num_pages: 320
description: Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris now being published for the first time 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.On April 7 1942 Hlne 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 Frances 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 its 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 fianc 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 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 fianc 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.
language: English
title: The Journal of Hélène Berr
publisher: McClelland & Stewart