More than a Name on a List: Hélène Berr

 

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day.   I’m thinking about how we can build bridges between past and present, by telling individual stories, by giving back to the people who were swallowed up in that terror their names, their faces, their uniqueness.

 

 

Frieda Linder-Kornweitz, from Vienna, died aged 31 with her daughter Karin (aged 7) at Auschwitz, December 1943 (http://jewishtraces.org/plus-quun-nom-dans-une-liste-frieda-linder-kornweitz/)

 

 

Sulamite-Solange Ast, age 18, died with her younger brother Marc and their mother, at Auschwitz in 1943.  Their father survived.

 

(http://www.holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/French%20Children/html&graphics/T0453.shtml)

 

http://www.stolpersteine.com/

 

Sometimes we just have a name, sometimes a photograph and fragments of a life. And sometimes from the darkness a voice emerges that is so vivid that as you read you hear it, you hear the urgency, the passion, the despair and you want to reach out.  Helene Berr’s is such a voice.

 

 

Her diary describes her life in Paris between 1942 and 1944.  It  wasn’t published till 2008, but since then it has become an essential document of the Holocaust and specifically of the Occupation of France. After the Liberation, her fiance and surviving family members circulated the manuscript amongst themselves, but eventually it was offered to the Shoah Memorial, published to great acclaim, and since then has been translated into 26 languages.  It’s inspired an exhibition at the Shoah Memorial , which uses Helene’s story and her words to illuminate some of the darkest corners of those dark years.

 

Hélène has been called the French Anne Frank, but whilst both kept journals which have become key documents of the Holocaust, and both died in the last weeks before Liberation, they’re very different.   Others have noted the parallels between the publication of her journal, and the discovery of the manuscript of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise.

 

However, these comparisons don’t do justice to the remarkable and unique qualities of this diary.  Hélène lived in the heart of Occupied Paris, walked its streets wearing the yellow star, worked with Jewish orphans, played music, fell in love.   And she wrote this poignant, vivid and impassioned account of the events she witnessed, ‘pour ne pas les oublier, parce qu’il ne faut pas oublier’, setting herself the task of recording everything, giving the unfolding tragedy its full weight, showing it raw, naked, without distortion.

 

16 April 1942

S said ‘The Germans are going to win the war’.   I said ‘No!’.  But I didn’t know what else to say.  I was conscious of my cowardice – the cowardice of not standing up in front of him for what I believed – so I shook myself – I exclaimed ‘But what will become of us if the Germans win?’.  He shrugged: ‘Bah! Nothing will change ‘.  I knew what he would say.  ‘There will always be the sun and the water’.  I was all the more irritated because deep down, at that moment, I felt the supreme pointlessness of all these arguments, in the face of beauty.  And yet I knew that I was falling under a malign spell.  … I forced myself to say: ‘but they won’t let everyone enjoy the light and the water’.  Happily, this phrase saved me.  I don’t want to be a coward.

8 June 1942

My God, I had no idea it would be so hard.  I was so brave all day.  I held my head high, and looked people straight in the face, when they averted their eyes.  But it’s hard.  …. This morning I went out with Mother.  Two kids in the street pointed at us, saying ‘Hey, have you seen? Jews’. But otherwise things seemed normal.  … A young couple were waiting, I saw the woman point me out to her companion.  I heard her say. ‘It’s heartbreaking’.  On the bus there was a woman, probably a domestic servant, who had already smiled at me before getting on board, and who turned serveral times to smile; a smart gentleman stared at me:  I couldn’t interpret the stare, but I looked back proudly.

18 July 1942

I felt guilty, that there was something I hadn’t seen, this reality.  This woman, her sister who has four children has been taken.  The evening of the round-up, she hid, but unluckily went back up to the concierge just as they came to find her.  Mme Bieder is like a hunted animal.  She’s not afraid for herself.  but she’s terrified that they’ll take her children from her.  ….  At Montmartre, there were so many arrests that the streets were blocked.  The faubourg Saint Denis is almost deserted.  They’re separating mothers from their children.  I’m recording the facts hastily, so as not to forget, because we musn’t forget.

31 January 1944

I used to quote, not long ago, a phrase from a Russian play: ‘We shall rest, Uncle Vanya, we shall rest’.  It meant the sleep of the tomb.  But more and more I say to  myself that only the dead escape this persecution; when I hear of the death of a Jew now, I think, ‘they’re out of the reach of the Germans’.  Isn’t that horrible?  We hardly weep for the dead any more.

