The Last Goodbye
In the summer of 1942, as the world was closing in on Amsterdam’s Jewish community, Anne Frank was experiencing a normal teenage life, filled with new crushes and social gatherings. Her diary entry from July 1, 1942, introduces us to Helmuth “Hello” Silberberg, a boy who would become a profound and poignant part of her story. She described a pleasant evening where Hello came to meet her parents, and they enjoyed “tea and cookies.” She noted that she found it “kind of nice” that he was in love with her and that her sister Margot found him to be “eminently suitable.” But in a moment of candid honesty, she admitted she was not in love with him, and that it was “all right for me to have boys as friends.”
Hello, however, was clearly captivated. Years later, he would recall that Anne was “unusually articulate” and that he “became fascinated with her.” Their brief friendship, filled with innocent conversations and shared moments, was a quiet, fleeting period of joy before their lives were forever altered.
In a heartbreaking twist of fate, Hello was the last person to see Anne in freedom. Otto Frank confirmed this after the war, making their last meeting a powerful and tragic symbol of the life she was forced to leave behind. Hello survived the war, a living witness to a life that was so cruelly cut short. His memory of Anne and their brief friendship is a testament to the person she was before the world knew her as the girl in the Secret Annex.