Some books arrive too early. This was the case of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's Journal , published in 1957 by Editions de Minuit. Not many people so did not want to plunge back into the throes of the Occupation. And the spirits were taken by another war, in Algeria ... This beautiful text is fortunately restored to us, in a new edition, with a preface by Pierre Assouline.

Daughter of a financial owner of the newspaper Capital , Jacqueline Perquel (1909-1987) belonged to a Jewish family of old Lorraine stock. She had married a young and brilliant naturalist, André Amar, son of bankers from Salonika. "Mesnil" is her name pen for these fragments of a newspaper held during the summer of 1944, followed by various articles she wrote afterwards, as head of the newsletter of an aid association for deportees.

"CHER, WHERE ARE YOU THERE?"

During the war, André Amar led the Paris section of a resistance movement, the Jewish Combat Organization (OJC). On July 18, 1944, with several comrades, he falls into an ambush. Arrested by the Gestapo, he is tortured, incarcerated in the Fresnes prison, then in Drancy, before being thrown in the last train leaving for the camps. His wife wonders anxiously about his fate. And she does it in writing, day by day, in her notebooks. Thirty-seven days exactly: the time for André to reappear, who managed to escape the convoy of death.

"Honey, where are you, what are you thinking about in your cell, if you're in that deep night, are you sleeping?" She ended up learning that he is detained in Fresnes. The questions jostle in his head: "Has he been drinking? Has he eaten? Does he sleep a little during those long, feverish nights in jail? Are we going to ... mistreat him ? people who tell what is done to them, and how they are taken back to their cells, in what state, in what state ... "

All the ghosts of the past haunt her. She sees the happy days, "the waddled and warm life of old" , the literary and musical evenings, the balls, the holidays spent together. "Oisives and too sweet holidays, unmerited, dying nowadays, glittering and fragile like butterfly wings ..."

Jacqueline is in her tenth refuge since the beginning of the war. All his family is hiding, provided with false papers. She circulates in Paris by bike, notes in her diary some little facts of everyday life: the black market, the gangster grocer, the prostitutes' merry-go-round, hoisted on their soled wedge-boots, "the Parisiennes in summer dresses clear, very wide, as they are worn this summer (because there is a fashion !) " ...

Is he still alive? "I beg you, come back!" Who to turn to ? "Alas, I do not know how to pray , at most beg , cry , revolt , blame God for what he has let do ." In its living rooms, its offices, this great Jewish bourgeoisie thought itself safe, definitely integrated. "We got caught up in the mirages of our class ," says Jacqueline Amar, " we were made Jews, slowly, from the outside, we who had forgotten her so much ..." She has every reason to hate those in the world. who broke their lives. Yet not an ounce of hatred in these admirable pages. "We are all responsible ..."

Paris is about to be released. On August 23, 1944, all the bells ring. "Why are the great joys so sad, why am I crying?" asks the young woman.

Two days later, he is called with great gestures: "Come quickly, André escaped." She stops, petrified. "Everything stops in me, I can not move , I am like a stone statue, I will never move again ..." But no, she moves, she runs, with her little girl in her arms. She runs towards the man of her life, in liberated Paris . She can finally shout out her name, take back her identity, find France , "kiss her cobblestones" ...