neighbors…the opposite.
And so, yeah, so taking on her story in that moment of reading the fate of all these different children, you know, most of them slaughtered. I remember just like collapsing into a heap and just sobbing, you know, it was just so painful to sort of realize what and I decided that that should be the very end of the book, an elegy for a birthday party, you know, what happened to these different children. And I also paired it with what Anna herself wrote about these children. She had, like in her diary, she had like a, what we call like in more modern parlance, a slam book about what she thought of them.
This one was a gossip, this one was it flirt, this one was this, this one was that. But the toll of how many people were lost and again, the loss as Ruthie talks about these incredible people that were lost to us, like, you know, what Anne Frank would have become, what you could have become.
So as a journalist, it felt like a very, it was a very beautiful task and a very difficult task, but it felt really like something borderline of obsession. Like I wanted to get my hands on every scrap of paper and every, you know, letters she had written in every sort of photograph I could get from her, but also tales of others who've gone, who had gone through simultaneously what she was going through, diaries and lots of testimonies of people from her neighborhood in Amsterdam, and people who were in the barracks with her. And also she tells a story, one of the things she was doing in the last months of her life, besides talking to me, was speaking to a German documentary crew about the lost train. This is this train, this journey of 13 days, the very, very last days of the war, careening through the Eastern German countryside. And while bombs were falling, and it was really clear what the goal of this train was, I mean, eventually I think the idea was to bring them to some sort of, to Theresienstadt and killing them there.
But, you know, in telling her story, you know, in telling all these moments,I felt like it was an amazing opportunity to sort of like, be inside the story, but it was also painful. It was also difficult. But also incredibly important. It was a mission of a lifetime, really.
Dina, it's hard to imagine this, of course, and is there something almost psychological about imagining it? I wonder had Anne survived, had Margot survived, would they have wound up in Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, or perhaps in Tel Aviv?
Yeah, it's impossible to know. But what we do know is that Anne felt very, very Dutch, you know, and she imagined that this book would come out in Dutch after the, you know, she'd read a novel based on the secret Annex. And she felt herself very much to be Dutch. I don't know, you know, how she would have come out of, you know, no one can know how she would have come out on the other side of things. But I think she would have told her stories. I think that's, that was so central to her. She was such a writer. And it's sort of a misnomer, we call it like the diary of a young girl, you know, she was a young girl, but she really matured, like as if she was in a hot house inside the Annex. A teacher of Hannah and Anna's, later was asked by Hannah, Anna seemed to, you know, not be like an extraordinary kid, she was a kid who was very, very, you know, smart and witty and always kept a notebook by her side and would’t let anybody read it on the playground. But she didn't seem extraordinary. She exhausted the adults around her. She was today's, in today's language, we be called “a spirited child”, you know, it's very intense and kind of overwhelming. And so Hannah's teacher, Hannah and his teacher after the war said that, you know, she didn't seem like she was a special smart girl, but no one, you know, the sort of extraordinary ability she had to sort of put emotions to words and to express what she was going through.
She was described this way because she was, you know, in this little hot house of intensity inside the Annex for those two years. And I think, in the fact that she didn't just write her story, you know, in real time, she goes back and she edits and she revises. That's what makes it even more of an interesting story. She hears…so there was a radio address. Everyone in the attic was listening to this radio address from this Dutch minister in exile saying Dutchman, please, please keep your diaries in your letters so that after the war, people know what happens. And then she goes through and she starts adding background material about the Jews of the neighborhood, about the Jews of the anti-Jewish law, adding context like a real journalist was what an adding sort of suspense and and, you know, key pivotal moments in the story, to make it, you know, to make it even more engaging. Again, imagining this will be the basis of a novel when she comes out. So we don't know where she would have physically landed. But I think we know that she would have been an incredible storyteller, had she lived.
You know, Hannah had a dose of prophecy in her and she prophetically worried. And she was right, that as time passed, people would care less about the Holocaust. I have seen this in my own lifetime. In fact, I think I've seen it more in the last several years than I ever dreamed I could have experienced this. And to be true to our mission, this is one of the main purposes of this podcast. We stand up for memory, to make sure that this amnesia, this moral amnesia, does not happen. So is this book a warning? Is it a bridge? Or is it both?
