Persephone Book No 5: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943

‘In the years to come, children will be taught about ghettos and yellow stars and the terror at school and it will make their hair stand on end…. But parallel with that textbook history, there also runs another… It is probably worth quite a bit being personally involved in the writing of history. You can really tell then what the history books leave out.’ Thursday, six o’clock, April 1942.

Etty wrote her diaries and letters in Amsterdam and in the transit camp at Westerbork in the east of the Netherlands over a two year period. She was 29 when she died at Auschwitz on 30 November 1943.  During the period she was writing, the lives of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam were becoming ever more restricted and round-ups and deportations began. The later diary entries and the letters describe life at Westerbork, where Etty was interned before being deported to Poland.

Etty’s diaries are extraordinary because, though she remains engaged with what is happening around her, she is also finding her own path towards what Eva Hoffman in the Preface calls ‘a perfect inward pitch’, to a place where she feels ‘the hidden harmony of the world’. So her writings – though they document the suffering and sorrow leading up to the tragic end of her own life and the lives of many, many others – also contain beauty, warmth and joy.

The early diary entries chronicle the beginnings of Etty’s relationship with Julius Spier, a charismatic figure with a Jungian psychoanalytical training who founded psychochirology (reading people’s lives and characters from their palms). Etty relates the questionable physical methods of instruction he used with his devoted followers – including herself – which were supposedly intended to demonstrate that the body and soul are one. She embarks on a relationship with him which is a catalyst for the development of her remarkable ‘inward pitch’ – call it spirituality or religion if you will, though arguably it resists any definitive categorisation.

Other people feature in Etty’s diary entries: her co-habitants in a house overlooking the Museumplein in Amsterdam, including Han, the owner of the house, with whom she also has a relationship. Then there are other friends and figures from Amsterdam’s academic and artistic circles and her family: her mother, her scholarly Headmaster father and her two brothers, Mischa, a talented pianist and Jaap, a doctor.

Etty studied Law, Psychology and Russian at university. Her aspiration is to write but, to earn money, she teaches Russian to private pupils. Later she is given a job at the Jewish Council as typist, though at every opportunity she escapes to a quiet corner to read. She reads a great deal, particularly Rilke and Dostoyevsky. The Old Testament, Jung, Kropotkin, St Augustine’s letters and an number of other works are also mentioned in her diaries.

Etty kept a diary for a number of reasons. She wrote for herself. She wanted it to be a place from which she could create a continuous thread running through her days, a thread that ‘is really one’s life’. Reading sections of it over to herself gave her strength. At one point, she suggests that she would like to have something to remind her of who she had once been if she survived the camps.

She also aspires to be one of the ‘chroniclers’ of her age. She records events and the suffering of people around her: the measures taken against Jews in Amsterdam; her work and her colleagues at the Jewish Council; life at Westerbork; the weekly transports. Two of her longer letters about Westerbork (the ones dated 18 December 1942 and 24 August 1943) were published by the Dutch Resistance in 1943.

But she is very clear that ‘little journalistic pieces’ that ‘simply record the bare facts’ will not suffice, nor does she see herself as suited to ‘describing a specific place or events’. The appropriate form she suggests is poetry, or even fairy tales because the misery ‘is so beyond all bounds of reality that it has become completely unreal’. Even in her earlier diary entries, she is clear that her focus is not on events, on what happens and on what is said. Her writing is alive with vivid daily-life moments in which she experiences the beauty and meaningfulness of life.

She wrote ‘so that others don’t have to start from scratch’. In a letter dated 18 December 1942, she writes: ‘if we have nothing to offer a desolate post-war world but our bodies saved at any cost, if we fail to draw new meaning from the deep wells of our distress and despair, then it will not be enough. New thoughts will have to radiate outwards from the camps themselves, new insights, spreading lucidity, will have to cross the barbed wire enclosing us’. She wanted to share what she had learned about living with others.

For she had learned a great deal. The book merits reading (and re-reading) by almost anyone for this reason alone. It is impossible to convey here the richness of her perspective on life as it develops through her writing and as she lived it. Towards the end, she recognises ways in which her approach might be misinterpreted. She writes of her dislike for the sort of ‘you must try to make the best of things’ or ‘seeing the good in everything’ type of attitude. She isn’t a precursor to the sort of faith in the transformative powers of positive thinking that abounds in contemporary popular psychology, self-help or (many but not all) spiritually-orientated works. Nor does she sit easily within any particular religious tradition, though she does pray and she alludes to God repeatedly and specifically mentions Christianity. But the power of her writing in part comes from the sense the reader has that the perspective she is forming is very much her own.

Her perspective is not only an internal attitude: it is also a lived reality. Increasingly, she is able to shift her focus from her current situation, and even from the suffering of her people, and to view it in the context of history, and indeed, of eternity. She is aware that her life has tended towards intellectual study and contemplation, and that she isn’t going to have an impact in the world by becoming ‘a social-worker or a political reformer’, but she feels that her life has nevertheless prepared her well for the camps where she seeks to be ‘a balm for all wounds’.

She remains vitally engaged with life whilst also letting go ‘grasping attachments’ – to the material comforts of her Amsterdam life; to people she loves and even to trying to preserve her own life (hence her refusal to go into hiding).

She writes of compassion and love for ‘everyone with whom one happens to share one’s life’. Though she is horrified and sickened by what she sees at Westerbork and writes of her deep moral indignation, her compassion leaves no room for hatred, even hatred of her German persecutors.

She has an extraordinary ability to allow sorrow the space it demands and yet to perceive beauty and joy in the everyday world and to be thankful for this, even as that world becomes ever darker, ever more lacking in external sources of life and joy. In her Amsterdam entries she marvels at the beauty of the jasmine growing outside her bedroom window. At Westerbork, she describes fields of lupins, the reflections sunshine in muddy puddles. The camp itself, on a moonlit night, to her seems to be ‘made out of silver and eternity’.

Her writing is full of beauty and truth and resists categorisation in any conventional way, or any kind definitive analysis. Indeed it at times seems to resist words themselves.

One Friday in May 1942, she writes: ‘Looked at Japanese prints with Glassner this afternoon. That’s how I want to write. With that much space surrounding the words. They would simply emphasise the silence. Just like that print with the sprig of blossom in the lower corner. A few delicate brush strokes – but with what attention to the smallest detail – and all around it space, not empty but inspired. The few great things that matter in life can be said in a few words. If I should ever write – but what? – I would like to brush in a few words against a wordless background. To describe the silence and stillness and to inspire them. What matters is the right relationship between words and wordlessness, the wordlessness in which much more happens that in all the words that one can string together’.

Questions

How does Etty’s writing compare with that of others who left a record of their lives and thought during these years (most obviously, Anne Frank but there are numerous others, for example, Charlotte Salomon, Edith Stein and Simone Weil)

‘Its not at all simple, the role of women’. What do Etty’s 1941 diary entries (particularly in June, August and October 1941) have to say on this subject? How is this reflected in her evolving relationship with Julius Spier.

‘I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves.’ 19 February 1942. What do you think of Etty’s chosen path of resistance to what is happening in the world around her?