William Stevenson - Past to Present

A TIRADE AGAINST TYRANNY WAS SPOKEN BY VICTOR HUGO. HE SAID that back in the mid-1700s, the suppression of autocratic regimes and the limitation of armaments were debated and dismissed Is this a reason for abandoning hope that at long last men will learn wisdom? The question troubled Helene Berr, a young Parisienne. In the first two years of Nazi occupation, she pursued a love of life, music, and literature. Then she was made to wear a yellow star. She continued to study at the Sorbonne, celebrated classical music with fellow musicians, and extracted from libraries and bookshops the dog-eared remains of classical English literature. Germans indulged such behavior among the privileged young: It earmarked future victims. Helene kept a diary. She strolls through the Paris of old. She quotes great philosophers. Bit by bit, she also notes where she is heading as the enemy clears out one Jewish quarter after another. In 1944, she writes that she is selected to board a cattle-wagon. Here her diary ends. Helene died five days before American troops reached the death camp where she was caged. Her notes survive. And once again I hear my French mother reading aloud, at the start of the Nazi Blitz on London, the very same question posed by Victor Hugo. This girl in Paris might as well have been on Mars, so sharply did war separate us from Continental Europe. Yet she, too, wondered: Is this a reason for abandoning hope that at long last men will learn wisdom?

I grew up clinging to such a hope. Yet I served in a fighting navy. There was no contradiction here. I had grown up in the dockside area where as a boy I learned to deal with harsh realities with compassion. I belonged to a Boy Scout troop where Sunday morning Divisions was a tradition of weekly prayers, calling our Eternal Father to hear us when we cry to thee / For those in peril on the sea. Our warships fought the crucial Battle of the Atlantic. If it were lost, said Winston Churchill, all would be lost. Torn between hope and reality, I learned about those dragons of Greek mythology that soared, as I soared as an aviator. The dragons looked down upon us from dizzy heights. These little monsters now come up from below with old forgotten notes for me to piece together. They remind me of a boy, young as Helene, torn between hope and looming realities. To survive past and present ills, the little monsters tell me, accept Helenes early vision of a future in which hope is all that ensures survival. The little Parisienne did not survive. Yet her love of life emerges, more than half a century later, to teach us never to forget. She taught me about the real dragons haunting us and forever teaching us to be wary and never take things at face value, sometimes wearing masks of good intentions never straight forward, teaching us to be always on guard: the dragons of everyday life, offering us lessons we sometimes read wrongly. These were the dragons which fooled Helene while she lived among them, fooling her in her early days under the Nazi occupation so that she lived a normal, happy life as a student, never suspecting the dragons were plotting a time when she could be scooped up more easily later. For the purpose of all dragons is never easy to divine.

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Journal d Helene Berr was finally published in 2008 by Editions Tallandier, Paris.