Patron Review: The Journal of Helene Berr, by Helene Berr

I just read this new book at EWML library and was deeply moved by it.

The diary of a holocaust victim in WWII Paris, this rich, unforgettable account reveals a twenty-three year old Sorbonne graduate's struggle with the Nazi persecution of Jews in the "occupied" section of France. Southern France was the hated Vichy regime's domain. Her very personal reflections of daily life begin in 1942, and end early 1944. Her growing awareness of just who she is and her deepening love for the man to become her fiance is is oppressed by the darkening outside world. The Journal was never intended to be published, but miraculously survived.

We find in the Journal an immensely appealing, intelligent, musically-gifted woman enjoying her circle of friends, and her wealthy, adoring family. She was fluent in English and loved English literature. Her family were all born in France and had long a part of cultivated life in Paris. Her fatherwas the managing director of a large chemical company, with connections to many influential people.

When she learns of Jewish children in desperate straits because of parents who were "deported" she actively serves in an organization to help them. Near the end of the story, all forty-three persons who worked in this endeavor were seized and sent to Aushwitz.

We see in the Jounal an enormously charming, serious person who would be an ornament to any time, era, or place. Concern for her own safety, when she is urged to "go south" is submerged in the care of others, children, whom she sees as more needy, knowing full well that it will lead to her ultimate destruction. It does in March, 1944 when the Gestapo comes to their house at 7:30 am and arrests her and her family. Her fiancé escaped to the south of France and was still living when this Journal was translated and published. Helene's father and mother never lived to see the end of 1944.

What can one take away from yet another devastating account of senseless Nazi murder? The gratuitous and uselsss elimination of a beautiful person; a life cut short far too soon. What is left to say? To me it expresses the painful fragility of the very existence of a fellow human whose generosity and sympathy probably exceed our own, and whose rarity is still, to me, disheartening. I recently clipped a "letter to the editor" in which the writer reflected on exiting the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It recalled that it was impossible to "know what it was like." But continued that "as human beings, we have a duty to realize how little we know about what it was like."

Lou Wallis