Jews in Paris Under German Occupation

The Journal of Hélène Berr

The story seems surprisingly ordinary at first, as the 21-year-old English literature student tells of going to classes at the Sorbonne, playing her violin with friends, visiting her grandmother across the Seine, rendezvousing with her new Catholic boyfriend and her sadness when he leaves to join the Free French. The daughter of the head of a prestigious chemical company, Berr’s family is wealthy haute bourgeois. It is quite amazing to see the normality of her life in those first years of the occupation, so different from tales of foreign-born Jews who were arrested at the beginning. But then as the reality of what is happening invades her routine, Berr starts to write of her growing horror and panic, and the reaction of supposed friends to her yellow star. The journal ends abruptly in March 1944 when she and her parents are arrested. Berr died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, five days before the camp’s liberation. The book includes maps of Paris at the time, a memoir by Berr’s niece who helped publish the manuscript, plus an introduction and afterword by David Bellos, the translator. Weinstein Books, pp. 304, $24.95

Pictures at an Exhibition

Sara Houghteling weaves real characters and stories into this novel about the Nazi looting of art treasures. Daniel Berenzon is a wealthy Jewish art dealer in Paris, a patron to the likes of Picasso and Matisse. He tries to teach his son Max the trade before the family flees to Le Puy in the south of France. After the war, Max returns to Paris to seek the family’s lost paintings and Rose, the woman for whom he yearns. The character of Rose, his father’s non-Jewish assistant, is modeled on an actual curator who helped document thefts from the Louvre. The first-time novelist paints vivid descriptions of Paris and the Louvre, of famous art and art auctions. Unfortunately, in a reversal of the creative fiction teachers’ admonition to “show, don’t tell,” Houghteling recounts the family’s hiding place, the Louvre looting and Max’s search through the postwar bureaucracy in long descriptive paragraphs rather than as action in the narrative. But this is an unusual story with an author’s note at the end explaining the real events included in the novel. Knopf, pp. 231, $24.95

Sarah’s Key

Tatiana de Rosnay focuses a fictional lens on Paris during the Occupation, with a poor Polish-born family arrested and sent to the notorious Vel’ d’Hiver stadium and thence to Drancy and Auschwitz. The conceit of the novel is to alternate chapters between 1942 and 2002. Julia, an American journalist married to a Frenchman, is assigned to write about the 60th anniversary of the French police roundup of foreign-born Jews. She investigates the 1942 story of 10-year-old Sarah who tries (in vain) to save her little brother when the family is arrested by locking him in a cupboard hideaway in their apartment, promising to come back for him. Julia eventually uncovers a connection between Sarah’s story and her husband’s family. The story is confusing as it moves between the two periods 60 years apart, and becomes a little melodramatic at the end, but it’s a haunting drama and revealing glimpse into Parisian life during the German occupation. St. Martin’s Press, pp. 288, $24.95

—Eileen Lavine