Hélène Berr

Origins and early life

Hélène Berr was born in the fourth arrondissement of Paris on 27 March 1921 into a prominent Alsatian Jewish family long settled in France; her father was a director of the Kuhlmann chemical works.

Work and career

She was reading for the agrégation in English at the Sorbonne when the antisemitic laws of Vichy shut her out of the examination. In April 1942 she began a journal, and in July she started work as a volunteer social worker for the UGIF, the body the occupier had imposed on French Jewry, looking after children whose parents had been taken. The journal she kept for two years is the record of a cultivated young Parisian watching her own world be dismantled clause by clause: the yellow star she decides to wear, the friends who cross the street, the round-ups, the children she can no longer place.

She wrote it, she said, so that someone would know. On 8 March 1944 she and her parents were arrested at home; she was held at Drancy and deported to Auschwitz on 27 March, her twenty-third birthday. She was evacuated to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944 and died there of typhus in April 1945, days before the British reached the camp. Her 262 handwritten pages, entrusted to the family cook and passed to her fiancé, were published only in 2008, with a preface by Patrick Modiano, and are now read alongside Anne Frank's.