French Anne Frank

The diary of Helene Berr, a young Jewish woman who witnessed the Nazi Occupation of Paris before being deported to Bergen-Belsen, has just been published in France.

This secret diary of a young Jewish woman recounting two years under the Nazi occupation portrays the slow shattering of her life, ending with her deportation on her 24th birthday and death in a concentration camp.

The French media are calling Berr “France's Anne Frank.” Both died of typhus a month apart at Germany's Bergen-Belsen camp. The teenage Anne wrote while in hiding in Amsterdam, while Berr, whose diary begins when she was 21, was able to attend class and move about Paris, despite growing Nazi restrictions.