The Journal of Hélène Berr

By: Hélène Berr, David Bellos - translator

Narrated by: Guila Clara Kessous

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, started to keep a journal about her life in Paris - about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the "boy with the grey eyes", and about 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, she writes, "I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it's hard." 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 ends with the chilling words: "Horror! Horror! Horror!" Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, just days before the liberation of the camp.

The Journal was found by Mariette Job, niece of Hélène Berr, in 1992 at Jean Morawiecki's place, Hélène's fiançé. In 2002, Mariette Job gave the manuscript to the Memorial. Before it was first published in France in January 2008, translation rights had already been sold for 26 languages.

The French actress Guila Clara Kessous continued this book's miraculous narrative by bringing it to life in audio with her nuanced, polished performance.

The story of Hélène Berr has been adapted by Jérome Prieur in a TV documentary and has been dubbed in English by Guila Clara Kessous.

©2008 Helene Berr. English translation copyright 2008 by David Bellos (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A voice to remember." (Elie Wiesel, author of Night)
"Her vibrant voice - full of anguish, compassion, indignation and defiance - springs from these pages…as extraordinary a document of occupied France as Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise." ( Publishers Weekly)
"A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how inexorably it was swept under those tragic times." ( Kirkus Reviews)

New perspective

Difficult at times following the thick French accent. Last half of journal was riveting. I really got a feel for what they were experiencing and feeling.

Moving and unforgettable

Helene is quite a remarkably brave young woman. I was moved by her love for life and her detail on her surroundings she wrote so eloquently about,

We should never forget

In 2002 Helene Berr’s niece Mariette Job donated Helene’s journal to The Archives of the Holocaust Memorial in Paris. It was published in France in 2008. David Bellos of Princeton University translated the journal into English for American publication. Helene Berr’s journal is an account of living in profound fear, day by day, in German occupied Paris during the Second World War. The journal covers two years recording what happened to the Jews under the Vichy government. Berr’s father was a WWI veteran and a prominent industrialist. Helene tells the how she felt the first day she had to wear the yellow star. She was a student of English at the Sorbonne, and a gifted violinist. Berr tells the story of her friends, neighbors and family being set off to the concentration camps and how the people rushed into their homes to steal everything. Helene was sent to Auschwitz on her 23 birthday and after 8 months she was moved to Bergen-Belsen. She survived in Bergen-Belsen for 5 months; she was beaten to death five days before the British liberated the camp. Her writing is simple and sometimes uses enchanting prose telling a story of monstrous events. Guila Clara Kessous a French actress did a great job narrating the book.