Hélène Berr

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".

Life

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.

The entrance to Bergen-Belsen

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.

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 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.

Yellow badge made mandatory by the Vichy regime in France

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!“

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” 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.

See also

• Hana Brady - Jewish girl and holocaust victim; subject of the children's book Hana's Suitcase
• Helga Deen – wrote a diary in Herzogenbusch concentration camp (Camp Vught)
• Anne Frank - a Jewish girl and holocaust victim; author of The Diary of a Young Girl
• Etty Hillesum – wrote a diary in Amsterdam and Camp Westerbork
• Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis
• Věra Kohnová - a Czech diarist
• David Koker – wrote a diary in Herzogenbusch concentration camp (Camp Vught)
• Janet Langhart – Writer of one act play "Anne and Emmett"
• Rutka Laskier - a Polish diarist
• List of diarists
• List of posthumous publications of Holocaust victims
• Sam Pivnik
• Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet who influenced her thoughts and diary writings.
• Tanya Savicheva
• Sophie Scholl - German student executed by the Nazis
• Henio Zytomirski - Polish boy who was a holocaust victim

Literature

• Hélène Berr: Hélène Berr Journal, 1942-1944, Foreword by Patrick Modiano, January 2008, Éditions Tallandier, ISBN 9782847345001
• Préface du «Journal» d'Hélène Berr, Foreword (French)

External links

• Lise Jaillant, A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion: Rediscovered Manuscripts and the Memory of the Holocaust in Contemporary France, Clio 39.3 (Summer 2010): 359-79.
• France finds its own Anne Frank as young Jewish woman's war diary hits the shelves The Observer, 6. January 2008 (English)
• Helene Berr's Holocaust Diary Flies Off the Shelves SpiegelOnline International, 9 January 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 January 2008, (English)

References

Journal by Helene Berr, translated by David Bellos, published by Quercus October 2008, ISBN 978 1 84724 574 8