•
Hannah Elisabeth "Hanneli" Pick-Goslar (12 November 1928 – 28 October 2022) known to most of her friends as "Lies", was Anne's oldest friend, along with Sanne Ledermann. While Hannah was in Bergen-Belsen, she met Auguste van Pels by asking through a hay-filled barbed wire fence if anyone who could hear her voice spoke Dutch. Mrs. van Pels answered her and remembered Hannah from peacetime in Amsterdam. Mrs. van Pels then told Hannah that Anne was a prisoner in the section of the camp van Pels herself was in. Hannah was astonished, as she, like most people back in Amsterdam, believed the Franks had escaped to
Switzerland. Hannah was able to talk to Anne several times through the barrier and to toss some essentials over it for her. She died on October 28, 2022, at the age of 93. •
Susanne "Sanne" Ledermann (7 October 1928 – 19 November 1943) was Anne's constant
companion from the time of her arrival in Amsterdam and is mentioned several times at the beginning of the diary. She was considered the "quiet" one of the trio of "Anne, Hanne and Sanne". She was very intelligent, and according to Anne, very facile with poetry. Sanne's full first name is variously listed in different sources as both "Susanne" and "Susanna". Only her friends called her "Sanne"; her family used the more Germanic "Susi". After his return to Amsterdam, Otto Frank learned that Sanne and her parents, Franz and Ilse, were arrested on 20 June 1943. Sanne and her parents were sent first to
Westerbork, then on 16 November to Auschwitz, where all three were gassed upon arrival. •
Barbara Ledermann (born 4 September 1925) Sanne's sister who was a friend of Margot's, had, through contacts in the
Dutch Underground, acquired a
German ID card (becoming "Barbara Waarts") and worked as a courier for the Underground. She survived the war and later married the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist
Martin Rodbell. •
Jacqueline Yvonne Meta "Jacque" van Maarsen (30 January 1929 – 13 February 2025) or "Jacque", as she was known to everyone, was Anne's best friend at the time the Frank family went into hiding. Jacque sincerely liked Anne, but at times found her too demanding in her friendship. Anne, writing later in her diary, was remorseful for her own attitude toward Jacque, regarding with better understanding Jacque's desire to have other close girlfriends as well – "I just want to apologize and explain things", Anne wrote. After two and a half months in hiding, Anne composed a farewell letter to Jacque in her diary, vowing her lifelong friendship. Jacque read this passage much later, after the publication of the diary. Jacque's French-born mother was a Christian, and that, along with several other extenuating circumstances, combined to get the "J" (for "Jew") removed from the family's identification cards. The van Maarsens were thus able to live out the war years in Amsterdam. Jacque later married her
childhood sweetheart Ruud Sanders and lived in Amsterdam, where she was a
bookbinder and wrote four books on their notable friendship:
Anne and Jopie (1990),
My Friend, Anne Frank (1996),
My Name Is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank (2003), and
Inheriting Anne Frank (2009). Van Maarsen died on 13 February 2025, aged 96. •
Nanette "Nanny" Blitz Konig (born 6 April 1929) was another schoolmate of Anne's. Nanette, by her own admission, was the girl given the made-up initials "E. S." in the early pages of Anne's diary. While they were not always on the best of terms during school days (their personalities were much too similar), Nanny had been invited to Anne's 13th birthday party, and when they met in Bergen-Belsen, their reunion was enthusiastic. With prisoners constantly being shifted around in the huge camp, Nanny quickly lost track of Anne. Nanette was the only member of her family to survive the war. While she was recovering from tuberculosis in a hospital immediately after the war, Otto Frank got in touch with her, and she was able to write and give him some information about her encounter with Anne at Belsen. Nanette and her family, as of 2019, resided in
São Paulo,
Brazil. (Müller, p. 269). •
Ilse Wagner (26 January 1929 – 2 April 1943) whom Jacque van Maarsen described as "a sweet and sensible girl", is mentioned several times in the early part of the diary. Ilse's family had a
