anniversary
ETTY HILLESUM

THE THINKING HEART
OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP
Born 100 years ago, she died in Auschwitz, “singing,” and left us a diary and a collection of letters that recorded a human journey of continuous dialogue with God, which enabled her to look at things for what they were. She embraced everything, even her murderers, because “gratitude will always be greater than sorrow.”

by Davide Perillo

A farmer found the postcard along the train tracks crossing the moorland outside Nieuweschans. No images, just the date of September 7, 1943, the address to Christine van Nooten, Deventer, and a text in tight, rounded handwriting: “Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high Tower.’ In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing. Good-bye.” Etty Hillesum, a 27-year-old Dutch Jew, had thrown it from carriage 12 of the train carrying her to Auschwitz, where she would die two months later. This year marks 100 years from her birth.
Can one go to the gas chambers singing? Can one experience the horror of the Holocaust–watching one’s friends, relatives, projects, and dreams die–and get on the train that leads to the sacrifice with a glad heart? That postcard signaled the end of a short life that posed this and many other questions in a way that sends chills down your spine. The diary and collection of letters (The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002) Etty left behind accompany us step by step, a bit at a time, as she made her discoveries and observed herself in action. They cover a three-year span, from 1941 to 1943. When it was published, the diary became a sensation, with 150,000 copies sold, and continues to generate a series of studies, theses, and new editions. The subsequent publication of her letters in English completes the reading of an existence that was full as few others are.
Esther “Etty” Hillesum was born in Middelburg, Netherlands, on the North Sea, to an upper middle class family. Her father was a high school principal her Russian mother was a volcanic character. Her two brothers shared her brilliant intelligence: Mischa would become one of the Europe’s most promising pianists, and Jaap, having discovered a new protein at the age of 17, had before him a promising career in medicine. Etty earned a law degree, and then another in Slavic languages. She also began studying psychology, but it was already too late to set out on that road, because the concentration camp gates were opening, and the Holocaust was underway. Etty often told her friends (and herself) that she wanted to be a writer, not realizing that in fact she already was one.

Counter-drama. That diary, written in the same city and during the same period as Ann Frank’s, recorded much more than stories and romances. It detailed a highly powerful human journey, encounter after encounter, suffering after suffering, in which her reason and senses and heart opened and broadened.
In the years all of Europe was experiencing tragedy, she was able to “write a counter-drama,” in the words of Jan Gert Gaarlandt, the editor of her diary. She did so with lucidity and force of character–not an effort of will, but an increasingly sharp awareness of how things truly were–that questioned and explored. What was the source of this strength?
The first answer is a very restless heart, one that drew her to love Rilke and Augustine, Leonardo and Dostoyevsky, that made her say continually and in a thousand ways, “I want something and I don’t know what,” and that threw her wide open when she encountered the man who would mark her life. Julius Spier, a man twice her age, had studied with Jung and was the father of “psychochirology,” analysis and therapy of the person based on the lines on the hand. One may smile at this, but Spier was possessed of unusual charism and depth, and had a strong influence over the young woman. He became her lover, though not the only one. “He took me metaphorically by the hand and said, ‘Look, that’s how you should live,’” she wrote in her diary, which she probably began at Spier’s suggestion. He was continually present in those pages and, above all, had a unique merit: “The great work he has done on me: he has dug up God in me and brought Him to life, and I shall now go on digging and seeking God in all the human hearts I meet, no matter where on earth that may be.”
Both this companionship and this journey were strange and full of uneven terrain–as is life–but real. Binding herself to Spier and his friends, and remaining tenaciously attached to experience, which “is the only way of experiencing reality intensely and absolutely, untroubled by thoughts ahead, which are bound not to correspond with reality, and do nothing but disillusion, tire and confuse one,” Etty faced the doubts that arose from her soul and the tragedy around her: “Mortal fear in every fiber. Complete collapse. Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic,” she summarized on November 10, 1941. They existed, and would return, but they were not an obstacle, only steps along a journey.
Etty traveled this road using all of herself, revealing in action a “broad” reason that Benedict XVI admired (in fact, it is no coincidence that Pope Benedict quoted her in his final audience as Pope, last February). She said that one must “think with the heart” because “perhaps we possess organs other than reason” that allow us to face and understand–that is, embrace–things we would never have believed possible. She saw the task that such a sensibility called her to: “Let me be the thinking heart of the barracks,” she wrote.  In asking this, she was not presumptuous: she was expressing the certainty that only a heart that thinks and sees and loves could bear the madness of war and the Shoah, for herself and for others.

