From April 1942 to March 1944, Hélène Berr kept a journal that is both an intensely moving and harrowing document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she 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. Eventually Hélène and her family are arrested and sent to Auschwitz. She died on the death march to Bergen-Belsen in 1945, five days before the liberation of the camp.