Diary of a young woman before the Holocaust took her life
By Susan Rubin Suleiman
Globe Correspondent / January 28, 2009


'Oh not another Holocaust book!" some readers may exclaim. But this compelling story proves that the well of sympathy and indignation over unjust suffering is bottomless. The fate of Hélène Berr, while not new in a historical sense, moves us deeply. Deported to Auschwitz with her parents in March 1944, this young French Jewish woman died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945, shortly before liberation by British troops. (Anne Frank, a few years younger, was in the same camp and died around the same time).

Berr's journal, written in Paris from 1942 to 1944, was kept by surviving members of her family for decades. In 2002, her niece Mariette Job donated it to the archives of the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, and it was published and widely hailed in France last year. David Bellos, a professor of French at Princeton, has done a fine job of presenting it to American readers, translating it, and providing maps and a brief historical essay on Jews in France.

Born in 1921, Berr belonged to an upper middle-class Jewish family that had lived in France for generations. Her father, a chemical engineer and a decorated veteran of World War I, ran an important industrial firm; her mother, a gracious hostess, ran a household with several servants. Hélène studied English literature at the Sorbonne and was an accomplished violinist. When she started keeping her journal, in April 1942, her days consisted of going to the university, meeting friends in the Luxembourg Gardens, attending concerts or playing chamber music, and enjoying the beautiful spring weather.

In a way, the presence of German troops (they had occupied the capital in 1940) hardly touched her. Poor foreign Jews, who had been flooding into France throughout the 1930s from Eastern Europe, were aware of the dangers they faced as "stateless persons." The Berrs, however, felt protected. After all, they were valued French citizens. Hélène's father had even been allowed to keep his job when other Jews in high places lost theirs.

A few weeks later, everything changed. By a decree in May 1942, all Jews in the occupied zone (at that time, the northern half of the country - later, all of France would be occupied) were ordered to wear the Jewish star on their clothing. For Hélène, this was a humiliation difficult to bear. She describes in detail how it felt to see children in the street pointing at her, or to see her friends in the library look away.

Reading a diary like this is unsettling, because the writer obviously doesn't know, from day to day, what we know in retrospect. It is fascinating to track her growing awareness of the persecution of Jews, as her world begins to unravel. In June 1942, her father was arrested and imprisoned in the transit camp at Drancy, from which transports "to the East" were already leaving. He was ransomed by his firm after a few weeks, but from then on was essentially under house arrest. Hélène started to work as a volunteer for UGIF, the Jewish organization that had been created by the Vichy government (with the Germans) to represent the Jewish community. While some people have blamed UGIF leaders for "collaboration," it did save some Jewish children and tried to help families. Hélène Berr was particularly devoted to young children in group homes, many of whom did not survive the war.

In November 1942, she suffers a huge loss. The young man with whom she has fallen in love (she shyly reports on their growing romance) leaves Paris to join General Charles de Gaulle in London. Hélène interrupts her diary for eight months, and when she takes it up again in August 1943, we realize that her sense of her fate - and of the fate of Jews in general - has become tragic. She now writes for Jean, her absent fiancé, and has the premonition that he will read her posthumously. She feels increasingly isolated from her fellow French citizens, who have shut their eyes and minds to the suffering of Jews. She herself can think of little else: "Now tragedy has become unrelievedly dark, and tension is a permanent condition," she writes a few weeks before her arrest. The last words of her diary are in English: "Horror! Horror! Horror!"

Hélène and her parents seem to have chosen not to try to save themselves by leaving Paris. Her siblings survived, and thanks to them and to her one-time fiancé (who received her manuscript after the war), we now have another important Holocaust book.

Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook," among other works.

Michael Dirda on 'The Journal of Helene Berr'
A girlish diary that turned into a chilling record.

The Journal of Hélène Berr is a relatively late addition to that most sorrowful of genres, one that should never have come to exist: Holocaust literature. Its title subtly recalls the most famous testimony to the horror of life under Nazi domination, The Diary of Anne Frank. As it happens, these two vital and deeply appealing diarists described precisely the same period -- 1942 to 1944 -- but with a significant difference: While the adolescent Frank hid in her secret rooms in Amsterdam, Berr carried on with her life as a university student in occupied Paris. At least for a while. Ultimately, though, both shared the same fate: death at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The two young women were imprisoned there at the same time. They might have met.

