“Je veux faire la chose la plus courageuse. Ce soir, je crois que c’est de le porter [l'étoile jaune].
Seulement, où cela peut-il nous mener?”

“I want to do whatever is most courageous. This evening I believe that means wearing the star. But where will it lead?”

It’s been a crazy beginning of a week, with substitute teaching for three days, fighting with Priceline over our Christmas France tickets (let’s just say that I will never use this company again), an assortment of administrative worries, and having friends over last night for the final table of the World Series of Poker (I love poker as a spectator sport). Lost in the minutia of the days, there was little time for reading, and even less for putting down more thoughts on Hélène Berr’s journal. It’s been in my mind on and off, though, and I did wonder if that was close to the way Hélène herself thought about her situation, especially in the early days when her work and her love life would often take over her worries.

In parallel to Hélène’s journal, I had to read the Last Day of a Condemned Man (by Victor Hugo), as I was teaching it. I remembered Stefanie’s review, which is excellent and with which I agree wholeheartedly. The book seemed to be more formally interesting than convincing: the use of slang (19th century slang was not a common thing; it was the private language of robbers, murderers and convicts, and using it did not go without an amount of critical outcry about the “bastardization” of language). As for the condemned man himself, Hugo wants to make him a symbol, a man who could be any man. He doesn’t flesh him out too much, which was counterproductive to me — if I oppose the death penalty, it is in great measure because of the fact that each man is unique, has feelings and a history, not because “it could be me”!

The two reads initially came together because Hélène mentions Hugo, wondering “if it would be like The Last Day of a Condemned man“ – “it” meaning being arrested and deported. I was then interested by the parallel in the reactions of Hélène and that of the unnamed man to the consolations of nature (romantics influences are perceptible for both) and their perplexity at the brutality and indifference of mankind. The difference lies in how they react to their situation: the condemned man cannot stop thinking about his own situation, and goes through alternatives of panic, anger and resignation; Hélène experiences ups and downs too, but she strives to always keep the suffering of others foremost, not to care for herself but to care for others. When early in the war, her father is released from captivity, she rejoices, but her joy is not, cannot be as pure as when others are saved from danger, because of the guilt associated.

This feeling of being a part of something bigger than she is informs the writing: while in the early days, Hélène’s journal is a chronicle of her life and feelings, it slowly becomes a deliberate testimony of what happened. Hélène feels a compulsion to share, to make people understand what is happening, but she fails to make the people around her get it, to illuminate their spirit, because (a last parallel with Hugo?) her reluctance to excite pity prevents her to use her own case (or that of people she knows) to illustrate her message. “Le principal problème qui se pose à moi: celui de la compréhension humaine et de la sympathie” (“the main problem I an facing: human understanding and sympathy”). Hélène struggles with the idea of a humanity split between people who feel for others and people who don’t. In an awful premonition, she sometimes is aware that she is really writing her diary for the people who will come after the war and will not be able to deny what happened. In the meantime, Hélène hurts herself with the insentivity of ordinary people such as a family friend, Mme Agache, who realizes in November 1943 that children are deported, when a friend of hers is deported with her two kids. “Depuis un an que nous vous le disions, vous ne vouliez pas le croire“, bitterly remarks Hélène’s mother (“we have been telling you for a year, you refused to believe“).

The hardest part of this hard document came for me at the end of the diary, when Hélène starts doubting her belief in the possibility of bettering others. Enamored with English writers and proud of her French heritage, there had always been a faint air of underestimating the richness of German culture in her writing (except musically), but she always fundamentally considers “the Germans” as people. On February 1st, 1944 (she was arrested at the end of March), she however notes “lorsque je vois un Allemand ou une Allemande, je me suis aperçue avec stupéfaction qu’une bouffée de rage montais en moi” (“when I see a German man or a German woman, I was astonished to realize that a feeling of rage arises in me”). On February 4th, she calls the Germans “les Boches” for the first time, and equates them to evil and ugliness. On the 15th, she pulls through as generous as ever, and reaffirms her certainty that the root of the problem is with the Nazi regime rather than with the German people, who have been conditioned not to think for themselves or to feel the difference between an order and duty. She asks the question of the potential difficulty in leading them back to their humanity: the temptation to think of a people as an entity instead of considering the myriad of human beings it is made out of is conquered.

It is Hélène’s last victory. A later entry, on the same day, enumerates some details she has just learned about camp’s life, and concludes on three words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!”

On March 8th, Hélène and her parents are arrested. Any other pages she might have written disappear; she is sent to Auschwitz, then to Bergen Belsen, where she dies from a beating administered because she could not get up one morning, weakened by the typhus. A few days later, Bergen Belsen is liberated by American soldiers. Hélène’s journal, entrusted to the family’s cook to be sent to Hélène’s love, shared by him with the rest of her family, remain a family document for over 60 years, before a family member decides to share it with the rest of us.