15 February 1944

Why then does the German soldier who I pass in the street not attack or bother me?  Why does he often hold the train door for me, or say ‘Excuse me’ if he blocks my way?  Why?  Becuase people don’t know – or rather they don’t think any more, they’re just about whatever they’ve been ordered to do right now.  But they don’t even see the incomprehensible illogic of holding the door open for me, when tomorrow they may send me to be deported, and yet I will be the same unique person. … Also no doubt they don’t know everything – one atrocious characteristic of this regime is its hypocrisy. They don’t know all of the horrible details of the persecutions, because there’s only a small group of torturers, and of Gestapo who are implicated in it. Would they feel it, if they knew?  Would they feel the suffering of these people dragged from their homes, these women separated from their flesh and blood? They’re too brutalised for that.  And then they don’t think – I always come back to that – I believe it’s the source of evil and the thing on which this regime bases its power.  Annihilate personal thoughts, the reaction of the individual conscience, that’s the first step to Nazism’.

 

 

Cultured and intelligent, a student at the Sorbonne until the anti-semitic laws prevented her from continuing her studies, 21 year old Hélène begins her journal in 1942 with an account of her visit to the home of poet Paul Valéry, who’s signed a copy of a book for her.  She is ‘overwhelmed with joy’.  At this stage, the war is, in a sense, just background noise.  Even so, even this early on, she senses a chasm opening up between her life, and that of her non-Jewish friends.  Little by little she is overwhelmed as she grasps the reality of what is happening around her, and the last words of her journal are a quotation from Macbeth  ‘Horror! Horror! Horror!’

 

Hélène constantly questions herself.  Should she try to get away, or stay in Paris?  She asks herself why, knowing what her fate is likely to be, she’s done nothing to avoid it.  She understands that the danger is increasing: ‘There aren’t many Jews left in Paris, and it’s the Germans who are arresting people now [rather than the French police], so there is less chance of escaping, because we won’t be warned.’  She believes, nonetheless, that to flee would be a defection, an act of bad faith.

 

In January 1944, Hélène writes ‘Will I make it to the end?’.  After several months of moving around each day and staying with different friends, she and her parents went home, for just one night.  That’s where they were arrested, on 8 March.

 

They were taken to the Drancy transit camp, and then deported, on Convoy 70 to Auschwitz, where Antoinette Berr was gassed on 30 April, and Raymond Berr was murdered in September.  Hélène survived for more than a year.  She was moved to Bergen-Belsen in November, where she was killed, just  five days before the camp was liberated.

 

She so nearly did make it to the end.

 

• Berr, Hélène, Journal, 1942-1944 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008)
• Bracher,  Nathan,  ‘Des Considérations inactuelles au cœur de l’Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d’Hélène Berr’, Modern & Contemporary France, 18, 1 (2010), 17-32
• Bracher, Nathan, ‘Éthique et esthétique dans le Journal d’Hélène Berr’, L’Esprit Créateur, 50, 4 (2010), 150–63
• Jaillant, Lise, ‘A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion: Rediscovered Manuscripts and the Memory of the Holocaust in Contemporary France’, Clio, 39, 3 (2010), 359-79
• Kelly, Debra, ‘From Cultural Amnesia to “Anamnesia”’, Synthesis, 2 (2010), 48-61
• Sinder, Henri, ‘Lights and Shades of Jewish Life in France, 1940-2’, Jewish Social Studies, 5 (1943), 367
• Classe de 1° ES2, Lycée Pierre Bourdieu-Fronton, ‘Helene Berr, une jeune étoile dans le Paris de l’Occupation’, 2008-9
• http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/helene_berr/index.html
• http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-463-par_delicatesse__jai_perdu_ma_vie.htm
• http://www.actualitte.com/critiques/journal-1942-1944-helene-berr-preface-de-patrick-modiano-287.htm
• http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/2007-12-20/helene-berr-l-autre-anne-frank/249/0/215612
• http://lettres.blogs.liberation.fr/sorin/2007/12/une-toile-jaune.html
• http://www.ajpn.org/personne-Helene-6381.html
• http://www.veroniquechemla.info/2010/04/helene-berr-une-vie-confisquee.html

 

16 July – Dark Hours, a Spring Breeze and a Winter Stadium

Thursday 16 July.   At 4 in the morning, it is still very dark.  The streets are deserted, the doors and windows closed.  But on this early Thursday morning, police cars are converging on pre-arranged spots, carrying officers and civilian assistants.   They consult their instructions, block the streets.   Each small team has a list of names and addresses.  Alongside the police vehicles, buses are parked along the pavements, awaiting their passengers.  At the appointed moment, the teams go in.  They knock.  ‘Police – open up!’.