As the journal begins in the spring of 1942, Hélène Berr picks up a package left with a Paris concierge. France's most distinguished poet has kindly inscribed one of his books to her: "On waking, so soft is the light and so fine this living blue, Paul Valery." The next day Berr records that she and her friends are planning a picnic to her family's country place at Aubergenville. In Paris itself life consists of English classes, evenings of chamber music (Bach, Schumann, Chopin), visits to bookshops, the reading of Russian novels or romantic poetry. Berr confesses that she might be in love with a young man named Gérard -- until she meets a fellow student named Jean Morawiecki. Her heart is suddenly torn. Full of emotional confusion, the 20-year-old finds refuge in the study of Old English. A dozen pages of the journal go by before there is any mention of the Germans.

After all, why discuss such unpleasantness? Hélène Berr belongs to a privileged family and class, her father being the eminent and valued managing director of Etablissements Kuhlmann, an important chemical company. Though Jewish, the Berrs are thoroughly French -- and haut-bourgeois -- in their outlook and culture. They certainly have almost nothing in common with the lower-class and sometimes now stateless émigré Jews occasionally being detained by the Germans. One could hardly imagine that such people and the elegant Berrs belonged to the same race -- at least not until the edict of May 29, 1942, ordering all Jews to wear a yellow star.

At first Berr hesitates, considering it "degrading," but ultimately she changes her mind out of a brave sense of solidarity. Her pages about publicly displaying this hateful insignia are both piteous and shocking:

"I was very courageous all day long. I held my head high, and I stared at other people so hard that it made them avert their eyes. But it's difficult . . . This afternoon it all started over again. I had to fetch Vivi Lafon from her English exam at 2:00. I did not want to wear the star, but I ended up doing so, thinking my reluctance was cowardly. First of all there were two girls in avenue de La Bourdonnais who pointed at me. Then at Ecole Militaire métro station . . . the ticket inspector said: 'Last carriage.' . . . I suddenly felt I was no longer myself, that everything had changed, that I had become a foreigner, as if I were in the grip of a nightmare. I could see familiar faces all around me, but I could feel their awkwardness and bafflement." It's all horrible, she knows, but then she thinks about Jean. The shy couple take walks, listen to records together, visit each other's families . . . and suddenly life is beautiful again. Berr is any young woman in love with a young man who loves her.

But one evening she arrives home to discover that her father has been arrested. Raymond Berr spends three months in Drancy, an internment camp near Paris. Berr, her mother and sister visit, and they notice the working-class Jews all around them in the visitor's room. "The four of us were so distant from those poor folk that we could hardly conceive that Papa was a prisoner too." But Papa is a prisoner too, and slowly Berr's consciousness begins to alter.

Etablissements Kuhlmann eventually pays a ransom to have Raymond Berr released, and the family continues its life in Paris. Some of their friends escape to Vichy France, and yet the Berrs decide to stay put, out of a sense of dignity, steadfastly refusing to be cowardly, believing it important to stand together with other Frenchmen. Berr herself touchingly confesses that it's "because of him [Jean] that I do not want to leave." Everyone is in denial. Nobody can quite believe that worse is yet to come.

Then it is announced that "Jews are no longer entitled to cross the Champs-Elysées. Theaters and restaurants are off-limits." Neighbors begin to warn the family about a series of roundups. Hélène Berr starts to record what she hears as well as sees:

"In Mlle Monsaingeon's neighborhood, a whole family, the father, the mother, and five children, gassed themselves to escape the roundup. One woman threw herself out of a window. Apparently several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape. They were threatened with the concentration camp if they failed to obey."

More and more, Berr regards her journal as an aide-memoire, almost a reporter's notebook: "I'm not even keeping this diary anymore, I've no willpower left, I'm just putting down the salient facts so as to remember them."

