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Journal (Paperback)
Helene Berr; Translated by David Bellos
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R341
R305
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From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of
the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving,
intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing
literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and
she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish
magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under
the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes
the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She
tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can:
studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there
is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and
her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent
to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death
march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only five days
before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal
she had left behind in Paris were "Horror! Horror! Horror!", a
hideous and poignant echo of her English studies. Helene Berr's
story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it
does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for
literature, for all that lasts.
Following in the tradition of timeless Holocaust literature such as
"Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl" and "Suite Francaise," this
important literary contribution by a young writer presents an
account of war-time Paris that is profoundly affecting and
devastatingly lucid.
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