table tennis set, and Anne and Margot frequently went to her house to play. Wagner was the first of Anne's circle of friends to be deported. Along with her mother and grandmother, she was sent to Westerbork in January 1943, then to
Sobibór extermination camp, where all three were gassed upon arrival on 2 April 1943. (Müller, p. 301). •
Lutz Peter Schiff (9 September 1926 – 31 May 1945) For all the admiring boys Anne was surrounded with during her school days, she said repeatedly in her diary that the only one she deeply cared about was Peter Schiff, whom she called "Petel". He was three years older than Anne and they had, according to Anne, been "inseparable" during the summer of 1940, when Anne turned 11. Then, Peter changed addresses, and a new acquaintance slightly older than Peter convinced him Anne was "just a child". Anne had several vivid dreams of Peter while in hiding, wrote about them in her diary, and realized herself that she saw Peter van Pels, at least partially, as a surrogate for Peter Schiff. Anne implies in her diary (12 January 1944) that Peter Schiff gave her a
pendant as a gift, which she cherished from then on. Schiff was also a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen, though he was transported from there to Auschwitz before Anne and Margot arrived at Belsen. It is known for certain that he died in Auschwitz, although the exact date of his death is unclear. In 2009, the
Anne Frank House received a photograph of Schiff as a boy, donated by one of his former classmates; it can be seen, along with the story of its donation, on the Anne Frank House website. •
Helmuth "Hello" Silberberg (8 June 1926 – 26 June 2015) was the boy Anne was closest to at the time her family went into hiding, though they had only known each other about two weeks at that time. Born in
Gelsenkirchen, Germany, his parents sent him to Amsterdam to live with his grandparents, believing, like Otto Frank, that Hitler would respect The Netherlands' neutrality. Silberberg's grandfather, who disliked the name Helmuth, dubbed him "Hello". Hello was 16 and adored Anne, but she wrote in her diary that she was "not in love with Hello, he is just a friend, or as mummy would say, one of my 'beaux'", though Anne also remarked in her diary on how much she enjoyed Hello's company, and she speculated that he might become "a real friend" over time. By a very convoluted series of events, including several narrow escapes from the Nazis, Hello eventually reunited with his parents in
Belgium. Belgium was also an occupied country, however, and he and his family were still "in hiding", though not under circumstances as difficult as the Franks'. The American forces liberated the town where the Silberbergs were hiding on 3 September 1944, and Hello was freed. This was on the same day that Anne and her family left on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Hello emigrated to the United States after the war and was later known as Ed Silverberg. He appeared as Ed Silverberg in the multimedia stage presentation about the Holocaust called,
And Then They Came for Me. He died in 2015 at age 89. •
Eva Geiringer (11 May 1929 – 3 January 2026)
(Eva Schloss) shared a similar history with Anne. The Geiringers lived on the opposite side of Merwedeplein, the square where the Franks' apartment was located, and Eva and Anne were almost exactly the same age. Eva was also a close friend of Sanne Ledermann's, and she knew both Anne and Margot. Eva described herself as an out-and-out
tomboy, and hence she was in awe of Anne's fashion sense and worldliness, but she was somewhat puzzled by Anne's fascination with boys. "I had a brother, so boys were no big thing to me", Eva wrote. But Anne had introduced Eva to Otto Frank when the Geiringers first came to Amsterdam "so you can speak German with someone", as Anne had said, and Eva never forgot Otto's warmth and kindness to her. Though they were acquainted on a first-name basis, Eva and Anne were not especially close, as they had different groups of friends aside from their mutual close friendship with Sanne Ledermann. Eva's brother Heinz was called up for deportation to labor camp on the same day as Margot Frank, and the Geiringers went into hiding at the same time the Franks did, though the Geiringer family split into two groups to do so – Eva and her mother in one location, and Heinz and his father at another. Though hiding in two separate locations, all four of the Geiringers were betrayed on the same day, about three months before the Frank family was arrested. Eva survived Auschwitz, and when the Russians liberated