Take their young friend Pironneau. "Maman has gotten the details of his execution. It was on the day of the great parade, he was taken off at 7:00 A.M., with another man, in the prison van, with their coffins. There was nobody there to shoot them; they had to wait until 3:00 in the afternoon for a 'volunteer' to come and shoot them, obliging one of them to witness the other's death."

Somewhat to her own surprise, Berr admits to a growing visceral hatred of the Krauts -- and to anger at the frequent indifference of non-Jewish Parisians. She begins to work part-time at a Jewish-run agency intended to help deportees and their families, soon taking homeless children under her wing, even organizing a scout troop. Suddenly, Jean announces that he is leaving to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French.

At this point Hélène Berr stops writing in her journal for some 10 months, starting again only in the fall of 1943. Sadly, the once high-spirited young woman, full of plans for a life of scholarship and learning, dreaming of happiness with the man she loves, has virtually disappeared. The voice is somber now, philosophical, that of a mature woman who recognizes that death in a concentration camp is her most likely future. Berr's only aim, until arrested, is to bear witness:

"I have a duty to write because other people must know. Every hour of every day there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill." To ensure at least her journal's survival, she passes along sections to the household cook, asking her to save the pages for Jean. Berr still daydreams about him, even imagines him reading the very page she is writing. But so much has been lost. "If only I could laugh! Jean liked laughing so much. Before, I used to laugh. Nowadays a sense of humor feels like sacrilege."

Still, Berr periodically strives to maintain a semblance of her old existence, fighting off despair to imagine that she will somehow survive. She studies and frequently quotes her beloved Keats, transcribes the reflections on World War I of the novelist Roger Martin du Gard, plays music, even reads Winnie-the-Pooh and retells Kipling's "Rikki Tikki Tavi" to her young orphans. But she also finds herself loathing the barbaric Germans, who "dared to claim that I was not French." And the horrible stories continue. Thirteen children from an orphanage are seized to make up the required 1,000 deportees for a convoy to the "East." So many people have been killed, Berr writes, that "we have almost stopped grieving for the dead." Her cousin, who is also her best friend, disappears into a concentration camp. "How many souls of infinite worth, repositories of gifts others should have treated with humility and respect, have been similarly crushed and broken by Germanic brutality?" For a long time, she cannot fathom why children and pregnant women are being seized by the Germans, until she finally recognizes the truth and sets it down: "They have one aim, which is extermination."

On March 8, 1944, at 7:30 in the morning, there was a knock at the door to the family's apartment. Raymond and Antoinette Berr died later that year in Auschwitz. Hélène Berr nonetheless managed to survive and in 1945 was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she grew sick from typhus and was then brutally beaten to death just five days before the camp was liberated by the British.

David Bellos, the translator and biographer of Georges Perec, as well as a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton, has created an exemplary American edition of Berr's journal. It includes maps, an introductory essay, a memoir by Berr's niece Mariette Job, a brief history of "France and the Jews" (by Bellos), and a half-dozen useful lists of books, acronyms, names and places. The Journal of Hélène Berr has been an immense bestseller in Europe and deserves comparable success in this country. This, alas, is how it truly was when good people were heartlessly abused and their lives were ruthlessly taken from them.

A newly published diary reveals a French counterpart to Amsterdam’s Anne Frank.

When The Journal of Hélène Berr was published in France early this year it became an overnight publishing sensation. Now, as the book is released in English, readers in the US will have a chance to discover why.

Hélène Berr is being called the Anne Frank of France. Like Anne Frank, she was a young Jewish woman living in Europe during the Nazi occupation who kept a diary. Unlike her younger counterpart, however, she was French and did not live in hiding. A gifted young student at the Sorbonne and daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Berr lived with her parents in their Parisian home until March 1944, when they were arrested and sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

In intelligent, heart-wrenchingly lucid prose, Berr chronicles the escalating horror of the last couple years of their lives. 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.

Berr’s diary begins in April 1942, when, despite the German occupation of her country, she is still living a fairly normal life. Her entries brim with enthusiasm for her family, English literature (her subject at the Sorbonne), classical music (she was also a gifted violinist), and Paris itself.

