Etty - 'An Interrupted Life'
The Diary of Etty Hillesum, Jewess Who Lost Her Life in Auschwitz
Feb 18, 2008
Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jewess who lived in Amsterdam during the Second World War, and who, like Anne Frank, recorded her experiences in her diary. Hillesum was Anne Frank’s elder by about ten years, and had graduated in law but became more attracted to the emerging science of psychology. Psychology helped her to know that her dream in life was to become a writer. However, Hillesum’s life was ‘interrupted’, as the title of one edition of her diary suggests, by the war, being in fact tragically ended in the gas chamber of Auschwitz on 30 November 1943.
Acceptance of Reality
What began as a personal diary became more and more a reflection on the situation of the war. While in the transit camp of Westerbork, she wrote, "My heart is a floodgate for a never-ending tide of misery." She wrote of things that were beyond her control, such as the anti-Jewish laws enacted in Holland, but she felt that what could never be taken from her was her choice of how to respond. She chose to meet the despair of her circumstances with an attitude of resilient acceptance. "Let them see my sadness and my utter defenselessness, too,” she wrote of meeting Nazi soldiers. “There is no need to put on a show, I have my inner strength and that is enough, the rest doesn’t matter."
Sense of Beauty Even in the Midst of Evil
In her diary, Etty struggles between the need for the beauty and power of words to explain our rich experience of life, and the contrary sense that words will never comprehend the full complexity of it. "… I still suffer from the old complaint. I cannot stop searching for the greatest redeeming formula. For the one word that sums up everything within me, the overflowing and rich sense of life. … I shall wait patiently until the words have grown inside me, the words that proclaim how good and beautiful it is to live in Your world, oh God, despite everything we human beings do to one another."
The Response of Loving-Kindness - A Legacy for the Future
She prophesied that "After this war, two torrents will be unleashed on the world: a torrent of loving-kindness and a torrent of hatred. And then I knew: I should take the field against hatred." By recording history and struggling to live with the terrible evil of her day, she felt she was leaving a legacy for those who would come after. Reflecting on 3 July 1942, she wrote, “… somebody else will … carry on from where my life has been cut short. And that is why I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath: so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again, need not face the same difficulties.”
Final Words
The last words of her diary are words similarly of conciliation and compassion, "We must act as a balm to all wounds." Her diary stands as a document for posterity of the nobility of a Jewish soul who chose goodness even when confronted with the face of anti-Semitic evil.
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