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In the spring of 1942, Hélène Berr, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family and a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, began composing a journal of her life in Paris under the Occupation. For the next two years, Hélène wrote regularly in the journal until she and her parents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz on her twenty-third birthday. Her parents died within six months. Hélène was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in April 1945, just two weeks before British troops would come to liberate the camp. Entrusted to her family’s longtime cook before she was taken away, Hélène’s journal survived as a family heirloom until her family agreed to publish it last year. It has since become a number-one bestseller in France and will be published in fifteen countries worldwide in fall 2008.
A stunningly talented writer, Hélène’s account of war-time Paris is profoundly affecting and devastatingly lucid. But her journal also offers insight into the mind and heart of a bright and candid young woman with an indomitable spirit. Seeking refuge from the harsh realities of being a Jew in Vichy France, Hélène writes of literature, music, love, and the beauty of Paris, keeping calm and rational even as tragedy becomes inevitable. Her last entry reads: "Horror, Horror, Horror"—a poignant but heartbreaking echo of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and of her English literature studies.
Hauntingly memorable, The Journal of Hélène Berr is a treasure at last found. HÉLÈNE BERR was a student of English Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with her mother and father, and she died in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.
DAVID BELLOS (translator) was the first ever winner of the Man Booker International Translator’s prize for his translations of the distinguished Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. He is the translator of, among others, Fred Vargas and Georges Perec, and he has also written a number of award-winning literary biographies. He is currently the professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
Intelligent, heart-wrenchingly lucid prose…Berr herself is transformed from a privileged, promising youth into an adult who must grapple firsthand with horrifying questions about the existence of evil in the human experience. What elevates her account to the heroic are the clarity, calm, and compassion which she maintains throughout.”
Vital…this, alas, is how it truly was when good people were heartlessly abused and their lives were ruthlessly taken from them.”
[Berr’s] writing is soulful, loving and wise, making for heartbreaking reading more than 60 years later.”
Reading The Journal of Hélène Berr, a diary of denial, heartbreak, and resistance that her family’s cook passed on to surviving relatives after Hélène’s death at Bergen-Belsen, is like watching a sunset: an inevitable, achingly vivid journey into the dark.”
Fascinating…moves us deeply…we now have another important Holocaust book.”
Her vibrant voice – full of anguish, compassion, indignation and defiance – springs from these pages – as extraordinary a document of occupied France as Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.”
A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how inexorably it was swept under those tragic times.”
This important new addition to the literature on the Holocaust and the French Occupation is sure to be welcomed by general readers and scholars alike.”
A soul-clutching account of a young woman facing the march of the Nazi death machine in Paris…you will not soon forget her voice or her haunting story.”
Breathtaking…A must for anyone interested in the personal forces of history and who loves a riveting read.”
