Caroline Moorehead

The yellow star of courage

Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos<br /> <br type="_moz" />

issue 25 October 2008

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.

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