Hélène Berr
Hardcover | Pages: 320 pages Rating: 4.06 | 1277 Users | 177 Reviews
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| Original Title: | Journal |
| ISBN: | 0771013132 (ISBN13: 9780771013133) |
| Edition Language: | English |
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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, Hélène 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 — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’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, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.” More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, 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: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — 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 fiancé, 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.
Identify Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
| Title | : | The Journal of Hélène Berr |
| Author | : | Hélène Berr |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 320 pages |
| Published | : | November 11th 2008 by McClelland & Stewart (first published 2008) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. History. World War II. Holocaust. Biography. Autobiography. Memoir. War. Cultural. France |
Rating Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
Ratings: 4.06 From 1277 Users | 177 ReviewsArticle Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
I just finished The Journal of Helene Berr, and I have to say that everyone should read it. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, it is an unbelievably moving first-hand account of a Jewish girl's perspective on the war, occupation, and genocide.I cannot even begin to express how this book has made me feel. Also like Anne, Helene died only days before her camp was liberated by the British, which is just such a cruel, heartbreaking thing. She was arrested on the one night her family decided to sleep inA journal kept by a young French woman living in Paris during WWII who, as a Jew, slowly became aware of where the increasingly restrictive policies were leading. She kept journal entries on her everyday life until the day of her arrest and deportation. The strength of this journal lies in its mixture of everyday, trivial events against a backdrop of increasing horror.
This book is a wonder and at the same time a poignant reminder of how many extraordinary people suffered an ignominious fate, when they were in fact GREAT human beings, writers, artists, or merely PEOPLE OF GOOD HEART. After having reread recently Etty Hillesum's books, I was absolutely taken by this Hélène Berr, this excellent human being who saved 500 children from deportation, who did all the voluntary (dangerous) work she did, who also might have escaped yet decided against it, who was
I was disappointed with the journal in the first year that Hélène wrote about her thoughts and activities. She is busy playing music, meeting with friends and falling in love. She does not seem to be greatly affected by what is happening to the Jews of Paris. Even when her father is sent to Drancy and subsequently released, events do not seem to have the profound emotional effect that one might expect. I kept thinking about the diary of Anne Frank and her amazing ability to document her
Journal of a young, 20-something Jewish-French woman in Paris during World War II. Began like a current blog--parties, shopping, school, meals--with family and friends--self-centered, self-conscious, revolving around people the reader neither knows nor cares about. Half-way in, the journal becomes more serious, more reflective, as the circumstances for Jews in France change. The most compelling thing about this book is what is not in it. There is the over-arching sense of terrible irony. The
A beautifully written journal. I couldn't keep track of all the people she mentions, but the message she's left behind is the huge number of people who were systematically being rounded up and sent off to concentration camps while the French people looked the other way.
I don't read a lot of journals, and this isn't typically the sort of thing I would pick up on my own. (This book is assigned reading for my Holocaust course.) But I am glad I read this. Helene Berr provides a glimpse at what life was like for the Jewish people of Paris in the 1940s, mixing in elements of her day-to-day life alongside the horrors of Nazi-occupied Paris. Though at some points devastating, Berr's writing is beautiful and her words, sadly, still resonate today, particularly in terms
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