Window Into Life in Vichy France

This essay discusses three diaries from the Vichy era, the period of the Nazi Occupation of
France: Jean Guéhenno's Journal des années noires 1940-1944, Hélène Berr's Journal, and
Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's Ceux qui ne dormaient pas. Guéhenno was an educator and writer
who entered the Resistance in 1940. His diary offers deep moral reflection as well as
accounts of the dishonorable peace Vichy imposed and the ignoble servitude to which the
new collaborationist French State and the Nazi occupier subjected France. In the final
pages, as Leclerc's army marches into Paris, with a victory he understands to be thanks to
the help of the Allied forces, Guéhenno dares to rekindle his former faith in humankind. Berr
was a young university student born into a wealthy old French Jewish family, the daughter
of a famous scientist. Sensitive and generous-spirited, she lived an unusual life inasmuch as
her family seemed to suffer no material hardship throughout the years that culminated in
their deportation in the spring of 1944. Among the memorable events of her diary is her
experience of the first day she was forced to wear the yellow star. Finally, Mesnil-Amar's
diary spans just one month at the end of the war in France, the month in which her husband
has been detained and is about to be deported on the last train to leave Paris.