Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel
Hélène Berr, twenty-one, student of English literature at the Sorbonne:
This is the first day I feel I'm really on holiday. The weather is glorious, yesterday's storm has brought fresher air. The birds are twittering, it's a morning as in Paul Valéry. It's also the first day I'm going to wear the yellow star. Those are the two sides of how life is now: youth, beauty, and freshness, all contained in this limpid morning; barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star.
Philippe Jullian, twenty-three, artist, and aspiring man of letters:
Read The Poor Folk, and felt like a character out of Dostoevsky, just as I felt extremely Proustian three years ago. I always see myself through the colored windows of my admiration. I'm afraid of having no more great works to immerse myself in. After Balzac, Proust, Dostoevsky and the English, what is left for me?...
How ugly they are, those poor Jews, who wear, stuck to their clothes, that mean yellow star.
Same date, June 8, 1942; same place, Paris; two different journals. Although both were solidly bourgeois, Berr's background was grander than Jullian's. She was Parisian; he came from provincial Bordeaux. Her father, Raymond Berr, was a famous scientist who ran a major chemical company. His was an impoverished war veteran named Simounet, of whom Philippe felt so ashamed that he took the name of his maternal grandfather, Camille Jullian, a noted historian of the Gauls. Philippe was a socially ambitious homosexual whose diary proudly dwells on dinners in the company of Jean Cocteau and his circle.[1] Hélène's idea of a perfect evening was listening to a Beethoven trio or discussing the poetry of Keats with her friends from the Sorbonne. But the main difference between them was one imposed by the German occupiers: she was Jewish, and he was not.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23493