Her biggest worry at the time is whether or not she is really in love with Gérard, her absent boyfriend. Amid her confusion on this topic, she meets fellow student Jean Morawiecki, a young man of “energy and moral strength.” They fall in love and become engaged.

But Hélène’s joy is short-lived. In June, her mother tells her about the yellow star they must now wear to identify themselves as Jews. Hélène tries not to think about it.

“But I knew there was something unpleasant at the back of my mind,” she writes.

A week later, she wears the star to the Sorbonne for the first time and, “Suddenly [I] felt I was no longer myself, that everything had changed, that I had become a foreigner, as if I were in the grip of a nightmare.”

The nightmares would only multiply. Soon, her father, Raymond, is arrested. (Because of his utility to the government as a prominent chemist, the Berrs had mistakenly imagined that he would not be touched.)

“I could no longer quite understand why the whole of Paris looked so beautiful on this radiant morning in June,” a devastated Hélène writes on that day.

The Berrs are able to free Raymond by paying a bribe but they are never again free of fear.

Although many of Hélène’s Jewish friends and siblings have now fled Paris, she resolves to stay and help her parents and others. “Leaving would be an act of cowardice,” she writes. “There are also the compensations of friendship and of community in resisting.”

She eventually leaves off all connection with the Sorbonne (“I no longer belong among the studious,” she decides) and devotes herself to helping other Jews, particularly children whose parents have been arrested.

Struggling to keep fear at bay, she and her family create new routines. “In the daytime, life forms a crust on top of thought,” she writes.

But horror comes closer and closer to the Berrs. There are more arrests, more deportations, and gradually it becomes hard to imagine any but a tragic end for them.

Hélène finally decides to entrust the pages of her journal to the family’s cook, Andrée Bardiau, who is not Jewish. She instructs Bardiau to keep them and – should Hélène not survive – to give them someday to Morawiecki (who has since escaped to fight with the French resistance.)

At the war’s end, Morawiecki did receive the journal and shared a copy with the surviving members of the Berr family.

After decades of privacy, the family finally made the decision to publish Hélène’s writing as a book (a development oddly parallel to the publication last year of “Suite Française,” a novel written by Jewish author Irène Némirovsky during the Nazi occupation of France, smuggled out by family, and just published now.)

“Will anybody ever be able to understand what it was like to live through this appalling tempest?” Hélène wonders in her journal in the fall of 1943. “Will they ever acknowledge the merit … there was in preserving a sense of fairness in the mind and softness in the heart throughout this nightmare?”

Thanks to the publication of this book, the answer to Hélène’s question is yes. Millions of readers will now be able to at least begin to comprehend and to appreciate.

Broken Stories

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

As reported last month in The New York Times, a trove of evidence of Kristallnacht, with piles of looted Jewish possessions, was found in a trash heap in the woods outside of a small town some 30 miles north of Berlin. The books, papers, ritual objects, dishes and other materials of life were delivered by train, the day after Kristallnacht, and have again been looted over the years. But much remains in the large field, as though hidden in the open — stories waiting to be told. Now, Israeli and German researchers hope to sift through this unlikely archive.

As the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht approaches on Nov. 9, many, many books continue to be published relating to the Holocaust. Several of the latest are works that were written decades ago, some during and right after the war, and then hidden, or lost and forgotten, and now published in English for the first time.

More new books are released than we have pages to report on, and each book mentioned here deserves more attention than we have space. Each of the memoirists and historians, novelists too, provides, as Krystyna Chiger writes in her memoir, “The Girl in the Green Sweater,” an “answer to forgetting.”

“The Journal of Helene Berr” (Weinstein Books) translated by David Bellos, was begun in the spring of 1942, when Berr, age 21 and a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, began to describe everyday life in Paris under German occupation. At first, her prosperous, cultivated and assimilated life was largely unchanged, and then, as she wrote, “There are things occurring now that I used to think only happened in novels.”