The well. A bit at a time, her pages became a prayer, a continual dialogue with God (“God, take me by Your hand, I shall follow You dutifully and not resist too much”), excavation into that “deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then, He must be dug out again.” Every day revealed a fierce search for the essential, which transformed the way Etty looked at everything and bound herself to everything. “‘I am so attached to this life of mine.’ What do you mean by ‘this life’? The comfortable life you now lead? Whether you are truly attached to life in the raw, in whatever form it may come, is something the years alone will be able to tell.” She began to search for what was truly necessary for living, even while she was waiting to be sent to a concentration camp.
It is striking to see the flower that blossomed from this increasingly real and personal faith. It was a detachment that makes one possess things, truly know them: “One ought to be able to live without books, without anything. There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.” Hers was an increasingly greater openness to reality: “When one begins to accept, must one not try to accept everything?” And again: “At a certain point, one can no longer do anything, just be and accept.” It was a freely given love for what exists because it exists, not because it could or should be ours. There is a very beautiful page in which she described this discovery, writing about a walk at sunset: “And here I have hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. I was too sensual, I might almost write too greedy.  I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it.... But that night, only just gone, I reacted quite differently. I felt that God’s world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now filled me with joy. I was just as deeply moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it.”
In Christian terms, we would call this virginity. It is striking that near these passages we also see quotations from the Gospel of Mark (“Don’t worry about tomorrow...”) and from the Letters of Saint Paul. This attitude was at once the source and the expression of an increasingly powerful interior freedom that enabled her to make heart-breaking judgments about what she saw around her, and not to flee, but to choose instead to stay: “Humiliation always involves two. The one who does the humiliating, and the one who allows himself to be humiliated. If the second is missing, that is, if the passive party is immune to humiliation, then the humiliation vanishes into thin air.” Etty did not stand outside the hell, observing. She chose to enter. In July of 1942, she found work as a typist at the Jewish Council, the organization that acted as intermediary between the Germans and the Jewish community, mediating, safeguarding, negotiating. But in truth it managed the flow of Jews who were brought to the Westerbork deportation camp, from which every Tuesday trains left for Auschwitz. Over 100,000 people passed through here on their way to the gas chambers. Etty chose to go there and stay there, even when she had the chance to hide. In that camp, she helped the sick and families, organized the arrival of food packages, and kept the children company. She spent herself entirely. But, in the meantime, she pushed herself ever closer to the edge of the abyss, freely.

The pages of her diary are full of Westerbork, descriptions that provide a cross-section of the greatness and misery of those who lived, awaiting death: the barracks, the waiting, the fights for stamps that could give you another week of life, concern for her parents and brothers... There are breathtaking passages: “A young girl called me. She was sitting bolt upright in her bed, eyes wide open. This girl has thin wrists and a peaky little face. She is partly paralyzed, and has just been learning to walk again, between two nurses, one step at a time. ‘Have you heard? I have to go.’ We look at each other for a long moment. It is as if her face has disappeared; she is all eyes. Then she says in a level, gray little voice, ‘Such a pity, isn’t it? That everything you have learned in life goes for nothing.’” There was also a great deal of irony, for example when they said that Etty, too, had to be deported, and then said no, “there had been an error.” “My call-up had been an ‘error.’ That seems a curious expression, as if it wasn’t an ‘error’ for everyone else.”
But there was also a true gaze on her tormentors, seeking every aspect of humanity, even the most hidden. Hers was a pure gaze, free of hatred: “I know those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way?” And then: “The earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth.” This is the “hymn to charity.”
In this “strange state of mournful contentment,” a mysterious and immense need arose in her: to help God. Not just to forgive Him for the absurd evil she saw happening (she wrote in August, 1942: “That one can have so much love as to be able to forgive God!!”), but actually to serve Him, to collaborate in His mysterious work: “I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves.” This was not blasphemy; it was the desire for the human person to remain human, not to be lost in the tragedy. This could happen only if the bond was not cut. Etty wanted Him not to be lost, to save herself and others: “I will always start with the principle of helping God as much as possible and if this works, so much the better, because it means that I will also be helping others.”

A balm. In the end, she attained total, unconditional gratuitousness, a radical love for others that gushed from a being who had reached her innermost depths. (“When I pray, I never pray for myself, always for others... One should only pray that another should have enough strength to shoulder his burden. If you do that, you lend him some of your own strength.”) This is the most striking thing about reading her: the continuous crescendo of her ascent. The last line of her diary tells all, in 12 words: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”
This was the way Etty Hillesum lived. “A beautiful life, precisely this!” she wrote of that transit camp, because “gratitude will always be greater than sorrow.” In her final days, she wrote: “The sky is full of birds, the purple lupines stand up so regally and peacefully... the sun is shining on my face–and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension. I’m fine.” The order to depart had arrived the evening before. Etty, her parents, and her brother Mischa boarded the train. The last word they heard her say was a happy “Bye!” shouted from carriage number 12, departing Westerbork. “We left singing.” It was true.