The yellow star of courage

Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos

‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution in German-occupied Paris in the second world war. There were, she believed, two kinds of people in the world: those who recognised what was happening to the Jews, and who felt with them, and those who either could or would not see. And in the first and ‘preferred’ group were to be found surprisingly few friends, but a great many ‘ordinary people’.

When Hélène Berr began to keep her diary, in April 1942, she was 21, a clever young woman who had recently graduated from the Sorbonne and who in the evenings played the violin with her friends. Her father, Raymond, was a leading researcher in industrial chemistry. The Berrs, who had five children, were prosperous, professional people, more attached to French republican and Enlightenment traditions than to any specifically Jewish beliefs. They attended the synagogue for weddings and funerals, but did not think of going to regular services. What neither Hélène nor her parents could quite grasp was the fact that integration was irrelevant and would not protect them from the Germans, or that Jewishness was a characteristic which, for the Nazis, overrode all Frenchness. Absurd as it seems in hindsight, they felt safe.

Comparisons with the diary of Anne Frank are inescapable. Both were young women — Anne of course considerably younger — and both began their diaries more concerned with their own emotional turmoil, their excitement about what growing up and love might bring them, than with what was happening politically around them.