Berr, who helped children through her work in the underground, saw herself as French and Jewish. She wrote pages full of literary references, and would give batches of them to the family’s cook for safekeeping. The journal was not intended for publication, but rather for her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki. Her writing is soulful, loving and wise, making for heartbreaking reading more than 60 years later.

The author was arrested in March 1944 and taken to Bergen-Belsen, where she died five days before the liberation of the camp. Anne Frank died a month earlier in the same concentration camp.

Mariette Job, a niece of the author, tracked down the manuscript, which was in the possession of Morawiecki, and with his support saw to the book’s first publication earlier this year in France, where it became a No. 1 best-seller.

The diary of a young Sorbonne graduate who died at Bergen-Belsen, 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. Already a publishing sensation in France, it survived in obscurity as a family heirloom until relatively recently, when the original was first displayed at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. The diary recounts the experiences and private thoughts of the 21-year-old daughter of a prominent Jewish family as she and those she loved suffered the indignities of life under the Occupation prior to their arrest and ultimate deportation and death. A student of English literature with a decidedly intellectual bent, Berr sought respite in reading, writing, and music to escape the tragedy unraveling around her. While surprisingly devoid of straightforward political commentary, the diary reveals that the "sinister meaning of it all" was not immediately apparent to Berr and those around her, itself a significant commentary on the mood and insecurities of the time. Translated by Bellos (French & comparative literature, Princeton Univ.; Georges Perec: A Life in Words ), the volume includes useful annotations as well as a postscript that places the plight of French Jewry within historical context. Highly recommended.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Mireille Juchau | October 25, 2008

"I found myself looking at pages regularly filled with small, calm, extraordinarily even handwriting. I found myself confronted with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling that I couldn't bring myself to tamper with, and beside which literature was something of which I felt ashamed." (My emphasis.)

In finding literature shameful, Duras was echoing some well-known statements about the appropriate way to represent the full horror of the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath of the event it was the seemingly unadorned factual account or testimony, with its raw urgency, that was considered the most crucial material: critical as evidence in war crime trials, and for revealing atrocities that were so disturbingly euphemised in Nazi documentation. But now, more than 60 years on, when so much is known about the Holocaust, what kind of power do newly discovered testimonies possess?

Journal, the diary of French Jew Helene Berr, had sold 26,000 copies three days after its release in France earlier this year (the recent translation into English is by David Bellos). Berr, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944, has been dubbed "France's Anne Frank" and her detailed, lyrical chronicle of her last years in Paris casts new light on the experience of French Jews under German occupation.

Though her Journal begins two years into the occupation, Berr's prose initially sings with breathless optimism. Aged 21, passionate, forthright and still anticipating a rich future, she spends time with friends at the Sorbonne, playsviolin and is preoccupied with her fiance-to-be. But these descriptions are soon punctuated by existential questions that combine the expected torment of early adulthood with more sobering realisations about the human capacity for depravity.

She notes she might "split the world" between those who can't understand her plight and those who can after encountering a friend on the Pont Mirabeau who blithely asks (of the Jewish curfew), "Don't you miss being able to go out in the evening?" She suspects she will "renounce a part of humanity ... stop believing that all men are perfectible".

What makes Journal vital historical evidence as well as a self-consciously literary work is Berr's thoughtful attention to the intricate and incremental effects of persecution in occupied Paris, a city whose romantic reputation seems relatively unscathed by this period of history. Berr testifies not just to the brutality of the Germans but also to how anti-Semitism is tolerated and sometimes facilitated by her fellow Parisians.

She elucidates the emotional and social effects of le statut des Juifs, the laws implemented by the Vichy regime. "Jews are no longer entitled to cross the Champs Elysees. Theatre and restaurants are off limits. The news has been couched in normal and hypocritical terms, as if it was an established fact that Jews are persecuted in France, as if it was a given."

While Berr confronts her fellow Parisians' unwillingness to comprehend or protest against the edicts that make her feel outcast and inhuman, she debates the merits of following orders. Her descriptions of wearing the yellow star are among the most compelling in her diary. Nuanced and thoughtful, her prose explores the psychological and emotional effects of this subjection. Berr defiantly pins the star to her clothes, "thinking my reluctance was cowardly", and though initially emboldened by strangers who smile or remark "It's disgusting", she's soon met by friends who are embarrassed, or who make excruciating, special efforts to be nice.

