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. At the outset, her friendships with other students and professors, her music and her family life combine to give a picture of a happy, fulfilled young woman. She is 21 years old and from the photographs that accompany the text we can see that she is as beautiful as she is talented.With her colleagues, she plays violin and 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. Although her father - decorated in the First World War as a French soldier and the distinguished head of a big chemical company - is entirely assimilated, she begins to be assailed by anxieties. And then comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. With difficulty, Helene remains calms and rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris, looking after the children of other arrested Jewish families.

Eventually, in March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only days before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal which she had ordained would be kept for her fiancé in England with the Free French were "Horror! Horror! Horror!", a hideous and poignant echo of her English studies.Helene Berr's story is almost too painful to read, fore-shadowing horror as it does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for literature, for all that lasts.