An English literature student at the Sorbonne, Hélène Berr was 21 when she began keeping her diary, in April 1942. In it, she recounts her daily life in occupied Paris, her studies, her walks, her reading and her encounters, as the antisemitic measures imposed by the Vichy regime and the German occupying forces progressively upended her existence.

Throughout its pages, the diary bears witness to the exclusion of Jews, the arrest of loved ones and the rise of persecution. Hélène Berr also records her thoughts, her hopes and her questions in the face of a reality whose gravity she came to understand more and more. Arrested with her parents, she was deported on 27 March 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, then transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where she died in April 1945, a few days before the camp’s liberation.

First published in 2008, her Journal is an exceptional testimony to daily life and antisemitic persecution in Paris during the Occupation. Written in the present tense, with great precision and remarkable sensitivity, it shows history through the eyes of a young woman confronted with the gradual disappearance of her freedoms and her familiar world.

In his film Hélène Berr, une jeune fille dans Paris occupé (« Hélène Berr, a young girl in occupied Paris »), made in 2013, Jérôme Prieur draws mainly on extracts from the Diary, accompanied by archival footage and understated reconstructions. Without seeking to dramatise the story, the director lets Hélène Berr’s voice be heard and conveys, through her writing, the daily life of a young Parisian woman confronted with persecution and deportation.

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