France's "Anne Frank" diary hits the bookshelf

France finds its own Anne Frank as young Jewish woman's war diary hits the shelves

Jason Burke in Paris
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer

It starts like any other young woman's diary - with a description of hobbies, a first boyfriend, schoolmates and trips to the country - but it ends like few others. The final words are 'the horror, the horror, the horror'.
This week The Journal of Helene Berr will arrive in French bookshops. The harrowing story of a young Jewish girl in occupied Paris, will be, according to the newspaper Liberation, 'the publishing sensation of 2008'. Two years ago, an account by another French Jewish writer, Irene Nemirovsky, who died in Auschwitz, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and sparked a fierce debate.

With her family, Berr, died in the concentration camps, among the 70,000 Jews deported from France in the Second World War, often with the help of the French police or officials.
'We thought everything had already been said on the Jews under the German Occupation,' said Michel Lafitte, a French historian who described the journal as 'incredibly rich'.

Berr, already being dubbed 'France's Anne Frank', is very different from both her Dutch counterpart and Nemirovsky. Her manuscript lay untouched for 50 years before being discovered by archivists from France's Holocaust Museum.

She was 21 when she started her diary in 1942 - only a few weeks before Nemirovsky died. Cultivated, steeped in Russian and English literature, from a wealthy old French family and a keen violinist who attended the Sorbonne University, Berr starts her diary with an account of picking up a signed copy of the works of poet Paul Valery from his home.

The early pages of the diary are full of descriptions of the countryside around Paris - 'I went to gather fruit in the upper orchard ... the blue sky and the sun made the dew drops sparkle and joy flooded through me like a spell', she writes.

'She is barely aware of her Jewish identity, the war has barely touched her and she is largely unaware of what is happening elsewhere in Europe,' said the book's editor, Antoine Sabbagh. 'She is in love for the first time. But then things start to change. The book reads like a novel, but with a terribly sad end.'

In one powerful passage Berr describes her first experiences wearing the yellow stars that Nazi laws forced French Jews to wear, of being chased from the park in front of Notre Dame cathedral, of her close relatives arrested by French police and humiliated, of Parisian streets emptied by the round-ups of Jews.

'We are living hour by hour, not even week by week,' she writes. Instead of fleeing she works as a volunteer at a holding camp for children whose parents have already been deported. 'They play in the yard ... repugnant, covered in sores and lice. Poor little kids,' Berr confides to her diary, recounting how her co-workers beseech her to flee France while there is still time.

The nightmare gets closer and she realises that her life might end 'somewhere in Upper Silesia' and in 'just a few weeks'. 'People are speaking about suffocating gas that they use on the convoys which arrive at the Polish frontier. They are rumours but there must be some truth in them,' she writes.

The diary becomes a work for posterity, above all to leave her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki, who has escaped France to fight with the Free French from England, something to remember her by.

'I know why I am keeping this journal,' she writes. 'I know that I want it to be given to Jean if I am not here when he comes back. I don't want to disappear without him knowing everything I have been thinking about while he has been away - or at least a part of it.'

The diary stops on 15 February 1944. The last entry describes an interview with a deportee who recounts the journey Jews take across France - 'from Bordeaux, from Nice, from Grenoble' - in French railway cattle wagons with 16 straw sacks as beds for 60 people, each given four potatoes and a pound of beef to last them six days. Berr knows what awaits - 'The Germans have one aim, to exterminate' - and reflects on how they hold a door open for her on the Paris Metro but are ready to deport her to her death tomorrow.

The final page recounts a visit Berr received from a former prisoner of war in Germany who tells her of the persecution of Jews he saw there and of the mass execution of sick captured Russian soldiers. 'The horror' is the final word. Berr was arrested with most of her family a few weeks later and died in the Belsen death camp, a few days before it was liberated by the British army.

The manuscript was given to Berr's fiance as she had wished after the war's end. Her niece, Mariette Job, decided to publish it. 'That way, the soul of Helene still lives,' she said. 'It is a very vibrant soul that is full of light.'