Thoughts on Paris – February 14, 1946

For the first time in my recollection, Paris shopkeepers have mentioned this saint Valentine. Florists have signs about him out front…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

For the first time in my recollection, Paris shopkeepers have mentioned this saint Valentine. Florists have signs about him out front, among the tulips, explaining that you should buy a pot of blooms (at three hundred francs) to send to your beloved. So business has grasped the value of hagiography here, finally, as connected with this particular saint.

Janet Flanner, to a friend

Notes:
• From Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend
• Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist.

A Life in Paris – February 14, 1944

More than a week ago I stopped writing this diary, wondering if I had reached a turning point in my external life. Nothing has happened yet…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

More than a week ago I stopped writing this diary, wondering if I had reached a turning point in my external life. Nothing has happened yet. I carry on sleeping at Andrée’s, and the parents sleep at the Loiselet’s. Every evening we are on the point of leaving, a question hangs in the air; uselessly, because we have already gone over things and are past reopening the discussion. We know that no one can aspire to being absolutely right, and we have no right to go against Papa, who has already been through it. It’s just fatigue, the temptation to spend the evening at home, to sleep in our own beds, which reawakens an opposition that has already been considered and consciously rejected. […]

During the alert the other day, thirty people with [yellow] stars were arrested, sent to Drancy and deported, just because they were out and about (simply to amuse themselves, obviously!)—Rabbi Sachs was returning from a funeral. Another man was turned out of the métro station at Cité (presumably not an official “Air Raid Shelter”) on his way back from a church service in memory of his son, who had died in the war, and was taken by the German police. “Aryans” who break the curfew get fined 1,500 francs, others are deported.

Hélène Berr

Notes:
• From The Journal of Hélène Berr
• Hélène Berr was twenty-one years old when she started to keep a diary in 1942. She had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family with strong ties to Parisian society and was a student at the Sorbonne. In March 1944, Hélène and her parents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Her parents died within months. Hélène was transferred to Bergen Belsen where she died days before the British liberated the camps.

A Life in Paris – February 14, 1942

Nothing can express the monotony and the resigned stupidity of life in Paris. It is very cold. Everyone is huddled in his house without a fire…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Nothing can express the monotony and the resigned stupidity of life in Paris. It is very cold. Everyone is huddled in his house without a fire. The only ones who can eat are those who are lucky enough to have relatives in the provinces to send them provisions. It is scientifically designed scarcity. […] If I have written nothing in these notebooks, it’s because it is not very useful, no doubt, to note that it is snowing, that we are hungry, that we are cold, that the executions are continuing, two or three every day (they no longer even have the honor of being on the front page of the papers), that people no longer think about it[….]

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 14, 1871

Truly the dregs of the cup of besiegerents are bitter. You get food, but no appetite…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Truly the dregs of the cup of besiegerents are bitter. You get food, but no appetite; light, and nothing to look at; safety, but combined with such intense ennui that I prefer the danger—any one would.

Felix M. Whitehurst

Notes:
• From My Private Diary During the Siege of Paris
• Felix M. Whitehurst kept a diary during the Prussian siege of Paris from September 1870-January 1871.