The thing I want to discuss is a book I've just read, "Journal" by Helene Berr, translated by David Bellos.
The product description from amazon says:
"From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish.
Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris.Yet always there is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz.
She went - as is later discovered - on the death march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only weeks before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal she had left behind in Paris were "Horror, Horror, Horror...", a hideous and poignant echo of her English studies from "The Heart of Darkness". Helene Berr's story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for literature, for all that lasts."
What the translator mentions and which I couldn't stop mentally yelling as I read the diary was Denial!!
It was horrible to read and I had no sympathy for her and her family. How arrogant were they to presume that since that they considered themselves French first and Jews second that they wouldn't suffer with the German or 'Kraut', as she called them, occupation? At no time she discussed any food shortage nor any deep down fear that they will be taken. Despite being Jewish and going to shul on Rosh Hashannah her observance was more Xian.
I couldn't believe that she was taking classes up to the last.I have to admire her though for working for the Jewish Agency helping to rehome Jewish children who became orphaned when their parents were deported or killed. But yet, couldn't she see that she and her family were doomed? And the stupidity of them not sleeping at home in case someone would come for them. Why not run and hide?
Then the one night that they did go home for a good night's sleep in their own beds, guess what happened? Yep.
This book really opened my eyes to French Jews during the Shoah and has me want to read more. I think deep down I resented the freedom she had compared to my family in Poland during the same time. They had the same horrific outcome but I am sure that my aunts and their families truly suffered while Ms Berr had her life go on with just a few adjustments.
I've started reading the biography of Irene Nemirovsky by Jonathan Weiss. 'Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works'.
What I have read so far about Ms Nemirovsky I don't think that I would have liked her when she was young.
Other books that have caught my eye and will buy and read are:
'Beyond These Walls' by Jamina Bauman
'Mendel's Daughter' by Martin Lemelman
'Crime of my Very Existence:Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality' by Michael Berkowitz.
Oh,before I end this, something, not sure how to describe it, happened to me last week. My town since the beginning of the government's decision to have a 'Holocaust Memorial Day' in January has always had some activity to remember those who died. (Holocaust Memorial Day is marked each year on 27January – the anniversary of the date of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.)
Last year we had a survivor to speak to us.Less said about that the better.
The beginning of the month I looked in the local paper for some notification that something would take place.I thought perhaps a rededication for newly planted trees. Last month I went to see the trees and plaque that the town placed near the lake at the edge of town. No trees and no plaque. I got touch with the council who ignored me until I wrote to my MP who got in touch with them and then back to me. Apparently some yabbos pulled out and killed the trees however some new trees in a safer position were planted and a dedication would occur.
So I emailed the council and received an email froma man who didn't know anything.Then I received a second one with him saying that nothing was planned this year.I told him that I thought that that was a disgrace. Then the somewhat funny incident happened. I received another email from him which I shouldn't have received, it was meant for a co-worker. In it he asked his cw what can be done to placate me. So I mailed him back asking if he thought that I should be placated. He apologised,He did say that the council was starting a fund to get the Anne Frank exhibition to come to town.We'll see.
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