“Life is Beautiful, In Spite of Everything”

Why write? Who are we writing to? What for? 

Writing beckons me as a teacher, a healer and a therapist.  There are lessons in writing.  There is meaning in language - words chosen and pieced together in just the right way.  For me, there is something quite visceral about the words on a page.  I can feel it in my bones or find it catching my breath.  But I often find it difficult to convey what’s going on in my head and heart in a language that fits.  

But then I met Etty.  Esther "Etty" Hillesum is not with us anymore, at least not in the physical sense.  But she has been with me every day since we were introduced.  Our introduction was simple - a brief mention in a book accompanied with a quote from her, which I couldn’t seem to get out of my head.  “There are many miracles in a human life.  My own has been one long sequence of inner miracles”.  The pull drawing me towards her was magnetic.  I dove in - Wikipedia, blogs, articles, books and her own writings.  

Etty Hillesum was 29 when she was killed in Auschwitz in a gas chamber. Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary. Etty also wrote letters. It took almost 40 years for her work to get published and has now been translated into 18 languages. What we know of her was written in the timespan of two years, between the ages of 27 and 29, in German occupied Amsterdam during WWII.  

When Etty starts keeping a diary in March 1941, she is still living the almost normal life of someone who was educated and had grown up in a protective Amsterdam environment. However, she is suffering from depression, and keeping a diary is part of her therapy. “It’s true I’m quite sure of it: I work very hard...inside me, inside my brain, there is an enormous workshop where fashioning, forging, laboring, suffering and sweating all go on.  But what the end product may be I do not know...Something is demanding to be given shape...I know that I shall have to live my life to the full come what may.  And my inner workshop must never be closed”.

Etty is a woman seeking serenity and trust in herself. The diary is full of uncompromising self-observation.  She practiced being totally honest with herself, as well as gentle and kind. She seemed to know there was wisdom awaiting her and that it would take some time,  “… like clothes that are much too big and into which I still have to grow.”  Etty was, bravely, on an internal quest without a clue where it would take her.   

My kind of girl.

It was during this innere emigration (a quest inside yourself for what you can no longer find in the outside world) that the Nazi’s were imposing many anti-Jewish restrictions all around her.  Fired from jobs, prohibited from public transportation, and wearing the yellow star just to name a few. But as the world of Jews narrowed under Nazi occupation with increasing regulations,  Etty’s inner world expanded.  “I see no other solution, I really see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war. That we must look into ourselves and nowhere else.”

It would be easy to conclude she was just using this internal journey as a way to escape the atrocities surrounding her.  But it seems clear that she had considered this possibility and rejected it. For Etty, going inside was not a place to hide from the world. It was a place where she could come to terms with what was unfolding around her - and try to develop an adequate response to it.

I’ve been on my own journey of sorts.  We all are.  As I read Etty I would often find myself, mouth agape, eyes wide, crying internally “yes yes that’s it!”  Those are the words painting the language I haven’t been able to formulate or even recognize on my own.  I got the sense that Etty was also somehow aware of the impact this could have, not only on her but on the world in which she moved.  “There is nothing else for it, I shall have to solve my own problems.  I always get the feeling that when I solve them for myself I shall have also solved them for a thousand other(s)...for these problems are not just mine alone.”

Let’s remember, Etty’s world and those of many around her, was continually getting worse.  She was not naive. But Etty had developed a deep understanding of the things she could control versus the things she could not.  And she chose to give where she could in ways that impacted the very real humans in the midst of suffering. She refuses to go into hiding and takes on administrative duties for the Jewish Council. By the summer of 1942, Etty’s main goal was to become what she called “the thinking heart of the barracks” in whichever camp she knew she would eventually end up. “I don’t want to be anything special, I only want to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.”  So when a social worker position opened up at the transit camp of Westerbork, she volunteered, hoping to put her ideals into practice.  “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty,” she wrote, “to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others.” 

Etty’s growing inner journey turned more real and external when she arrived at Westerbork. This camp was a temporary way station for tens of thousands of Dutch Jews - basically a waiting room for the gas chambers of Poland.  Her life there was filled with an unending list of needs to be fulfilled for those suffering, knowing full well that in the process she would likely end up among their number (at the time she had privileges to come and go from the camp as. Jewish Council member). Etty had some connection to a place where she could be engaged in reality and transcend it at the same time.  “Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves. We may suffer, but we must not succumb.”  

With a bone-deep peace she worked and toiled, comforted and cheered all around her, seeing it as her duty to assist her people in preserving their humanity in the face of extinction.  In the midst of extreme conditions, Etty develops an awareness of the indestructible beauty of this world. “The misery here is quite terrible,” Hillesum wrote in a letter from Westerbork camp on July 3, 1943, “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. And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart – I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force – the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.” 

The striking thing about her diaries and letters is that even after all these years, her voice echoes as loudly as ever.  The year of  2020 has been a doozie.  Just like during Etty’s time, discrimination, racism, persecution, and the hunting down of people is happening now.  Uncertainty, fear, death and sadness are vibrating underneath the surface for all of us, for many reasons.  And when I say “all of us” I mean humanity.  

What Etty showed me, and all of us, is what human beings are capable of, even in extreme circumstances.  “If all this suffering does not help us to broaden our horizon,” she wrote, “to attain a greater humanity by shedding all trifling and irrelevant issues, then it will all have been for nothing.”  In these times, how can we resist hatred surrounding and provoking us?  In what ways can we take responsibility for our own souls and, consequently, the health and survival of not only our lives, but of our humanity?  Etty had a pretty good idea.  “We could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live,” she wrote.  

On July 5, 1943, her personal status was suddenly revoked and she became a camp internee along with her father, mother and brother Mischa.  By September the family were deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz where Etty died 3 months later.   The revolutionary and moving example she gives allows us to meet the challenge she raised in the final sentence of her diary: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”  

A postcard was found that Etty had thrown from the train taking her to her death.  The last words on record from her are these: "I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother, and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning... We left the camp singing."