Hélène Berr
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Hélène Berr (born 1921 in Paris, France; died April 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) was a Jewish French woman, who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France. In France she is considered to be a "French Anne Frank".
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[edit] Life
Hélène Berr is part of a Jewish family that had lived in France for several generations. She studied Russian and English literature at the Sorbonne university. She also played the violin.
She was not able to pass her final exam at the university because the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime prevented her from doing so. She was active in the “General Organization of Israelites in France” (Union générale des israélites de France, UGIF). On March 8, 1944 she was captured and later she was deported from Drancy to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She died in April 1945 in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp just a few weeks before the liberation of the camp.
[edit] Diary
Hélène Berr began her notes on April 7, 1942 at the age of 21. At first the horrors of anti-Semitism and the war do not show in her diary. The landscape around Paris, her first love and her friends at the Sorbonne are the topics of her diary.
In her text which has many citations of William Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll the war appears at most as an evil dream. But little by little she gets more conscious of her situation. She reports about the yellow badge that Jews were ordered to wear, of expulsions from public parks and about abuse against her family members and friends.
She hears rumours about gas chambers and complains about her fear of the future: We live from hour to hour, not even from day to day. A deported Jew told her about the plans of the Nazis. The last entry in the diary is about a conversation with a German prisoner of war. The diary ends on February 15, 1944 with a citation from Joseph Conrad´s Au cœur des ténèbres (Heart of Darkness) and the words„Horror! Horror! Horror!“
Berr ordered her notes to be released to her fiancé Jean Morawiecki after her death. Morawiecki later followed a career as a diplomat. He gave the diary that consists of 262 single pages to Berr's niece Mariette Job. She decided in the end to publish the diary which has been stored in the Shoah monument since 2002.
The book was published in France in January 2008. The Libération paper declared it as “the editorial event at the beginning of 2008”[1] and reminded the readers of the lively discussions about the book of Jewish Irene Nemirovsky. The first print of 24,000 copies was sold out after only 2 days [2].
[edit] See also
[edit] Literature
- Hélène Berr: Hélène Berr Journal, 1942-1944, Foreword by Patrick Modiano, Januar 2008, Éditions Tallandier, ISBN 9782847345001
- Préface du «Journal» d'Hélène Berr, Foreword (French)
[edit] External links
- France finds its own Anne Frank as young Jewish woman's war diary hits the shelves The Observer, 6. Januar 2008 (English)
- Helene Berr's Holocaust Diary Flies Off the Shelves SpiegelOnline International, 9. Januar 2008 (English)
- Student's Diary Tells of Occupied Paris, Excerpts from `Helene Berr Journal,' Jewish student's diary on Nazi occupation of Paris, Associated Press, 10. Januar 2008, (English)
[edit] References
- ^ „Ce sera l’événement éditorial du début de l’année 2008.“, La vie brève, Liberation, 20. Dezember 2007
- ^ DER SPIEGEL (German) No. 3/2008, p. 94
Journal by Helene Berr, translated by David Bellos, published by Quercus October 2008, ISBN 978 1 84724 574 8
