The central Paris Memorial de la Shoah on Wednesday launched a moving exhibition in tribute to the French -Jewish writer Irène Nemirovsky.The extensive collection includes a series of letters she sent months before her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz and an original audio recording of an interview she gave in 1939.

The exhibition, titled “Sometimes I feel I am a stranger”, features about 250 documents – some previously shown at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage   in 2008 – including family pictures, original manuscripts of Suite Française and David Golder, Ms. Nemirovsky’s most famous novels, and dozens of articles she wrote for major newspapers and magazines in the 1930s.

Born in 1903, Nemirovsky was just fifteen when she emigrated to France to escape post-Russian Revolution chaos. She published her first short stories at the tender age of eighteen and the controversial novel, David Golder, in 1929.

The exhibition captures, with several heartbreaking letters and notes, the tragedy of  Nemirovsky’s fate and her last efforts to obtain help, only several days before her arrest. Among the show’s most significant items is a letter she sent to the head of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime, Marshal Philippe Pétain. “I’ve learned that your government had decided to take measures against stateless people,” she writes. “I can’t believe, Mr. Marshal, that there isn’t any distinction made between undesirable people and honorable foreigners.”

Ms. Nemirovsky was arrested on July 13, 1942 by French police and deported to Auschwitz, where she died of typhoid fever. She first gained international recognition in 2004, more than 60 years after she wrote Suite Française.

The exhibition runs from October 13th, 2010 – March 8th, 2011