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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History Through The Eyes Of One, November 26, 2008
I had a sense of sinking and could only repeat: Stop. Stop. Stop.,
every fiber of my body engaged in stopping the unrelenting forward march of the Nazis. Of course I knew ultimately what was in store for the young French Jew Helene Berr, but as I read the new English translation of The Journal Of Helene Berr, I found myself helpless to do anything less than hope against hope that she and her family, and the women of the U.G.I.F. and the orphaned children, indeed all those who would be touched by the hand of evil, would be spared.
The Journal is the intimate, enchanting diary of the appealing, whip smart Helene Berr. Twenty-one, an eager, romantic student at the Sorbonne, Helene entrusts her most intimate hopes and dreams, passions and fears to her journal through the tense, horrifying years of 1942 through 1944. As the German presence in Paris becomes increasingly ubiquitous and rumors swirl and solidify into terrifying fact, Helene writes. She writes of the death of a puppy love, the flowering of a new, deeper love, the arrest of her father, the arrests and murders of friends and strangers, and her need to be courageous, not only for herself, but for others.
With wit, clarity, and an almost shocking intelligence, she allows us to see a huge historical event through the eyes of one and thereby the whole. She embodies the consternation that thousands must have felt when confronted with the order to wear the yellow star identifying them as Jews:
"This evening I've changed my mind: I now think it is cowardly not to wear it, vis-à-vis people who will. Only, if I do wear it, I want to stay very elegant and dignified at all times so that people can see what that means. I want to do whatever is most courageous. This evening I believe that means wearing the star. But where will it lead?"
As she chronicles the awful events unfolding around her from the suicides of the hopeless to the arrests of babies as young as two years old, to mothers, daughters, wives and sweethearts driven mad to her own agony as her fiancé goes off to join the Free French, Helene makes the struggle between the self and the larger world tangible. And in the end, meditating on the place of literature in the world, Christian duty, and what she fears will be her own wasted youth, Helene, brings Paris and the plight of a brave people to the world through the pen of one brave woman.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
MOVING AND VERY INTERESTING, July 29, 2009
Helene Berr - an assimilated French Jew - started writing a journal during the German occupation in April 1942 when she was 21 years old. Her family was well-to-do and she studied at the Sorbonne. She was intelligent, cultured, and sensitive, had many friends, and loved life.
For a time her life under the Germans remained fairly normal. She continued to visit friends and the family's summer place in the country, read English literature, and played violin at small recitals. She fell in love with a young man and wrote of her passion for nature and poetry.
Things started to change for her when Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star. She began to feel different from other people and thought about fleeing to the south of France where it was supposedly safer for Jews. However, she couldn't bring herself to act in what she considered a "cowardly" way and decided to remain in Paris.
She wrote about the roundups of Jews and their transfer to transit camps like Gurs and Drancy - and from there, somewhere to the east. Many of her friends were snatched off the streets and deported with no notice whatsoever. At this point she helped out at a Jewish aid organization, taking orphaned children for nature walks and working at the group's headquarters - until the Germans closed it and the children were deported.
Her last entry in February 1944 reads: "Horror. Horror. Horror." She was deported and sent to Auschwitz and later to Bergen-Belsen. By chance, Anne Frank, the famous diary writer, was there at the same time. Helene contracted typhus (also like Anne) and died after a beating a few days before the camp was liberated.
Helene Berr's journal is unique and moving and deserves to be widely read. Her voice sounds almost contemporary and in the first part of the book she writes often and intensely of her ideals, loves, and hopes for the future. Later, after the raids begin, her entries are about helping the children and watching her friends disappear. Her journal shows what it was like for French Jews under the Nazis - something less written about than the killing fields in Poland - from the gradual erosion of civil rights to street arrests and final deportation to an unknown, tragic destination.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An illuminating addition to any personal library or school curriculum, January 26, 2009
There is no shortage of books on the Holocaust. We have, of course, the diary of Anne Frank, which appears to be the definitive nonfiction work recording World War II. It always seems more difficult, though, to find out what the war was like in France, as most accounts by or about Jews seem to focus on eastern Europe.
Hélène Berr was a French university student at the time of the war. A violin player and student of English literature, she wrote a journal that by any account would be considered an accomplishment in style, literary analysis and flow. Her prose is beautiful, and you almost forget that you are reading about the Holocaust, as it is just as interesting to read her thoughts on music and literature.
Again, a comparison with Anne Frank seems the best way to illustrate Berr's own journal. Frank lived in the Secret Annex and had nothing else to do but write for long hours in her diary. Once she heard that diaries were going to be collected after the war, she even went back and began to edit it with the intent of publication. It was written because she was a regular girl who kept a journal whenever she had the free time. Not everyone knows what it feels like to live in Nazi-occupied Paris, but more of us do know what it feels like to be in love with two people at once or to be frustrated with your family, friends or schoolwork. In that basic humanity, we can insert ourselves immediately into Berr's world, and then we follow her into the darker times, as the Gestapo gain more and more control over it.
Berr's family struggles to hold on when her father is taken to a prison. The man she loves is forced to flee France for his safety, and she watches as friends and neighbors are taken by the Gestapo to various prisons and camps. She herself seems lucky enough, but even her education and life are deeply affected by the presence of Hitler's police in her city.
I struggle in my own reading of Holocaust literature because I don't want to seem morbid or as if I enjoy descriptions of death and inhumane treatment. Anyone who has read a book or seen a movie probably has had to take in more than enough descriptions of Nazi treatment of Jews and others. But we continue to read so that we don't forget, and because each account gives us a little something different. THE JOURNAL OF HELENE BERR seems more hopeful, partly because of its unique narrator. Berr, who was Jewish, was able to go on with her daily life for much longer than others, and because of that, we see a more realistic, young girl reaction to the ways her life was changed. How horrible it is to wear an ugly yellow star on all of your fashionable clothing. How terrible it is when you can't be mean to your mother, because she is the one who is keeping the family together while your father is in prison. Berr's thoughts seem more within reach than others, if just because it is easier not to have to fathom so many horrific experiences at death and concentration camps.
THE JOURNAL OF HELENE BERR is illustrated further with a glossary, an epilogue detailing Berr's death in Bergen-Belsen just days before its liberation, an index and more. It would be an illuminating addition to any personal library or school curriculum.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Hannah Gómez
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