Bookish

The Journal of Hélène Berr. This was published last year from a manuscript that the author had given to the family cook bit by bit for safekeeping during World War II. Berr was a French 21-year-old daughter of a decorated WWI veteran and respected industrialist, an accomplished violinist and lover of English poetry, and Jewish. This is a record of how her world descended into madness. No happy ending. In France, she has apparently become known as "the French Anne Frank." Like Frank, Berr was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, then to Bergen-Belsen, and died shortly before the camp's liberation, of typhus. One review here.