By H' 'l' 'ne Berr
300 pages; Weinstein Books

"Why do I bother to make everything so dramatic?" wonders a vivacious, passionately intellectual young Jewish student at Paris's Sorbonne in 1942. A devotee of Keats and Mozart, she probes the heady mysteries of love—even as the Nazis savagely infiltrate her city and her life. Reading The Journal of Hèléne Berr (Weinstein), a diary of denial, heartbreak, and resistance that her family's cook passed on to surviving relatives after Hèléne's death at Bergen-Belsen, is like watching a sunset: an inevitable, achingly vivid journey into the dark.

— Cathleen Medwick