The last quotation was from the end of the diary, in fact from the last page, and uses a religious metaphor that has significance both in Judaism and Christianity. This characterizes much of the third section of the diary.
On July 15, , Hillesum took a job with the Judenrat and worked there for two weeks. She terminated this job, which she despised, by volunteering to accompany the first group of Jews that was sent to the Westerbork Durchgangslager transit camp. This apparently bought her some privileges, for example the right to return to Amsterdam several times. The third and last section of the diary, which starts on September 15, , during her first trip back to Amsterdam after Spier had suddenly died of illness, is both in style and spirit quite different from the first two sections.
It ends on October 8, shortly before her return to Westerbork. No doubt aided by her religious faith and in spite of failing health, Hillesum survived Westerbork until September 7, , when she, her parents, and her brother Mischa were put on a transport to Auschwitz. Her faith did not help her to survive there; she died in Auschwitz barely three months later.
Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, Have an update or correction? Let us know. Episode E. Lockhart's New Jewish Superhero. Frenk, Hanan. Jewish Women's Archive. Learn more. Etty Hillesum January 15, — The misery here is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire.
Finally, in , an abridged volume of the diaries was published by the writer and editor Jan G. Pomerans, An Interrupted Life , came out in along with many other foreign editions , to widespread acclaim. At first, Hillesum is not particularly preoccupied by the war, or by the tightening restrictions on the Jewish population in the Netherlands. She is an intellectual and extroverted law graduate doing postgrad studies in Slavic languages.
Living in a shared house in the bohemian red-light district of Amsterdam, she rides her bike around, socializes with friends, and earns money from odd jobs including tutoring in Russian her mother, Riva, fled the pogroms in Russia as a young woman. Spiritually awakened and emotionally elevated, she grows besotted with her charismatic mentor. Even at the height of her fixation on Spier, she remains fond of another lover, her sixty-something landlord, Han. Not because of other men, but because I myself am made up of so many people.
Is it decadent? Equipped with a special permit from the Joodsche Raad — as the Jewish Council Judenrat was called in Holland — which allowed her freedom of movement, she passed letters on from inmates in the camp to Amsterdam and to underground groups, and also smuggled medication back into the camp. Attention begets love, which always leads to action. She sought to 'wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer, and my words will have to be so many hammer strokes with which to beat out the story of our fate.
Unbowed by suffering. Hillesum refused to escape or go into hiding, as her non-Jewish Dutch friends implored her to do; on one occasion, they even tried to kidnap her in order to save her. Although she was not obliged to do so, she always insisted on returning to Westerbork, even after becoming ill and being hospitalized in Amsterdam. She was not naive; she knew exactly what she was returning to.
She did not make do with the artistic and documentary aspects of her role as a writer, or even with her work as a nurse. As Prof. It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. We may suffer, but we must not succumb. With a song. That July, the special status and privileges granted to the members of the Jewish Council of Westerbork were revoked. The were told that only half of them would be able to return to Amsterdam.
Hillesum chose to be part of the group that remained behind in the camp, together with her parents and her brother Mischa, who had also arrived there. In September, she is deported to Auschwitz, just a few days after she, in a clandestine letter, had painted a staggering picture of the trains leaving in convoy in the middle of the night. She is killed in Auschwitz in November If you jump to conclusions too soon or want to draft a compact synthesis, you are in for a disappointment. We should never forget that Etty wrote primarily for herself, initially for therapeutic purposes, and set out on an internal quest — with a courage that is not to be underestimated, — without a clue where it would take her.
Moreover, she was devoid of any urge to find systems and definitely lacked a desire to cover up contradictions in her thinking. This does not mean, however, that all interpretations of her work are equally justified.
Camp Westerbork was a transit camp in the Drenthe province, meant to serve as a refugee camp for Jews who had illegally entered the Netherlands. That is also true when it comes to her understanding of resistance, which for her always equals a moral, inner resistance. What is significant here, is that she consciously refuses to develop an image of the enemy. She rejects hatred. Next to Dutch, i. The German language also serves as a vehicle for her innermost quest, through reading, for instance, the works of Carl-Gustav Jung and even more Rilke.
It is also the language of the translations from world literature she often reads. The truth, however, is not as straightforward. A makeshift construction. But I am also deeply impressed by the notion she finally conceives in her diary, although I cannot call to mind what exactly lies behind her metaphors:.
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