(A significant contribution to history, The Journal of H�l�ne Berr is a heart-breaking story of a heroic young woman whose indomitable spirit thrived in the face of prejudice and war. The work of a stunningly talented writer, H�l�ne's journal is both an intensely moving, intimate document, and a text of astonishing literary accomplishment.

From April 1942 to February 1944, H�l�ne Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal of her life in Nazi-occupied Paris, seeking refuge from the harsh realities of being a Jew under the Vichy regime. With her friends and fellow students, H�l�ne plays the violin and escapes the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. Although she comes from a privileged and sophisticated family-her father is a decorated French officer of the First World War and the distinguished director of a large chemical company-she begins to be assailed by anxieties. With difficulty, H�l�ne keeps to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris, and looking after the children of arrested Jewish families.

H�l�ne writes of literature, music, love, and the beauty of her city, striving to remain calm and rational even as tragedy closes in. But as anti-Semitic ordinances are passed and rumors of mass exterminations surface, we bear witness to the shift in H�l�ne's world and inner life.

In 1944, H�l�ne and her parents were arrested and sent to Drancy. On her twenty-third birthday they were taken by train to Auschwitz, where her parents died within six months. H�l�ne was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in April 1945, just days before British troops arrived to liberate the camp.

Entrusted by H�l�ne to her family's longtime cook before she was taken away, H�l�ne's journal survived as a family heirloom over the years until her niece recently decided to share it with the world. A devastatingly lucid account of one of history's darkest moments, it has become an instant classic. Translated and published in more than fifteen countries, The Journal of H�l�ne Berr-now available in English for the first time-is a treasure at last found.

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