The occupants are escorted to the buses, and taken on to one of two destinations – single adults to transit camps, including a half-built housing estate on the edge of the city,  recently cleared of many of its occupants to make room for this influx, and families to a nearby sports stadium.    At the latter, no food or water is provided.  It’s mid-July, and once the building is sealed, the heat rapidly becomes oppressive.  The few working toilets don’t work for long.  The people in the stadium are afraid, and some in despair throw themselves from the balconies to the floor below.  A few manage to use the general chaos to slip out, provided that the police at the entry are either sufficiently distracted, or willing to be suddenly inattentive.  A few manage to get themselves transferred to hospital (this may prove to be only a temporary respite).  Once space in the transit camp has been cleared again, the families in the stadium are transported there.   Until the trains take them, too, to their final destination.

Thursday 16 July 1942, Paris.  The Vel’ d’Hiv round up, named after the sports stadium used to house the Jews who were dragged from their homes that morning and in the hours that followed.   Drancy camp, next stop en route to Auschwitz.   13,152 were arrested, of whom 5802 were women, and 4051 children.  Some of the adults – less than 3% – made it home after the Liberation, to search fruitlessly for news of their children at the Hotel Lutétia. None of the children came home.

This wasn’t the first round-up of Jews in occupied Paris, but it was the largest yet, and a turning point, both in the persecution and in the resistance to it.  It shattered the illusion that in France, the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, nothing too terrible could happen, even under Occupation – an illusion which had led many to register themselves voluntarily, thus providing the information required for the round-up.    It showed the extent of collaboration, with the round-up being executed by French police, not by the Germans.  And it shattered the myth that the deportations were intended to provide workers for the Reich, when young children, the elderly, the sick, pregnant women, were taken, as their neighbours watched.

François Mauriac wrote in his clandestine publication Le Cahier noir:  ‘Entire races are condemned to perish.  At what other moment in history have the prisons been so full of innocents?  At what other era have children been dragged from their mothers, crammed into cattle trucks, as I saw one sombre morning at Austerlitz station?’.     People saw, and some were moved to active resistance by what they saw.

It is 70 years since this event. Do we still need to tell this story?

In 2010 two new films came out which focused on the Vel d’Hiv round up, and the responses (if one sets aside those which focused on the merits or demerits of the films themselves) were polarised.  Some critics felt that they were  fulfilling an indispensible ‘devoir de mémoire’, particularly in drawing attention to the responsibility (only publicly acknowledged in the 1990s) of the French authorities , whilst audience members spoke of being shocked and overwhelmed.  On the other hand, some felt it was counterproductive – that the constant telling and re-telling actually creates ‘une certaine lassitude’, that if the younger generations see ‘remembering’ as a chore, the temptation to forget will become ever stronger.

There’s plenty of evidence that, however much people may have heard about these events, they are still fairly hazy about the detail.    When Andreas Whittam Smith wrote a piece for the Independent about how the film The Round-Up was bringing to light hidden events, a letter appeared in the paper arguing that:

• The events concerned were never denied
• Those responsible were executed after the war
• Of the 300,000 French nationals registered as Jews, 80% survived
• Not all the deported children died in the camps, some came back but spoke little of their sufferings

In reality, whilst the fact of the event was not denied, the responsibility of French officials was  (a nano-second clip of a gendarme’s cap in Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard had to be cut before the film was released).

Of those most particularly responsible for the round-up, only Pierre Laval was executed -  Louis Darquier de Pellepoix escaped to Spain and died free and utterly unrepentant, and Rene Bousquet was acquitted immediately after the war, and assassinated in 1993, just before he was due to stand trial.

France did, it is true, lose only 20% of its Jewish population – if one counts only Jews with French nationality.  They managed this by offering up  non-naturalised Jews, aiming to meet their deportation quotas by filling the convoys with foreigners for as long as possible.   To make up the promised numbers, the Vichy leadership persuaded the Germans that children should be taken along with their parents, even though most of them had been born in France and were therefore French citizens.  And on the day, the official exemptions eg for women in late pregnancy or with new babies were ignored.   This deal with the devil did, arguably, save the lives of  many naturalised French citizens who were Jews  – some were not arrested until much later so giving them slightly better odds of survival, and others had time to find a way of escaping or living under cover.  But non-French Jews clearly didn’t count.  They were expendable.

