Search launched for the violin of Holocaust victim Hélène Berr

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The niece of Holocaust victim Hélène Berr has launched an appeal to discover the whereabouts of the violin that formerly belonged to her aunt. The instrument was sold by the Vichy Enchères auction house in 2006 and its current location is unknown.

Mariette Job, the daughter of Hélène Berr’s sister, published her aunt’s diary in 2008. The Diary of Hélène Berr covers the period from 7 April 1942 to 15 February 1944. Berr died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 10 April 1945. The diary became an immediate bestseller in France, selling out after two days. It contains antry for 27 October 1943 in which Berr states: ‘I would want to save my violin, the red folder into which I put Jean’s letters, the few books I’ve not been able to part with, and these pages.’

Berr purchased the violin on 17 March 1942 from Maucotel and Deschamps, a violin shop in the Rue de Rome, Paris. She entrusted the instrument to a close friend before she was deported, after which it was inherited by her sister Denise Job. It was offered for sale at Christie’s in London (March 2005) and at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris (June 2006), before being sold by Vichy Enchères at an auction on 7 December 2006, where it was described in the catalogue as a ‘School of Amati violin’ with a different scroll.

‘Somewhere in the world, a musician is playing this violin, unaware that it once belonged to Hélène Berr,’ says Mariette Job. ’A violin can have a “broken soul”, but it can also be reborn. It is this quest that motivates me, just as it did when I searched for the manuscript of Hélène Berr’s diary in 1992. It is obviously not with the aim of recovering the instrument, but rather for the chance to know the person who plays it today, perhaps without even knowing its history.’ Anyone with information about the instrument’s current whereabouts is invited to email thestrad@thestrad.com