Bridge, because it shows, you know, that it didn't have to be this way. You know, it didn't have to. If, you know, if various things had happened differently, you know, Hitler could have been stopped, and all of that. But, it's a voice from time. You know, it's a voice from the past that bridges us to this current moment and tells us, and whispers in our ear very, very loudly. Don't forget. Don't forget. And remember what happens, when when when hatred and racism and cruelty and totalitarianism run amok. This is not a good formula. Stop. Stop. And we're in this time in the world now where we're seeing really terrible things, you know, happening and on the brink of happening, as well.
You just said something very powerful, Dina, and I want to underscore this. Evil is always a matter of human choice. People choose to do evil. They choose to do good. At every step of the way, this unfolded in history and now, people have choices and they make those choices. And we are the beneficiaries or the victims of those choices.
And, as we move towards our conclusion, I just need to ask, in what way does Hannah's resilience live in your lives? And what about that? We always have to end on hope. Every Jewish message ends with hope. How do we get hope from this story?
Dina, how about you?
I think, you know, to quote Mr. Rogers, always look for the helpers. And I think there's a lot of stories of helpers in this, in this book. There's a story, you know, of Hannah's father herself who sets up with a fellow refugee friend, an agency to help fellow German Jewish refugees who are trying to find their way, you know, in Amsterdam.
There's a story of their neighbor, Mrs. Goudsmit, who's a Christian woman who's married to a Jewish man who tries to, when they tried it, when they come to deport the family in June of ‘43, she tries to take the little girl, tries to take Gaby for herself. And one of the Dutch Nazi policemen, the Green Policemen, says to her, "How dare you? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" You know, a Christian woman trying to take a Jew. And she says, "I'm not ashamed of myself."
And she reminds them of the humanity. And so these various times, the sort of, the humanity comes through. It turns out, as I found out after writing the book, I think, speaking to her son, she hid Jews in the basement in a crawl space during the deportations. She was very, very brave. And there's lots of these stories of bravery and camaraderie and specifically female solidarity, and female friendship and connection.
And so that gives me a lot of hope. I'm currently working on a project with Emily Damari, who's a hostage who came back from Gaza. And she also very much has a very recurring theme of, like, the power of friendship and connection in these very dark times in the Hamas tunnels and the apartments in Gaza. And the power of not losing yourself. And I think that's from the story of Emily and also from the story of Hannah. Hannah always kept sort of her moral compass and her true self. And that helped her later on in life as well. But she always cared deeply. In the last weeks of her life, she was following the protests in Iran. Again, we're having another round of revolution, another round of street protests in Iran. And she was, kept asking me, "What's going to happen to those girls and those women who are protesting in the streets of Iran?" Again, like, her care was very much about the Jewish people, but about people writ large. She really cared deeply about people and humanity. And that's what we need is people to care about humanity, in order to stop atrocities.
You know, Dina, you just said something very powerful, and I'm going to leave it at this.
What's amazing to me, both disquieting and inspirational, is that our generation will now have its own stories of resilience, bravery, and courage to add to this Sefer Torah, as it were, that we are writing of Jewish courage. And those are the stories from Gaza, from the tunnels, etc. And those are stories that are going to endure.
And I would like to think that future generations will read those stories, will read your work, will imbibe the memories that Ruthie has shared with us, and that they will become the storytellers as well. There is a profound responsibility for us, not only to share the horror, but to share the hope. I think sometimes we have to make those choices, those two "H" words. It's either horror or hope, and I always want to go for hope. I'd like to say that hope is the biggest invention of the Jewish people.
We'd like to thank our friends who are with us today. We want to thank Dina Kraft. We want to thank Ruthie Meir.
This episode has been a production from The 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman, and I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Friends, you can find TO BE CONTINUED on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, wherever you listen. But you need to be part of this story. You need to download it. You need to listen to it. And you want to do us a real mitzvah? Leave us a five-star review so that other people will be able to be part of this lasting, ongoing conversation.
So to you, Ruthie, and to you, Dina, your time is precious. Your memories are sacred. Thank you for sharing those with us today.
