Journal

Product Description

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 & a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin & she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the ”selfish magic” of English literature & poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation & her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She tries to remain calm & rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there is fear for the future, & eventually, in March 1944, Helene & her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp & soon sent to Auschwitz. She went
- as is later discovered
- on the death march to Bergen-Belsen & there she died in 1945, only five days before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal she had left behind in Paris were ” Horror! Horror! Horror!”, a hideous & poignant echo of her English studies. 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.