And did all the deported children die in the camps?  Of those deported after this round-up, yes, all of them.  The only survivors were those children who managed to escape either from the velodrome or from the transit camps.   And of the 11,400 children deported in total from France, 200 did come back.  200.

So, as I’ve said elsewhere,  we must remember, in order to preserve the truth, in order to give back to the victims their names, their voices, their stories.

============================================================================================

Pamphlet distributed by the Mouvement national contre le racisme, September 1942.

French mothers and fathers, young people, teachers, educators!  When you kiss your child goodnight in bed before their happy sleep, in the morning when you catch their first smile on waking, think of those hellish trains where, crammed in like a herd of beasts on the way to the abbatoir, 2000 little Jewish children, alone, abandoned to their mortal anguish, crying with terror and thirst.   Is there anywhere in the world, in all modern history, anything more atrocious, more inhuman, more barbaric than the torture of innocent children?   These children, just like yours, have mothers and fathers ready to protect them.  But they are dragged from them without pity, with bestial savagery.  ..  These horrors happen amongst us, on our sweet French earth, with the complicity of the French government collaborating with those who starve us, who loot our treasures, who hold our prisoners, who murder the patriots fighting for a free and happy France….

French Youth!  Schoolchildren!  Students! When you go back to school, you will find in your classes thousands of empty places.  They are those of your Jewish friends, brought up as you are in the love of France.  Know that the Pétain-Laval government has handed them over to certain death.  Is this the new order?  Is this the National Revolution? …

Protest to the authorities! Shelter, protect, hide Jewish children and their families! Do not let them be handed over to Hitler’s killers! Save the honour of France!

From Hélène Berr’s journal:

15 July – Something is about to happen, something which will be a tragedy, perhaps the tragedy.   M Simon came here this evening to warn us that there was talk of a round-up of 20,000 people the day after tomorrow.

18 July – I thought on Thursday that life would stop.  But it continues. … [Mme Bieder's] sister who has 4 children, has been taken.  The evening of the round-up she hid, but unfortunately came back down to the concierge just at the moment they came to look for her  …  They are separating mothers from their children.   I am noting the facts, hastily, so as not to forget, because we must not forget.

16 July 1995, Jacques Chirac:

These black hours will stain our history for ever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was assisted by the French, by the French state. Fifty-three years ago, on 16 July 1942, 450 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders, obeyed the demands of the Nazis. That day, in the capital and the Paris region, nearly 10,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested at home, in the early hours of the morning, and assembled at police stations… France, home of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners.

Hélène Berr, Journal, 1942-1944 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008)

Hubert Haddad, Vent printanier (Paris: Zulma, 2010)

Claude Levy, Paul Tillard,  La Grande Rafle du Vel d’Hiv (Paris: Tallandier, 2010)

François Mauriac, Le Cahier noir (Geneva; Paris: Editions des Trois Collines, 1945)

AMEJD du XIème, Fragments d’histoire(s).  Lambeaux de mémoire: enfants juifs deportés du XIème arrondissement de Paris (1942-1944) (Paris: AMEJD, 2011)

Les fils et filles des deportés de France, Les 11400 enfants juifs deportés de France, Mairie de Paris, 2007

Adam Rayski, Il y a 60 ans – 1942-2002: La Rafle du Velodrome d’hiver (Mairie de Paris, 2002)

http://jewishtraces.org/requis-au-vel-dhiv/

http://www.massviolence.org/The-Vel-d-Hiv-round-up

http://jewishtraces.org/rachelmulle/

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgney1_un-voyage-pas-comme-les-autres-un-film-de-samuel-muller_webcam

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2012/07/08/pour-la-premiere-fois-la-police-expose-ses-archives-de-la-rafle-du-vel-d-hiv_1730780_3224.html

The Round Up, 2010. French film directed by Roselyne Bosch and produced by Alain Goldman
Sarah’s Key, 2010. French film directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and produced by Stéphane Marsil.

Nigeria, 1966/World Refugee Day, 20 June 2012

Nigeria, 1966

During the series of coups and counter coups leading up to the secession of Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War, thousands of Igbo people were killed in the northern territories of Nigeria.  Many more fled to escape the massacres.   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s Half of a Yellow Sun gives a harrowing account both of the pogroms and of that flight, from a number of perspectives – the Igbo heroine, in Kano as violence explodes, who escapes on a train along with many others, traumatised, lost and bereaved; the Englishman who finds himself at Kano airport as Igbo staff and travellers are identified and killed; the people meeting the trains as they arrived, searching for their own friends and family afraid to find them and not to find them.

