On March 8, 1944, at 7 AM, Hélène and her parents were finally arrested. On the 27th, Hélène’s twenty-third birthday, they were loaded into cattle cars to Auschwitz. Her mother was gassed in April. Her father was killed in September. People remembered Hélène for trying to keep up the morale of fellow inmates by singing bits from the Brandenburg Concertos and César Frank’s Violin and Piano Sonata.
On March 22, Philippe Jullian wrote in his diary:
The twenty days I spent in the country were quite pleasant, and I take no pleasure in returning to Paris. One is awfully tired of feeling irritated all the time. The atmosphere is tense with raids, the fear of departures to Germany. An uncertain period, cowardly for those who aren’t heroes.
Paris is liberated on August 25, 1944. Jullian is happy that the German occupation is over. But on October 2, he writes:
Paris may be freer, but uncomfortable too. On the rue de Wagram there are more maids in their Sunday best attached to the Americans than there were in the arms of the Germans. Vulgarity, sad lubricity in the métro of Etoile; stupid meetings, lost times and lives.
Hélène was still in Auschwitz then. In November, she was transported to Bergen-Belsen. On April 10, 1945, five days before British and Canadian troops liberated the camp, Hélène, ravaged by typhus, no longer had enough strength to rise from her bunk. She was then beaten to death by one of the guards.
