The Kleine Frauenlager where Anne and Margot Frank ended up in Bergen-Belsen was right next to the Sternlager. The two sections were separated by a fence consisting of two layers of gauze and barbed wire with straw or reeds in between. So the prisoners could not see each other, but they could hear each other. This is how Anne met up with her good friend Hanneli Goslar (1928), who had been imprisoned in the Sternlager since January 1944, at the fence.

Hanneli Goslar remembered someone coming to get her in January or early February 1945 because there was someone on the other side of the fence who could put her in touch with her friend Anne Frank:

"So I have no choice but to get close to the barbed wire in the evening, as far as I can. And I start shouting about that [...] And when I called out there at the barbed wire: 'Hello, hello', the woman who answered me was Peter's mother, Mrs Van Pels.(...) And she knew exactly that I was a friend of Anne's and the first thing she says was: 'Oh, you want to speak to Anne,' I say: 'Yes, of course,' We talked for half a minute, it was too dangerous. And then she only added [...]: 'I can't bring Margot, she can't walk up to this barbed wire, but I'll bring Anne,' and there I stood and waited. And really after five minutes or so, a very faint voice, and it was Anne."^[1]

Hanneli thought Anne had fled to Switzerland with her family, so it was an emotional meeting.

The packages

As conditions in Anne's camp section were a lot worse than Hanneli's, she promised to bring Anne food and clothes. The next evening, Hanneli threw a parcel over the barbed wire. What the contents of the parcel were is not entirely clear because Hanneli's statements about it varied. In 1957, for example, she said the parcel consisted of a jumper in which a tin of sardines was wrapped, a few lumps of sugar and some pieces of rusk.^[2] In a 2009 interview, she recalled a sock or a glove, some dried plums and Swedish knäckebröd.^[3] But whatever was in this parcel, Anne never got it: 

"And then I hear Anne crying and screaming and angry. What happened? No, I couldn't see her, and that barbed wire was high and the night was dark and I had to throw at what I hear. But there were hundreds of other hungry women there, and another woman had picked up that package, run away, and didn't give her anything. Well, I had to calm her down first and I promised: 'We'll do it again.´"^[3]

Eventually, Hanneli managed to put together a new parcel and this time it did reach Anne. The content of this second parcel is also unclear. In most interviews, Hanneli does not comment on this. In an interview from 1957, Hanneli described it as a pair of stockings and some food.^[2] In another interview from the same year, she is slightly more detailed:

"I collected a second pitiful parcel for Anne. A woman mourning her daughter’s death contributed a torn sweater and pair of cotton stockings in addition to the pieces of sugar and stale crackers other people gave me."^[4]

The date of the meetings

In total, the friends met at the fence three times.^[3] According to Hanneli's recollections, the meetings with Anne took place in February 1945. But there are indications that it may have happened earlier, as early as the beginning of January 1945.

The first meeting must have been before 7 February 1945, because Auguste van Pels, by whom they were able to get in touch, was deported to Raguhn that day.^[5] Hanneli stated that shortly before the meetings with Anne, she had received a parcel from the Swiss Red Cross and put what was left of it in Anne's first parcel. A list of 51 names from the Swiss Red Cross dated 23 January 1945 lists Hanneli's grandmother Therese Klee as one of the recipients of a parcel. Those parcels were to be sent to Bergen Belsen ‘in den nächsten Tagen’, but there is no confirmation whether the parcels actually arrived.^[6]

Some diaries of other Sternlager prisoners mention that around 400 food parcels were brought into the camp from Sweden in early January 1945. Possibly the Goslar family also received parcels at that time. With this, the meetings between Anne and Hanneli may also have taken place in January.

Although Hanneli herself could not remember this,^[3] a number of fellow prisoners stated that they were also present at the meetings between Anne and Hanneli, or knew about these meetings.

Irene Hasenberg (1930),^[7] who became good friends with Hanneli Goslar in the camp, recalled that they had looked for clothes together for in the first parcel:

"And so she and I gathered some clothing and made this bundle. [...] We throw it over and because it was so dark Anne couldn’t see anything but another woman came and picked up the bundle and ran off with the bundle. That was the only time that I saw Anne. Because then either the next day or two days later, there was an Austauschtransport and we had the passports and we were selected to go on that transport on the 21st of January our train left Bergen-Belsen."^[8]

The family left the camp on 21 January 1945 on a so-called German-American civilian exchange to Switzerland.

Marion Bienes (1925), who had been in Margot Frank's class at the Municipal Lyceum for Girls in Amsterdam, recalled that a fellow prisoner from her barracks told her about meeting Anne Frank in early January 1945. Bienes explained that she could not come to the fence at the time because of her care for her terminally ill father, who died on 9 January 1945.^[9]

Martha van Collem (1929), who knew the Frank family from the Liberal Jewish Congregation in Amsterdam, also claimed to have attended the meetings once or twice with her sister Ilse. According to her, these took place in early March 1945,^[10] but research shows that there is a very high chance that Anne had already died by then.^[11]

Anne and Hanneli Goslar most likely met between early January and 7 February 1945. Hanneli did not come out of the barracks for several days in late February 1945, around the time her father died. When she eventually went looking for Anne, the small women's camp was empty and she could not find her. Possibly Anne had been moved within the camp, or transferred to an infirmary barrack.^[11]