Details Books Conducive To The Journal of Hélène Berr
| Original Title: | Journal |
| ISBN: | 0771013132 (ISBN13: 9780771013133) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Hélène Berr
Hardcover | Pages: 320 pages Rating: 4.06 | 1277 Users | 177 Reviews
Description In Favor Of Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: 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, Hélène 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 France’s 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 it’s 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 fiancé, 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 words: “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 fiancé, 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.
Identify Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
| Title | : | The Journal of Hélène Berr |
| Author | : | Hélène Berr |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 320 pages |
| Published | : | November 11th 2008 by McClelland & Stewart (first published 2008) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. History. World War II. Holocaust. Biography. Autobiography. Memoir. War. Cultural. France |
Rating Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
Ratings: 4.06 From 1277 Users | 177 ReviewsEvaluation Regarding Books The Journal of Hélène Berr
No doubt, that if Helen Berr had survived Holocaust, she would have been by now a very renown poet-writer in the european literary scene. Her inspiring diary of everyday life in Paris (1943-1944) impresses us for its clarity, its depth of ideas and its authenticity. Breathtaking.I was disappointed with the journal in the first year that Hélène wrote about her thoughts and activities. She is busy playing music, meeting with friends and falling in love. She does not seem to be greatly affected by what is happening to the Jews of Paris. Even when her father is sent to Drancy and subsequently released, events do not seem to have the profound emotional effect that one might expect. I kept thinking about the diary of Anne Frank and her amazing ability to document her
June 1942 Up to that point the future had remained undecipherable. But it had unfolded, and we knew what lay in store....Just twelve days went by, and another piece of the future lost its aura of mystery and impenetrability, and turned out to be sad and squalid. p73It was not the best time to be young and in love, especially in Paris after the arrival of the Germans. In 1942 Helene Berr was still a brilliant student of literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne with a large circle of friends
A journal kept by a young French woman living in Paris during WWII who, as a Jew, slowly became aware of where the increasingly restrictive policies were leading. She kept journal entries on her everyday life until the day of her arrest and deportation. The strength of this journal lies in its mixture of everyday, trivial events against a backdrop of increasing horror.
In 2002 Helene Berrs niece Mariette Job donated Helenes journal to The Archives of the Holocaust Memorial in Paris. It was published in France in 2008. David Bellos of Princeton University translated the journal into English for American publication. Helene Berrs journal is an account of living in profound fear, day by day, in German occupied Paris during the Second World War. The journal covers two years recording what happened to the Jews under the Vichy government. Berrs father was a WWI
A beautifully written journal. I couldn't keep track of all the people she mentions, but the message she's left behind is the huge number of people who were systematically being rounded up and sent off to concentration camps while the French people looked the other way.
This journal will haunt me.I have for years avoided reading anything about WWII in Europe. I'm glad I waited until I was a bit more aware and receptive, even though that's not why it took me so long to go there.Helene Berr is, for such a young age, astonishingly insightful and brave. She writes about her impending doom with a clear mind and her words echo eerily familiar pains I've felt in my own country, though obviously not as harshly..."The glorification of violence, pride, sentimentality,
0 Comments:
Post a Comment