Journal - Helen Berr - (2008)
Library book
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 weeks 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 from The Heart of Darkness. 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.
This is a remarkable book and at times rather unbearable. Helen was writing for herself, she had no future audience in mind when she began her journal in 1942. She talks abiout lunches, studies, music and her new boyfriend as, with her head rather buried in the sand, she carries on her priveliged middle class life. However bit by terrible bit she has to confront the reality of the world around her with increasing fear. She stops writing her journal for a while - resuming it about a year later - intending it as a document for her boyfriend who had by then joined the free French. We only really know about Helen's bravery in rescuing Jewish children because her translator tells us about it. Helen herself refers very little, and quite vaguely about her work.
What I couldn't get past - and I have felt this when reading other biographical accounts of these times - was how human beings, millions of them - by virtue of doing nothing very much, allowed these things to happen. I don't believe human beings are so very different 70 odd years on, although much of our world is different and communications etc are vastly different. Therefore as a race - we have the capacity to allow similar to happen - and that is chilling.