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Book Summary and Reviews of The Journal of Helene Berr by Helene Berr

The Journal of Helene Berr by Helene Berr

The Journal of Helene Berr

by Helene Berr

  • Critics' Consensus (15):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Nov 2008, 0 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"The publishing sensation of 2008 . . . We seem to understand for the first time the horror and absurdity Jews had to face every day in occupied Paris." - Liberation (Paris).

"A work of exceptional literary and historical qualities." — Sud Ouest.

"Starred Review. [Her] vibrant voice—full of anguish, compassion, indignation and defiance—springs from these pages—as extraordinary a document of occupied France as Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française.

"... sure to be welcomed by general readers and scholars alike ... Highly recommended." - Library Journal.

This information about The Journal of Helene Berr was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

John Smith

Helene Berrs Diary
I have read many many ww2 diaries...
Given Helenes intelegence ...family background and humanity...it is a lesson in what is in the best of us.
Helenes diary is in the company of only two others ...
in a certian stratosphere ...where these Heroines rose above the terrible circimstances they faced.

The others being Etty Hillesum and Anne Frank

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