As I read her account, I found myself shaking and weeping.  I lived in the north of Nigeria at this time.  I was a young child, 9 years old, and my parents shielded me and my younger siblings from as much as they could.  But I knew that people were being killed because of their ethnicity.  I saw the mob which approached our home looking for Igbos, knew that my father and a friend had gone out to speak to them, to try to calm them and deter them but without success.    I knew of westerners arriving at Kano airport, to witness scenes of horror, some of whom got back on the plane as Richard does in the novel.  I learned later of the people who my parents found hiding in the unoccupied house across the road from us, who my father took in the back of our car, covered with blankets, to the army compound where others had taken refuge, and of the train organised by another expatriate to take them all to safety but which was ambushed, its passengers dragged out and killed.

As Rob Nixon said, in the New York Times, ‘“Half of a Yellow Sun” takes us inside ordinary lives laid waste by the all too ordinary unraveling of nation states. When an acquaintance of Olanna’s turns up at a refugee camp, she notices that “he was thinner and lankier than she remembered and looked as though he would break in two if he sat down abruptly.” It’s a measure of Adichie’s mastery of small things — and of the mess the world is in — that we see that man arrive, in country after country, again and again and again.’

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s literary role model is often said to be Chinua Achebe, who himself was caught up in these events.  His writing having brought him to the attention of the military who suspected him of having foreknowledge of the coup, he had to send his pregnant wife and children on a squalid boat through a series of unseen creeks to the Igbo stronghold of  Port Harcourt.   During the civil war which followed, his family had to move repeatedly to escape the fighting, returning to their destroyed home only after the war was over.   His poem, ‘Refugee Mother and Child’, reflects those experiences:

No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget.
The air was heavy with odors
of diarrhea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in labored
steps behind blown empty bellies.
Most mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-colored
hair left on his skull and then -
singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it… In another life
this would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2009)

Chinua Achebe, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005)

Rob Nixon, ‘A Biafran Story’, New York Times, 1 October 2006

 

World Refugee Day, 20 June 2012

http://takeaction.unhcr.org/

di·lem·ma \ : a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially ones that are equally undesirable.

No one chooses to be a refugee

Every minute eight people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror.

If conflict threatened your family, what would you do? Stay and risk your lives? Or try to flee, and risk kidnap, rape or torture?

For many refugees the choice is between the horrific or something worse.

What would you do?

World Refugee Day was established by the United Nations to honor the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children who are forced to flee their homes under threat of persecution, conflict and violence.

http://takeaction.unhcr.org/

Holocaust Memorial Day 2012

When I was 9 years old, my family lived in Zaria, in Northern Nigeria.   It was 1966, and a series of coups d’etat were hiking up tensions between the north and south, tensions which in May and September of that year resulted in mobs seeking out and killing on the streets, in the schools and hospitals and churches, anyone recognised as being of Igbo origin.   I don’t know how many died.   Probably no one does.   Because of the civil war that followed, the pogroms in the north have received little attention – though Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her stunning novel Half of  a Yellow Sun portrayed these events incredibly powerfully.  I was a child, and my parents protected me and my younger siblings from the horror of what was happening.   But even as a child I heard and saw enough – even when the adult conversations stopped abruptly in my presence – to be haunted by what I’d half overheard, seen out of the corner of my eye.  I’ve needed to try to understand what happened, not just in Northern Nigeria in 1966, but whenever an attempt is made to wipe a group of people from the face of the earth.

We’re told that we must remember the past in order not to relive it.  It’s a lot more complicated than that of course.  In order not to relive it we’d have to understand it.   Memories aren’t necessarily trustworthy – after the Liberation, Michel Butor has spoken of how his parent’s generation said of the years of occupation, 1939-1945 was a nightmare, but it’s over, so we’ll forget all of that and pick up where we left off.  His generation of writers has been preoccupied with memory, and how we revisit,  rework and reshape as we try to master the past.   The simple imperative to remember would seem to have done us little good in the generations since Auschwitz.   It didn’t stop, or even slow down, the slaughter in Rwanda, the massacres in Srebenica, decades of pogroms in Nigeria, the devastation in Darfur, the killings in Cambodia.  But remember we must.  The important thing is that we remember right, and we remember well.

