Synopsis
Ranging from 1942 to her family's 1944 deportation, the personal journal of the daughter of a prominent Jewish family describes two years of life in war-time Paris under Nazi occupation, writing not only of the harsh realities of being a Jew in Vichy France but also of her love of literature and music, the beauty of Paris, and more.
Reviews
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda The Journal of Hélène Berr is a relatively late addition to that most sorrowful of genres, one that should never have come to exist: Holocaust literature. Its title subtly recalls the most famous testimony to the horror of life under Nazi domination, The Diary of Anne Frank. As it happens, these two vital and deeply appealing diarists described precisely the same period -- 1942 to 1944 -- but with a significant difference: While the adolescent Frank hid in her secret rooms in Amsterdam, Berr carried on with her life as a university student in occupied Paris. At least for a while. Ultimately, though, both shared the same fate: death at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The two young women were imprisoned there at the same time. They might have met. As the journal begins in the spring of 1942, Hélène Berr picks up a package left with a Paris concierge. France's most distinguished poet has kindly inscribed one of his books to her: "On waking, so soft is the light and so fine this living blue, Paul Valery." The next day Berr records that she and her friends are planning a picnic to her family's country place at Aubergenville. In Paris itself life consists of English classes, evenings of chamber music (Bach, Schumann, Chopin), visits to bookshops, the reading of Russian novels or romantic poetry. Berr confesses that she might be in love with a young man named Gérard -- until she meets a fellow student named Jean Morawiecki. Her heart is suddenly torn. Full of emotional confusion, the 20-year-old finds refuge in the study of Old English. A dozen pages of the journal go by before there is any mention of the Germans. After all, why discuss such unpleasantness? Hélène Berr belongs to a privileged family and class, her father being the eminent and valued managing director of Etablissements Kuhlmann, an important chemical company. Though Jewish, the Berrs are thoroughly French -- and haut-bourgeois -- in their outlook and culture. They certainly have almost nothing in common with the lower-class and sometimes now stateless émigré Jews occasionally being detained by the Germans. One could hardly imagine that such people and the elegant Berrs belonged to the same race -- at least not until the edict of May 29, 1942, ordering all Jews to wear a yellow star. At first Berr hesitates, considering it "degrading," but ultimately she changes her mind out of a brave sense of solidarity. Her pages about publicly displaying this hateful insignia are both piteous and shocking: "I was very courageous all day long. I held my head high, and I stared at other people so hard that it made them avert their eyes. But it's difficult . . . This afternoon it all started over again. I had to fetch Vivi Lafon from her English exam at 2:00. I did not want to wear the star, but I ended up doing so, thinking my reluctance was cowardly. First of all there were two girls in avenue de La Bourdonnais who pointed at me. Then at Ecole Militaire métro station . . . the ticket inspector said: 'Last carriage.' . . . I suddenly felt I was no longer myself, that everything had changed, that I had become a foreigner, as if I were in the grip of a nightmare. I could see familiar faces all around me, but I could feel their awkwardness and bafflement." It's all horrible, she knows, but then she thinks about Jean. The shy couple take walks, listen to records together, visit each other's families . . . and suddenly life is beautiful again. Berr is any young woman in love with a young man who loves her. But one evening she arrives home to discover that her father has been arrested. Raymond Berr spends three months in Drancy, an internment camp near Paris. Berr, her mother and sister visit, and they notice the working-class Jews all around them in the visitor's room. "The four of us were so distant from those poor folk that we could hardly conceive that Papa was a prisoner too." But Papa is a prisoner too, and slowly Berr's consciousness begins to alter. Etablissements Kuhlmann eventually pays a ransom to have Raymond Berr released, and the family continues its life in Paris. Some of their friends escape to Vichy France, and yet the Berrs decide to stay put, out of a sense of dignity, steadfastly refusing to be cowardly, believing it important to stand together with other Frenchmen. Berr herself touchingly confesses that it's "because of him [Jean] that I do not want to leave." Everyone is in denial. Nobody can quite believe that worse is yet to come. Then it is announced that "Jews are no longer entitled to cross the Champs-Elysées. Theaters and restaurants are off-limits." Neighbors begin to warn the family about a series of roundups. Hélène Berr starts to record what she hears as well as sees: "In Mlle Monsaingeon's neighborhood, a whole family, the father, the mother, and five children, gassed themselves to escape the roundup. "One woman threw herself out of a window. "Apparently several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape. They were threatened with the concentration camp if they failed to obey." More and more, Berr regards her journal as an aide-memoire, almost a reporter's notebook: "I'm not even keeping this diary anymore, I've no