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Scene from »My Best Friend Anne Frank« with Josephine Arendsen, Aiko Beemsterboer
Photo: Bas Losekoot / Netflix
"I want to see the world," says the girl who giggles and wants to be a writer.
He is keenly interested in boys playing football in the park and takes one to the movies.
However, as a Jew, the newsreel is only allowed to look at it from the back of the screen, the boy knows the secret way there.
Anne takes her best friend, Hanneli, with her to watch over her.
She intervenes decisively when the cavalier makes serious attempts to make out: "Have you actually completely cured your jaundice?" she asks Anne, who of course never had jaundice.
Ann and Hannah
A childhood in Amsterdam, two pubescent girlfriends in the summery streets of the city.
One is called Anne Frank.
A little later she would go into hiding with her family and eventually die of exhaustion, starvation and typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The other Hannah Goslar, called Hanneli, schoolmate, best friend, like Anne of Jewish faith and with German roots.
She will also be deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she will meet Anne one last time.
She will survive the concentration camp.
The feature film »My Best Friend Anna Frank«, which can now be seen on Netflix, draws its emotional power from this interweaving of lively teenage life and the dying horror of the Holocaust.
It is the first film from the Netherlands about Anne Frank;
there it ran in the cinema last year and became a hit with the public.
This film, which is based on Hannah Goslar's biography, has nothing to do with the current debates about Anne Frank's alleged traitor.
Happily.
Because it shows once again impressively why Anne's story is so powerful - and what's so wrong with the research into Anne's alleged traitor.
A strong, cheeky, courageous girl
The film focuses on Hannah Goslar (Josephine Arendsen), who tells her story.
But the point of reference that frames this story is Anne.
Actress Aiko Beemsterboer plays her as a strong, cheeky, brave girl who vibrates with vibrancy.
"God knows everything - Anne knows everything better," says Hannah's mother once, rolling her eyes, and Hannah sometimes suffers from Anne's cheeky remarks too.
Unlike Anne, she's not interested in boys at all, and she doesn't want to be a writer, but a nurse.
Once the two argue because Anne opens the page in a biology book that shows the penis and vagina.
Hannah is embarrassed, she runs home.
Shortly thereafter, it is said that Anne and her family have found shelter in Switzerland and that they are safe.
In addition to these scenes from everyday life, camp life in Bergen-Belsen stands out with all its horrors: cold and illness, humiliation and hunger, death and terror.
Hannah is alone with her four-year-old sister Gabi;
the mother died before the deportation, the father is terminally ill in the infirmary.
One day, behind a makeshift straw visual barrier, Hannah recognizes Anne's voice.
She's already very weak and says, "I don't have anyone anymore." Hannah, risking her life, throws her food over the fence.
Above all, it is these heartbreaking scenes that capture the madness of the orderly, factory-style murder of people in a few harrowing sentences and images.
The cheeky, cheeky, smart, funny Anne Frank represents the millions of people who were alive, loved and enriched the world - until the Nazi death machine wiped them out.
»My best friend Anne Frank« makes visible the black hole that the Holocaust ate into life, right up to the present day.
The past is near
Because there can never be a line, never - this film also shows that.
He makes painful experiences out of memories, present out of the past.
It comes at exactly the right time.
Because the search for the man who betrayed Anne Frank - what else is behind it than trying to find an explanation for the madness, a face that can be blamed?
Behind this is also the desire to facilitate the commemoration and to take away the urgency that the story of Anne Frank still has.
Inge Auerbacher's moving speech in the Bundestag on the occasion of the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust showed how close the past still is to us.
"Ruth, I'm here!" she exclaimed in memory of a girl she met in Auschwitz concentration camp and who died there.
Hannah Goslar never forgot Anne Frank either, she tirelessly reminded her of her in books, speeches and conversations.
She is still alive, in Jerusalem, at 93 years old.
Together, she and her sister have seven children, 38 grandchildren, and 27 great-grandchildren.
That, as it says in the credits of "My Best Friend Anne Frank," was her revenge on Hitler.