The Journal of Hélène Berr

The Journal of Hélène Berr

Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.

On April 7, 1942, HÃ©lÃ¨ne Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris â€” about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the â€œboy with the grey eyes,â€ about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by Franceâ€™s Nazi occupiers. Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking.

The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, â€œI held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But itâ€™s hard.â€ More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancÃ©, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: â€œHorror! Horror! Horror!â€ Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went â€” as was discovered later â€” on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp.

The journal did eventually reach her fiancÃ©, and for over fifty years it was kept private. In 2002, it was donated to the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. Before it was first published in France in January 2008, translation rights had already been sold for twelve languages.

Country	USA
Author	Helene Berr
Binding	Hardcover
Brand	Brand: McClelland n Stewart
EAN	9780771013133
Edition	First Canadian Edition
Feature	Used Book in Good Condition
Format	International Edition
ISBN	0771013132
Label	McClelland & Stewart
Manufacturer	McClelland & Stewart
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	320
PublicationDate	2008-11-11
Publisher	McClelland & Stewart
ReleaseDate	2008-11-11
Studio	McClelland & Stewart

The Journal of Hélène Berr

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