willpower left, I'm just putting down the salient facts so as to remember them." Take their young friend Pironneau. "Maman has gotten the details of his execution. It was on the day of the great parade, he was taken off at 7:00 A.M., with another man, in the prison van, with their coffins. There was nobody there to shoot them; they had to wait until 3:00 in the afternoon for a 'volunteer' to come and shoot them, obliging one of them to witness the other's death." Somewhat to her own surprise, Berr admits to a growing visceral hatred of the Krauts -- and to anger at the frequent indifference of non-Jewish Parisians. She begins to work part-time at a Jewish-run agency intended to help deportees and their families, soon taking homeless children under her wing, even organizing a scout troop. Suddenly, Jean announces that he is leaving to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French. At this point Hélène Berr stops writing in her journal for some 10 months, starting again only in the fall of 1943. Sadly, the once high-spirited young woman, full of plans for a life of scholarship and learning, dreaming of happiness with the man she loves, has virtually disappeared. The voice is somber now, philosophical, that of a mature woman who recognizes that death in a concentration camp is her most likely future. Berr's only aim, until arrested, is to bear witness: "I have a duty to write because other people must know. Every hour of every day there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill." To ensure at least her journal's survival, she passes along sections to the household cook, asking her to save the pages for Jean. Berr still daydreams about him, even imagines him reading the very page she is writing. But so much has been lost. "If only I could laugh! Jean liked laughing so much. Before, I used to laugh. Nowadays a sense of humor feels like sacrilege." Still, Berr periodically strives to maintain a semblance of her old existence, fighting off despair to imagine that she will somehow survive. She studies and frequently quotes her beloved Keats, transcribes the reflections on World War I of the novelist Roger Martin du Gard, plays music, even reads Winnie-the-Pooh and retells Kipling's "Rikki Tikki Tavi" to her young orphans. But she also finds herself loathing the barbaric Germans, who "dared to claim that I was not French." And the horrible stories continue. Thirteen children from an orphanage are seized to make up the required 1,000 deportees for a convoy to the "East." So many people have been killed, Berr writes, that "we have almost stopped grieving for the dead." Her cousin, who is also her best friend, disappears into a concentration camp. "How many souls of infinite worth, repositories of gifts others should have treated with humility and respect, have been similarly crushed and broken by Germanic brutality?" For a long time, she cannot fathom why children and pregnant women are being seized by the Germans, until she finally recognizes the truth and sets it down: "They have one aim, which is extermination." On March 8, 1944, at 7:30 in the morning, there was a knock at the door to the family's apartment. Raymond and Antoinette Berr died later that year in Auschwitz. Hélène Berr nonetheless managed to survive and in 1945 was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she grew sick from typhus and was then brutally beaten to death just five days before the camp was liberated by the British. David Bellos, the translator and biographer of Georges Perec, as well as a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton, has created an exemplary American edition of Berr's journal. It includes maps, an introductory essay, a memoir by Berr's niece Mariette Job, a brief history of "France and the Jews" (by Bellos), and a half-dozen useful lists of books, acronyms, names and places. The Journal of Hélène Berr has been an immense bestseller in Europe and deserves comparable success in this country. This, alas, is how it truly was when good people were heartlessly abused and their lives were ruthlessly taken from them.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Starred Review. Iwas abruptly assailed by the feeling that I had to describe reality, writes Berr midway through this urgent firsthand account of the devastation of Paris's Jewish community during WWII. This journal, which begins in 1942 as the record of a young woman's intense and buzzing inner life, becomes over time a record of human suffering: How will the world be cleansed unless it is made to understand the full extent of the evil it is doing? Berr, daughter of a prosperous assimilated Jewish family, was forced to quit her studies at the Sorbonne, joined an underground network to save Jewish children, saw her father arrested and beloved friends deported. But as compelling as external trials are the thoughts and feeling of this brilliant, passionate and brave young woman. As the noose tightens around Paris's Jews, Berr wonders if she still has the right to find momentary pleasure in reading; she questions herself for falling into instinctive, primitive hatred of Germans. Yet in one overpowering moment of rage, she rails against impassive Parisian Christians who crucify Christ every day. Berr died in Bergen-Belsen in 1944, five days before the camp's liberation, but her vibrant voice—full of anguish, compassion, indignation and defiance—springs from these pages—as extraordinary a document of occupied France as Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Photos. (Nov.)
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