Hélène Berr - The Journal of Helene Berr

DAVID BELLOS

This remarkable book is not a novel. It is a personal diary, not intended for publication, and, like any private document, it is occasionally enigmatic. Written by a passionate, intelligent and musically gifted woman of twenty-one from a cultivated and prominent French family, it is, to begin with, just a diary. Hlne tries to analyze her feelings for one young man, Grard, whose background is similar to her own, then slowly realizes that she has fallen in love with another, the handsome Jean Morawiecki.

Hlne began her Journal in the spring of 1942. Despite nearly two years of German occupation, life among the lite of French youth seemed almost unchanged, at least on the surface. Up to that time Hlne had not wanted to admit even to herself that the persecution of Jews was affecting her. As spring turned to summer, however, increasingly flagrant acts of oppression opened her eyes to reality. Her personal diary becomes a precious, horrified and horrifying eyewitness account of the means by which the Nazis Final Solution to the Jewish Question was implemented in France.

Hlnes rich and busy life moved between four overlapping sets of people. She had a crowd of student friends in the English Studies Department at the Sorbonne (some of them went by nicknames borrowed from their favourite books or authors: Sparkenbroke, Charlotte Bront, Lancelot of the Lake). Secondly, she played the violin in a group of gifted amateur musicians, one of whom was Grards father, a high-court judge. In her own comfortable home in avenue Elise-Reclus, Hlne lived with her older sister Denise and their two parents (as well as the domestic staff). During the summer months they often took the half-hour train ride from Gare Saint-Lazare to the familys country seat at Aubergenville, usually with friends and relatives in tow. Hlnes fourth circle centred on her maternal grandmothers apartment in rue Raynouard and the family of her beloved cousin Nicole S.

France was at the time divided in two, and some people in Hlnes circles had fled the Occupied Zone to seek refuge in the south. Her own sister and brother had crossed the line already, while Grard was on his way to join the Free French. Over the following months Hlne came under strong pressure to follow suit. But because she made the firm and conscious decision to stay in Paris with her parents and older relatives, she entered a fifth and entirely new circle that of the Jewish support and relief agencies, in which she forged strong friendships, notably with Franoise Bernheim, an acquaintance of Sylvia Beach, the famous bookseller.

Even in wartime, the Berrs led an extremely sociable life. People were invited to lunch, tea and dinner quite frequently, and hospitality was extended to those who just happened to call. Face-to-face conversation was the main source of information, as newspapers were just propaganda, telephones were few and far between, television service did not exist, and people of Hlnes standing and class did not frequent bars or cafs. (By the evidence of her Journal, she did not go the cinema either.) Her intense and varied social life took place in the library and courtyard of the Sorbonne, in the Luxembourg Gardens, but mostly in her own or her friends families homes.

One feature of Hlne Berrs writing that is hidden from readers of this translation is that it is to a surprising degree in English in the original. Like many European families of their class and period, the Berrs were keen Anglophiles. English was the language of good taste and the social graces, and they gave their daughters, among other things, an English nanny and a taste for Dundee marmalade. As a student, Hlne specialized in English language and literature, and she could well have become a professor of English. She was well read in British literature, especially the Romantic poets, and was familiar with many English and American writers of her own day (Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley, Louis Bromfield, Maurice Baring). Literature in English came to her mind more often than French as she wrote her first-hand account of Frances dark years, and English words and expressions crop up on every page. The significance of using English in French is hard to represent