One friend, Molinie, speaks kindly while his eyes "drifted away from my star"; other students find it distasteful, as if by wearing it she has forced them to confront something beneath them.

"I suddenly felt I was no longer myself, that everything had changed, that I had become a foreigner, as if I was in the grip of a nightmare ... as if my forehead had been seared by a branding iron." Yet, soon after this she spends a happy day at the family's country home, picking strawberries and cherries.

Journal compels with such strange juxtapositions: moments of privileged leisure alongside the Berr family's deepening sense of desolation.

As in many accounts of the Holocaust, the most poignant events are often those that, with the benefit of hindsight, seem frankly horrific to us but had more complex emotional effects at the time. When Berr finally hears of friends who have been deported, she writes with childish delight, knowing they are alive: "I could dance, run and skip. I don't know how to restrain my joy." Yet the postcard bearing this news has come from Birkenau, the camp adjoining Auschwitz, a place not yet synonymous with genocide.

When Berr's father is arrested, her family discovers it is because his yellow star was stitched incorrectly. Ironically, his wife had affixed it with hooks and press-studs so it could be more easily worn on several different suits.

This ludicrous pretext for arrest appears without comment from Berr, perhaps because the petty cruelty of the regime is more readily apparent now history has illuminated it, or because her father's transfer to Drancy internment camp is more urgent. His departure sets off such "excitement" in the house as the family rushes to pack his things, "it was like we were getting ready to go on a journey".

Well connected and with opportunities to escape (her father is released through some influential associates), the family nevertheless remains in Paris.

"Maybe," Berr speculates in December 1943, after rumours that all Jews are to be arrested in January, "it's all just more scaremongering. Should we abandon everything and take such a grave decision (to go into hiding) when it's quite possible that nothing will happen at all?"

Journal ends with a letter written from a police cell underneath the Raincy circus in March 1944. Full of coded messages, this note contains Berr's last words to her sister before she is transported to Belsen on her 23rd birthday. And though it is signed "All is well darling. See you soon", the final diary entry reveals she fully understood the fate of those deported by the Nazis. Her last words are: "Horror, horror, horror."

Journal reminds us that testimony can be both profoundly truthful and literary, and though this diary characteristically contains all the quotidian detail of ordinary life, such occasionally unexciting material is an utterly necessary counterpoint to the creeping banality of evil that tormented and ultimately destroyed its author.

Mireille Juchau is the author of Burning In, published by Giramondo.

How the diaries of Hélène Berr, the 'Anne Frank of France', came to be published

The belated discovery of Hélène Berr's diaries has seen her hailed as the Anne Frank of France. Elizabeth Grice meets the niece whose perseverance led to their publication

'It is raining Death on earth," Hélène Berr wrote in her journal on November 1, 1943.

She was a young Parisian student, a Jew, whose friends were daily disappearing to the concentration camps and she knew the net was tightening. Rumours had reached her that asphyxiating gas was being administered to convoys of Jewish deportees at the Polish border.

"To think that every person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute," she wrote, "is probably destined to suffer this terrible fate. To think that it is not over yet, that it continues with diabolical regularity.

"To think that if I am arrested this evening (which I have been expecting for ages now), in a week's time I'll be in Upper Silesia, maybe dead, and my whole life, with the infinity I sense within me, will be snuffed out..."

Intimate and harrowing, her diary was destined for her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki, who had left Paris to join the Free French, and she was clear-eyed enough to realise that it would probably be all that survived of her.

But as the horrors of Nazi occupation increased, she began to see that it had a wider purpose: she was bearing witness to a persecution that many others refused to see.

As she wrote, Hélène, a brilliant English student at the Sorbonne, gave batches of loose pages to the family cook, Andrée Bardiau.

"It makes me happy to think that if I am taken, Andrée will have kept these pages, which are a piece of me, the most precious part, because no other material thing matters to me any more; what must be rescued is the soul and the memory it contains."

