Hélène Berr, at the Stolen Life Exposition organized in Houston, Texas

Inauguration of the exhibition on Thursday, August 25, 2016 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Hélène Berr was 21 years old in 1942. Parisian, a student at the Sorbonne, she kept her diary from April 1942 to February 1944. This text, of an exceptional literary quality, mixes the daily experience of the unbearable and the dreamed world of letters, alternating at every moment between hope and despair.

Arrested on March 8, 1944, she is deported to Auschwitz with her father and mother. She survives almost to the end of the ordeal, succumbing to exhaustion at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, five days before the camp’s liberation.

The exhibition, going beyond the strict framework of the newspaper and the personality of Hélène Berr, extends to the context of the Occupation and the persecution of the Jews in France. It offers the opportunity to discover the original manuscript of this journal published in 2008, as well as many family archives deposited at the Shoah Memorial.