Michael Dirda on 'The Journal of Helene Berr'

"One woman threw herself out of a window.

"Apparently several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape. They were threatened with the concentration camp if they failed to obey."

More and more, Berr regards her journal as an aide-memoire, almost a reporter's notebook: "I'm not even keeping this diary anymore, I've no willpower left, I'm just putting down the salient facts so as to remember them."

Take their young friend Pironneau. "Maman has gotten the details of his execution. It was on the day of the great parade, he was taken off at 7:00 A.M., with another man, in the prison van, with their coffins. There was nobody there to shoot them; they had to wait until 3:00 in the afternoon for a 'volunteer' to come and shoot them, obliging one of them to witness the other's death."

Somewhat to her own surprise, Berr admits to a growing visceral hatred of the Krauts -- and to anger at the frequent indifference of non-Jewish Parisians. She begins to work part-time at a Jewish-run agency intended to help deportees and their families, soon taking homeless children under her wing, even organizing a scout troop. Suddenly, Jean announces that he is leaving to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French.

At this point Hélène Berr stops writing in her journal for some 10 months, starting again only in the fall of 1943. Sadly, the once high-spirited young woman, full of plans for a life of scholarship and learning, dreaming of happiness with the man she loves, has virtually disappeared. The voice is somber now, philosophical, that of a mature woman who recognizes that death in a concentration camp is her most likely future. Berr's only aim, until arrested, is to bear witness:

"I have a duty to write because other people must know. Every hour of every day there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill." To ensure at least her journal's survival, she passes along sections to the household cook, asking her to save the pages for Jean. Berr still daydreams about him, even imagines him reading the very page she is writing. But so much has been lost. "If only I could laugh! Jean liked laughing so much. Before, I used to laugh. Nowadays a sense of humor feels like sacrilege."

Still, Berr periodically strives to maintain a semblance of her old existence, fighting off despair to imagine that she will somehow survive. She studies and frequently quotes her beloved Keats, transcribes the reflections on World War I of the novelist Roger Martin du Gard, plays music, even reads Winnie-the-Pooh and retells Kipling's "Rikki Tikki Tavi" to her young orphans. But she also finds herself loathing the barbaric Germans, who "dared to claim that I was not French." And the horrible stories continue. Thirteen children from an orphanage are seized to make up the required 1,000 deportees for a convoy to the "East." So many people have been killed, Berr writes, that "we have almost stopped grieving for the dead." Her cousin, who is also her best friend, disappears into a concentration camp. "How many souls of infinite worth, repositories of gifts others should have treated with humility and respect, have been similarly crushed and broken by Germanic brutality?" For a long time, she cannot fathom why children and pregnant women are being seized by the Germans, until she finally recognizes the truth and sets it down: "They have one aim, which is extermination."

On March 8, 1944, at 7:30 in the morning, there was a knock at the door to the family's apartment. Raymond and Antoinette Berr died later that year in Auschwitz. Hélène Berr nonetheless managed to survive and in 1945 was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she grew sick from typhus and was then brutally beaten to death just five days before the camp was liberated by the British.

David Bellos, the translator and biographer of Georges Perec, as well as a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton, has created an exemplary American edition of Berr's journal. It includes maps, an introductory essay, a memoir by Berr's niece Mariette Job, a brief history of "France and the Jews" (by Bellos), and a half-dozen useful lists of books, acronyms, names and places. The Journal of Hélène Berr has been an immense bestseller in Europe and deserves comparable success in this country. This, alas, is how it truly was when good people were heartlessly abused and their lives were ruthlessly taken from them. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com