Birkenau, the women's sector of the camp, she walked the mile-and-a-half distance to the men's camp to look for her father and brother, finding out much later that they had not survived the
prisoner march out of Auschwitz. But when she entered the sick barracks of the men's camp, she recognized Otto Frank and had a warm reunion with him. Eight years later, Otto married Eva's widowed mother
Elfriede (Fritzi) Geiringer, thereby making Eva a stepsister of Anne and Margot's. Eva later wrote her autobiography ''Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank
(1988), which served as the inspiration for the development of a popular multimedia stage presentation about the Holocaust called And Then They Came for Me''. Eva also co-authored, with Barbara Powers, an autobiography targeted to younger readers and considered a suitable companion book to Anne's diary, titled
Promise, in which she describes her family's happy life before going into hiding, and the experiences of living in hiding during the Nazi occupation, of going to the concentration camps, and finally, of going after liberation to the house where Heinz and their father had hidden, to retrieve the paintings Heinz had hidden beneath the floorboards there. Heinz's paintings have been displayed in exhibitions in the United States and are now a part of a permanent exhibition in
Amsterdam's war museum. In 2013, Eva Schloss' memoir of life after the Holocaust,
After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival by the stepsister of Anne Frank, was published. After the war, Eva eventually built a new life in London with her husband of 60 years, Zvi Schloss, with whom she has three daughters. In May 2013, she was featured on
BBC Radio 4's ''
Woman's Hour''. •
Mary Bos (26 September, 1928 – 14 April, 2020) was a schoolmate from Anne's
Montessori school and an invited guest at Anne's 10th birthday party; in the well-known photo of that gathering, she is the very slender girl third from the right. Mary was a gifted artist, whose drawings and paintings were much admired by her peers. She is mentioned in passing in Anne's diary, when Anne writes of dreaming that she and Peter Schiff are looking "at a book of drawings by Mary Bos". Mary and her parents had emigrated to the
United States in February 1940. When they left, Anne wrote Mary a little poem as a goodbye note. Mary almost forgot about Anne, but after the war, when Anne's diary was published, she recalled her friend Anne from Montessori school. After the war, Mary wed Bob Schneider. After Anne's diary was first published in 1947, Mary finally learned of Anne's fate. Mary Bos died April 14, 2020 •
Käthe "Kitty" Egyedi (1928 – 2010) was another lifelong friend of Anne's and was, like Mary Bos, a fine artist. (Kitty remained a lifelong friend of Mary Bos; they communicated regularly by letter, even after Mary moved permanently to the
United States in 1940). Schoolmates at Montessori, Anne and Kitty attended different schools after sixth grade, and hence they had drifted apart somewhat. But shortly before the Franks went into hiding, Kitty visited Anne one day when Anne was in bed with a slight fever. They chatted the whole afternoon, and Kitty was impressed and pleased that the shrill, blunt, and boy-crazy friend she remembered from Montessori school had begun to mature into a somewhat more introspective and thoughtful girl. This drew them closer together again. In the picture of Anne's 10th birthday referenced above under "Mary Bos", Kitty is the girl in the center with the dark pleated skirt. was another good friend of Anne's all the way through Montessori school. Ietje was the girl with whom Anne breathlessly shared the news concerning one of Anne's maternal uncles, who had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to labor camp (he later was released and emigrated to the United States). Being Christian, Ietje's family was able to live out the war in Amsterdam. Ietje became a teacher in later years and today lives in
Amstelveen, outside of Amsterdam. She is the girl second from right in the "10 birthday" picture. •
Eugene Hollander (14 December 1912 – 15 December 1996) first-cousin of Frank's mother. Holocaust survivor, wrote the memoir ''From the Hell of the Holocaust: A Survivor's Story''. Died 15 December 1996. ==Arresting officer==