In 2008, more than fifty years after her death, Hélène Berr’s diary was finally published. It’s an important document not merely because it is all that is left of this talented young woman, so full of musical and literary promise, but also because Berr was so insightful about the nature of the choices facing her and the inevitable catastrophe lurking at the heart of the Union Générale des Israélites de France, the UGIF, itself. This tainted body, neither collaborationist devil nor resistance bastion for Jewish survival it might once have aspired to be, was, as the American historian Richard Cohen subtly argued, an organization with an innate ‘precarious duality’ at its core. Picasso’s Minotaur again. Eventual publication of The Journal of Hélène Berr was largely thanks to the determination of her niece, Mariette Job, who had known of its existence since 1946 when the family housekeeper gave it to Hélène’s brother, who passed it on to Jean Morawiecki. In the 1990s Mariette searched in earnest and found an elderly Morawiecki, by then retired as a diplomat and living once more in Paris.
‘He gave me the manuscript, which he had been keeping on top of a very high cupboard. It had been a weight almost too heavy for him to bear,’ Mariette explained. He agreed to publication which was, after all, what Hélène had wanted, and wrote in the epilogue, ‘In that sink of iniquity, Hélène never gave up on the future. She never lost the strength to struggle against the abjection all around her. She preserved her soul and helped her comrades keep theirs … May this journal survive down the ages so as to nurture the memory of all those whose words were annihilated.’
One of Hélène’s friends, Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, who also kept a diary, questioned how she herself had been able to continue living when so many of her friends had been killed. ‘Is there an element of choice in the ordeal? How is it possible that one is able, in spite of everything, to bear it, even to accept it? Is there a part of ourselves, a point at which we consent to it, as the price we pay to cleanse ourselves of the remorse that lies beneath the web of an almost happy life? A kind of penance … is it a betrayal to be alive?’ Eventually Jacqueline found a solace in work, helping Jewish déportées less fortunate than herself, and in identifying with Jewishness.
Lise London, having survived first the Spanish Civil War, then months in French prisons followed by almost three years in Ravensbrück and the 1945 death march, finally wrote her memoirs in the 1990s, La Mégère de la Rue Daguerre or The Shrew of the Rue Daguerre – the name given to her by the Vichy Ambassador to the Nazis in Paris, Fernand de Brinon, when she organized the food riot in that street. She said communism gave her faith and strength to survive prison and torture. ‘To be a communist was more than just belonging to a party: it was about faith. There was a religious element to it. We wanted to spread the revolution. When you lost faith, everything collapsed.’