I’m reminded, oddly perhaps in this context, of a song from South Pacific: ‘You’ve got to be taught To hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year.  It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught.’  Frances McDormand’s character in Mississippi Burning echoes these words very closely: ‘Hatred isn’t something you’re born with. It gets taught. At school, they said segregation is what’s said in the Bible…  At 7 years of age, you get told it enough times, you believe it. You believe the hatred. You live it… you breathe it. You marry it.’   And so we need to teach the opposite, for the sake of the future.

And for the sake of the past.  The perpetrators of genocide don’t start by taking lives.  First they take everything else – name, livelihood, home, dignity, humanity.  For it to be possible for society to collude in this, the victims have to become less than human – cockroaches, perhaps, or lice.   Or less, even, than that – one of the most powerful Holocaust documents  is a memo, addressing technical problems with vehicle stability.  As one reads it, it takes a while before the nature of the destabilising ‘load’ becomes apparent: this load has a tendency to rush towards the light, which causes problems in getting the doors closed.  This load may also scream.

And so, for the sake of the past, we need to give back to the victims of genocide what we can – their names, their stories, their voices.   Serge Klarsfeld reconstructed the convoy lists from the French internment camps and gave the people once herded onto cattle trucks a name, an address, sometimes a photograph, a letter.   The photographs of the children – see them if you can bear it, and I think one has to bear it – in their best clothes or on summer holidays, looking solemn or smiling for the camera, tell you everything, in a way, about genocide.  Sheffield’s wonderful Ensemble 360 performed music last spring by composers who were imprisoned at Terezin -  music created in the midst of a nightmare, by composers who had barely begun to achieve their potential before they were silenced.

Hélène Berr is one of the people I will be thinking of on Holocaust Memorial Day.   She was 20 when Paris was occupied, from a thoroughly assimilated French Jewish family, a student at the Sorbonne.   She was 21 when she started the journal in which, at first, the war and the Nazi persecution are almost background noise.  She was almost 23 when she was arrested, a few months before Paris was liberated, and then deported to Auschwitz on one of the convoys from Drancy.   It was her 23rd birthday when she was moved from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen.   She was 24 when she died, in Bergen Belsen, 5 days before the camp was liberated.    Her journal, kept by surviving members of her family after the war, was finally published in 2008 and when I read it I loved her, and I grieved for the fate I already knew would be hers.   Another voice that wasn’t quite silenced, after all.

http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/helene_berr/index.html

Hélène Berr,  Journal, 1942-1944 (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2008)

http://gideonklein.cz/fruvod.htm

Les 11400 enfants Juifs deportés de france (Mairie de Paris, 2007)

http://www.holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/French%20Children/html&graphics/T0423.shtml

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper, 2007)

Manifesto/Introduction

My probably infrequent entries to this blog will, I anticipate, fall into three categories, potentially overlapping.  Firstly, the work of Michel Butor, nouveau romancier, far less well known than he deserves, one of the most fascinating writers of the postwar era, and all of whose works are rich in allusion and reflection, ideas and passion, intellect and humanity.  Secondly, I’ll occasionally write about what other things I’m reading (currently Proust and Stephen King), listening to or watching.  And there may be events, anniversaries, and other sources of inspiration that prompt an entry from time to time.

I’m an administrator at the University of Sheffield, where I’m also a part-time student, studying French Language & Cultures for my second undergraduate degree (the first, in English & Biblical Studies, was also with Sheffield, many decades ago).   I grew up in West Africa, an experience which has been hugely influential on me, and which can be evidenced not only in my enthusiastic support for Ghana’s national football team (in contrast to my despairing loyalty to Nottingham Forest), but also in my interest in postcolonial African history and, because I lived in Northern Nigeria during the bloody preamble to the Civil War, in genocide and xenophobia wherever they manifest themselves.    Alongside my work, and my studies, and my family life, I am passionate about music, literature and visual art.

Anyone interested in finding out more about Butor – and it would delight me enormously if anyone was inspired to read him by this blog – should start with the novels, which is fine if you read French, a tad more tricky if not, as the English translations are not easy to track down, or rather expensive if you do.  I’ll give details of both editions, where possible:

Passage de Milan (Paris: Minuit, 1954)

L’Emploi du Temps (Paris: Minuit, 1956)/ Passing Time

La Modification (Paris: Minuit, 1957)/ A Change of Heart or Second Thoughts

Degrés (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)/ Degrees

Mobile: étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) / Mobile

Portrait de l’artiste en jeune singe: capriccio (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) / Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape

Anthologie nomade (Paris: Gallimard, 2004)