Hélène Berr (27 March 1921 – April 1945) 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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Hélène Berr was born in Paris, France, a member 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 internment camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She died in April 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just 5 days before the liberation of the camp.
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 from 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 Shakespeare's Macbeth: Horror! Horror! Horror!“ [1]
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 at Paris' Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Museum) 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”[2] and reminded the readers of the lively discussions about the book of Jewish Irène Némirovsky. The first print of 24,000 copies was sold out after only 2 days.[3]
Journal by Helene Berr, translated by David Bellos, published by Quercus October 2008, ISBN 978 1 84724 574 8