She began writing in April 1942, when she was 21 and life was still relatively good for prosperous professionals like the Berrs.

But their initial belief that they would be protected by their centuries of Frenchness was pitifully eroded - first as they were forced to wear the yellow star, then as friends and colleagues were rounded up and stories filtered back of death and degradation.

"I sense that a great dark path awaits me," she wrote.

Her final entry on February 15, 1944, ended: "Horror! Horror! Horror!"

Three weeks later, the Gestapo came for them during the night. Hélène Berr and her parents had dropped their guard and were sleeping at home instead of at the house of their non-Jewish cook.

They were arrested and deported to Auschwitz on her 23rd birthday, March 27. Antoinette Berr was gassed and her husband, Raymond, an inspiration to the other internees, was poisoned.

Hélène survived the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Sick with typhus, she was beaten to death because she was too weak to get up from her bunk for reveille.

O Reading Room

Her Secret Life

"Why do I bother to make everything so dramatic?" wonders a vivacious, passionately intellectual young Jewish student at Paris's Sorbonne in 1942. A devotee of Keats and Mozart, she probes the heady mysteries of love -- even as the Nazis savagely infiltrate her city and her life. Reading The Journal of Hélène Berr (Weinstein), 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.

“[A] brilliant, passionate and brave young woman…[Berr’s] 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.”

The Journal of Hélène Berr

Hélène Berr, trans. from the French and with intro. and afterword by David Bellos, afterword by Mariette Job.
Weinstein $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-60286-063-3

“I was abruptly assailed by the feeling that I had to describe reality,” writes Berr midway through this urgent firsthand account of the devastation of Paris's Jewish community during WWII. This journal, which begins in 1942 as the record of a young woman's “intense and buzzing” inner life, becomes over time a record of human suffering: “How will the world be cleansed unless it is made to understand the full extent of the evil it is doing?” Berr, daughter of a prosperous assimilated Jewish family, was forced to quit her studies at the Sorbonne, joined an underground network to save Jewish children, saw her father arrested and beloved friends deported. But as compelling as external trials are the thoughts and feeling of this brilliant, passionate and brave young woman. As the noose tightens around Paris's Jews, Berr wonders if she still has the right to find momentary pleasure in reading; she questions herself for falling into “instinctive, primitive” hatred of Germans. Yet in one overpowering moment of rage, she rails against impassive Parisian Christians who “crucify Christ every day.” Berr died in Bergen-Belsen in 1944, five days before the camp's liberation, but 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. (Nov.)

The journal of a bright young woman who was among the many French Jews funneled through Drancy, the Parisian collection camp, to Nazi death camps.

The book opens on April 7, 1942, when the author was 21. She was reading Shakespeare, Hemingway and Keats. She had a warm circle of friends and family. She wrote of her Sorbonne graduate studies in English literature, of chamber music, picnics and the opposite sex. She received regular postcards from an absent boyfriend (en route to join the Free French), but her new sweetheart was handsome Jean Morawiecki, whom she met at the Sorbonne. Berr wrote of belles-lettres, Beethoven and the bewilderment of young love in that summer of ’42. Then came the decree that all Jews must wear a yellow badge with a six-pointed star. (Her father was arrested for wearing his improperly affixed.) Jews could not attend theaters or restaurants or cross the Champs-Elysées. The edicts brought increasing isolation; Berr worked in a clandestine group that placed Jewish children with families in unoccupied France. Gradually quotidian life succumbed to the inescapable. In her diary, Berr to turned to philosophy and thoughts of mortality, as in the entry that commented, “I am leading a posthumous life.” Such big thoughts combine with small daily concerns in the journal, and it’s the small things that give her account its considerable power. The reader, not the writer, is always aware of the impending end: Berr died at Bergen-Belsen five days before the British liberated the camp. Her diary was passed along several pages at a time and eventually reached its intended reader, Morawiecki, who had escaped to fight the Nazis. “I’ll come back, you know,” she wrote. “Jean, I will come back.” And, in a way, she has; the journal recently became a bestseller in France. Useful additional material is provided by translator Bellos.

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.