The first time a friend told me that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews I was six. Most of my classmates agreed, and quoted their parents in evidence – from which I conclude that anyone who suggests that they don’t understand how the Holocaust happened is either a fool or a liar. It was a team effort by popular demand. If the Germans had won the war, no one would have felt bad about it. But the Germans lost. How awkward.

It became necessary to convince non-Jewish Europeans that mass-murdering Jewish Europeans was wrong. It was a hard sell. Images of old men with sidelocks would only affirm that the Jews were weird and foreign, just as everyone had said before it became crass to say it. Piles of dead bodies were tasteless – which was also what everyone had said about the Jews. When we consider how Anne Frank became the universal face of ‘Holocaust remembrance’, we should remember who’s doing the remembering and what they choose to forget.

‘I still believe that people are really good at heart,’ Frank told herself in her diary. That was before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was shaved, stripped, tattooed and assigned to slave labour. Transferred from there to Belsen, she died of starvation and typhus in February or March 1945. Her childhood friend, Hannah Pick-Goslar, was reunited with her in Belsen, survived, and became a widely travelled Holocaust educator, dying last year aged 93. She did not believe that Anne would have felt the same about people’s good-heartedness after seeing Auschwitz.

Ghosted by the journalist Dina Kraft, My Friend Anne Frank is Pick-Goslar’s autobiography. I was ready to assume that the book was another child-centred narrative reminiscent of Roma Ligocka’s memoir The Girl in the Red Coat orJohn Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I also feared it was part of the cynical commercial penumbra around Frank that might as well be a halo, as she completes her transition into an icon of near-Christian innocence. But it isn’t these things. If you think Frank’s diary is a brave, wise and heart-warming testament to the indomitable human spirit, you really should read the sequel.

Born in Berlin in 1928, Pick-Goslar was raised in a home that ‘bridged German philosophy and Jewish tradition’. Her mother loved German literature, music and art, and gave her the middle name Elisabeth ‘in tribute to Goethe, her god’ (Elisabeth being the middle name of Goethe’s mother). Her father was a Social Democrat, a press officer for the Prussian state government and an adult returnee to Judaism. After Hitler’s rise to power, Pick-Goslar’s father secured a job in London with Unilever. But Unilever cancelled the offer and the visas when he told them that, as an observant Jew, he could not work on Saturdays. The family went to Amsterdam instead; Hannah and Anne became friends, and then the Germans invaded.

Deportations, arrests, assaults and suicides followed. The Jews in Amsterdam were slowly immobilised: their passports were stamped with ‘J’, their bicycles were taken and a curfew and guards turned their neighbourhood into a prison. Hannah’s mother became pregnant again, just before ‘we acquired our yellow stars’. The Frank family disappeared in July 1942 – to Switzerland, the Pick-Goslars thought. Hannah did not know that they were hiding in the recesses of a trap.

When German soldiers deported the Pick-Goslars to the transit camp at Westerbork, only one neighbour, a German Christian, attempted to intervene. The rest leaned out of their windows to watch, ‘their freshly- poured morning coffee next to them on their windowsills’. From Westerbork, the family went to Bergen-Belsen, where Hannah’s grandmother, mother and father died. The smell from the crematorium was ‘sour, like boiling glue’.

Anne Frank was taken west from Auschwitz to Belsen as the Russians advanced. She and Hannah were in different sections of the camp and spoke through the wire. Anne was ‘freezing’, ‘starving’ and ‘dressed only in rags’. Her parents were dead – gassed, she presumed – and her sister Margot was dying from typhus. ‘They took my hair.’ Then she disappeared. In that part of the camp, Pick-Goslar writes, a rope would be tied to a corpse’s leg to drag it to ‘one of the piles which were growing daily in between and in front of the barracks’.

‘What will we do if we’re ever… no, I mustn’t write that down,’ Frank wrote in May 1944. She was a born writer. Her diary gave her the fame she desired, and her readers the absolution they need. But, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1997, a convenient ‘fixation’ on the girl in the attic forestalls a reckoning with the truth. This ‘subversion of history’ encourages readers to ‘stew in an implausible and ugly innocence’, and a ‘shamelessness of appropriation’.

If Anne had survived, as Hannah and one her sisters did, would good Europeans love her diary, or would they view her as a Zionist enemy? Pick-Goslar trained as a nurse and lived in Jerusalem. An observant Jew, she called her three children, 11 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren her ‘revenge’ on Hitler.