Helene Berr - an assimilated French Jew - started writing a journal during the German occupation in April 1942 when she was 21 years old. Her family was well-to-do and she studied at the Sorbonne. She was intelligent, cultured, and sensitive, had many friends, and loved life.
For a time her life under the Germans remained fairly normal. She continued to visit friends and the family's summer place in the country, read English literature, and played violin at small recitals. She fell in love with a young man and wrote of her passion for nature and poetry.
Things started to change for her when Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star. She began to feel different from other people and thought about fleeing to the south of France where it was supposedly safer for Jews. However, she couldn't bring herself to act in what she considered a "cowardly" way and decided to remain in Paris.
She wrote about the roundups of Jews and their transfer to transit camps like Gurs and Drancy - and from there, somewhere to the east. Many of her friends were snatched off the streets and deported with no notice whatsoever. At this point she helped out at a Jewish aid organization, taking orphaned children for nature walks and working at the group's headquarters - until the Germans closed it and the children were deported.
Her last entry in February 1944 reads: "Horror. Horror. Horror." She was deported and sent to Auschwitz and later to Bergen-Belsen. By chance, Anne Frank, the famous diary writer, was there at the same time. Helene contracted typhus (also like Anne) and died after a beating a few days before the camp was liberated.
Helene Berr's journal is unique and moving and deserves to be widely read. Her voice sounds almost contemporary and in the first part of the book she writes often and intensely of her ideals, loves, and hopes for the future. Later, after the raids begin, her entries are about helping the children and watching her friends disappear. Her journal shows what it was like for French Jews under the Nazis - something less written about than the killing fields in Poland - from the gradual erosion of civil rights to street arrests and final deportation to an unknown, tragic destination.
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