1/5/24. 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 studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Hlne and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz.