Everyone who has read this book remains deeply affected. Practically every review on the Web gives it a five-star rating. Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch Jewish woman who was killed in a notorious Nazi concentration camp at the age of 29. In the last three years of her life (from March 1941 to August 1943), she kept a diary, into which she poured the deepest part of her life. When the diary begins, Etty is a frightened, confused young woman very aware of her intellectual interests, her vibrant sexuality and the terrifying persecution of the Jews which has started. The diary shows her transformation from a frightened, sensual, insecure young woman to becoming the “loving heart of the barracks,” a source of hope and support for the desperate people around her—right up to the day she was sent to the extermination camp. Here are short excerpts from her diary, which was discovered in 1981, and took the world by storm.
This is a painful and well-nigh insuperable step for me, yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper… The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me,…
The erotic and the spiritual
(About Julius Spier, a group therapist, to whom Etty would become close) If someone makes an impression on me, I can revel in erotic fantasies for days and nights on end…For a few days I could do nothing but think of him…
More arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers. We seek the meaning of life, wondering whether any meaning can be left. But that is something each one of us must settle with himself and with God.
For a moment yesterday I thought I couldn’t go on living, that I needed help. Life and suffering had lost their meaning for me…
There is really a 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.
Sometimes I don’t feel like going on.
There are moments when this is what I want: his [Spier’s] concentrated, undivided love… I want him to say, “Darling, you are the only one and I shall love you for ever more.” …I do have a strong erotic streak and a great need for caresses and tenderness.
It is a slow and painful process, this striving after true inner freedom. Growing more and more certain there is no help or assurance or refuge in others. That the others are just as uncertain and weak and helpless as you are…
Mortal fear in every fibre. Complete collapse. Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic..
… God, take me by Your hand, I shall follow you dutifully, and not resist too much. I shall evade none of the tempests life has in store for me.. but now and then grant me a short respite…
Oh God, I thank you for having created me as I am. I thank you for the sense of fulfilment I sometimes have…
December 31: The last evening of a year that has been by richest and most fruitful and yes, the happiest of all… I listen to myself, allow myself to be led not by anything on the outside, but by what wells up from deep within.
What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?… The rottenness of others is in us too.
….How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
Everything is no longer pure chance.. .I have a destiny… At the end of each day I feel the need to say: life is very good after all.
Somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in the whole day is turning inwards in praying for five short minutes.
There are no wasted and boring minutes any longer…
The sexual and erotic element in me has gradually been conditioned to play a subordinate role to human warmth, although that warmth is intense and passionate enough….. A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body.
Lord, help me not to waste a drop of my energy on fear and anxiety, but grant me all the resilience I need to bear this day… God, do not let me dissipate my strength on useless hatred against these soldiers. Let me save my strength for better things.
The threat grows over greater, and terror increases from day to day. I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall…
.. And yet, at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breasts of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe.
…Our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves. I find life beautiful and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. Life is hard but that is no bad thing… True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself.
Meaning in the midst of terror
The English radio has reported that 700,000 Jews perished last year alone, in Germany and the occupied territories…And yet I don’t think life is meaningless. And God is not accountable to us for the senseless harm we cause one another. We are accountable to Him.. I find life beautiful and meaningful, from minute to minute.
Somewhere there is something inside me that will never desert me again.
A new insight: …They are out to destroy us completely… Today I am filled with terrible despair, and I shall have to come to terms with that as well…I shall not be bitter… I find life meaningful… yes, meaningful…My love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in any way discouraged. I continue to grow from day to day, even with the likelihood of destruction staring me in the face…
All that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well… We must help you and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last… No one is in their clutches who is in Your arms.
When I pray I never pray for myself; always for others, or else I hold a silly, naive or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God…
To think that one small human heart can experience so much, Oh God, so much suffering and so much love. I am so grateful to You, God, for having chosen my heart, in these times. To experience all the things it has experienced.
From Westerbork (the transit camp or jail from which Jews were sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz).
…These two months behind barbed wire have been the richest and most intense months of my life…I have learned to love Westerbork… I am grateful to you, Oh God, for having made my life so rich.
…I feel at home. I have learned so much about it here. We are at home in every place on earth, if only we carry everything within us….
We have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn’t even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies…no one is really bad deep down…. Each of us must turn inwards and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
When I hear women and girls say, ‘We don’t want to think, we don’t want to feel, otherwise we are sure to go out of our minds,’ I was filled with an infinite tenderness… and I prayed, ‘Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.’ Alone for once in the middle of the night, God and I have been left together, and I feel all the richer and at peace for it.
It all comes down to the same thing: Life is beautiful. And I believe in God. And I want to be there right in the thick of what people call “Horror” and still be able to say: Life is beautiful.
…My impressions are scattered like glittering stars on the dark velvet of my memory.
Oh God, I am grateful to you for having given me this life.
Healing Balm
Etty’s last diary entry before leaving Westerbork was: We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.
…I feel perfectly able to bear my lot, but not that of my parents.
…. I always end up with one single word: God. And that says everything and there is no need for anything more. All my creative powers are translated into inner dialog with you; the beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches.
On September 7, 1943, Etty, her parents and brothers were put on the train to Auschwitz to be gassed to death. An acquaintance wrote to Etty’s friends: “Alas, she too has gone…Talking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way, full of sparkling humour, perhaps just a touch of sadness, but every inch the Etty you all know so well.. I wish I could describe the grace with which she and her family left. I think she quite preferred to share the experiences they have prepared for us all.”
Out of a window of that train Etty threw a postcard, which was found and sent by farmers: “We have left the camp singing.” A Red Cross report states that Etty died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943. Her parents and one brother died there too.
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