The Story of the Courage To Be of Etty Hillesum

Dr Paul Thelakat

“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. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.” (12 July 1942).
The above is a quotation from the diary of a 29-year-old Etty HIllesum of Netherlands who was killed in Anschutz Concentration camp of the Nazis on November 30, 1943. She was the eldest of the three children of Levie Hillesum and Riva Bernstein. Hillesum’s father, a classicist, was gentle, thoughtful and humorous by nature and loved his books. Her mother was a Russian-language teacher who had fled Russian pogroms. Riva brought a warm Russian Slavic touch to the Hillesum family. Her parents and two brothers were all killed by the Nazis. Hillesum began to celebrate her birthday on the date she first met psycho-chirologist, Julius Spier.
She wrote in the diary: “On the third of February I was one year old. I think I’ll celebrate 3rd February as my birthday from now on—it is more important than 15th January, the day my umbilical cord was cut.” With Spier’s help, Hillesum learned the importance of self-discipline in all areas of her life. She copied much of Spier’s counsel, including his advice that: “If you practice something daily, then you will also feel daily that something is gradually taking shape” (48).
On 10 May 1940, the German Army invaded the Netherlands. May 1942 onwards, Jews in Holland were required to wear the yellow star, and restrictions continued to increase. The beginning of the end of Hillesum’s life commenced on July 5, 1943, when, after a period of approximately eleven months as part of the Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council), Hillesum had her special status revoked. She was back in Amsterdam. From there she left on 19 August to visit her parents for the last time in Deventer. On Friday afternoon 21 August 1942, she returned to camp Westerbork. Probably, she was allowed to return to Amsterdam on 4 September 1942 on the ground of the leave scheme. There she was shocked by the deterioration of the situation in the camp. Etty Hillesum continually turned down offers to go into hiding. She said that she wished to ‘share her people’s fate.’ The day arrived for Hillesum and her family on September 7, 1943, and it was inside a packed cattle car heading to Auschwitz, that Hillesum scrawled her final recorded words onto a postcard, which she then threw from the train. Discovered and posted to its recipient, it read: “Christine, opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ 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. On special orders from The Hague, we left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa, too. We shall be travelling for three days. Good-bye for now from the four of us.” Etty entrusted her diaries and requested that they be published if she did not return. The first step towards what eventually became a deep religious faith was not through any interest in ‘religion’ as such at all. It had more to do with a sense in her of the inadequacy of the way that she, as an intellectual young woman educated in a modern university in post-Enlightenment Europe, engaged with the world around her—predominantly through the mind.

Pope Benedict XVI: “I am also
thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young
Dutch girl of Jewish origin who
died in Auschwitz. At first far from
God, she discovered him looking
deep within her and she wrote:
‘There is a really deep well
inside me. And in it dwells God.”

“Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields—there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze—and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and now that I must find them. I must fling myself into reality, time and again, must come to terms with everything I meet on my path, feed the outer world with my inner world and visa versa. But it is all so terribly difficult and I feel so heavyhearted.” (118)
Paul Tillich, calls it the courage of despair—a term which gives courage an altogether deeper meaning. It is “the courage to be” in spite of death, fate, meaninglessness or despair Even in the face of death, she would not be daunted. She writes: “With the courage of despair I shall try to steal from this day one hour to tell you a few trifles which even happen in this heath land of Drenthe.”…“it is good to live even behind barbed wire and draughty barracks if one lives with the necessary love for people and for life.” In the words of Woodhouse, “The search for truth was a driving force in Etty’s makeup… she came to understand her vocation as the seeing and bearing witness to what was more deeply true in the terrible times in which she lived. And she knew that truth is indivisible. Then discovering what is true is impossible. And when the search for truth is abandoned, a terrible blindness overcomes people.”19
Out of the crucible of the Holocaust emerged a profound theology of vulnerable Presence, which led this extraordinary young woman to triumph over the evil that threatened to engulf her. The image of a jasmine bush whose blossoms have blown away serves as a metaphor for the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe. In reality, she was not a nature lover; yet in this passage she uses the fate of the jasmine as a metaphor for the fate of her people. Literature is not the same as reality—not even in a diary. While writers such as Rilke and Dostoevsky exercised a significant influence upon Hillesum, with the Russian novelist representing the paragon of her literary aspirations and the German-born poet leading her into her deepest self, her diaries are saturated with a variety of other voices, all of which to varying degrees contribute to her worldview. While many of these voices articulate a Christian vision of the world—a vision to which Hillesum was sympathetic—attempts to claim Hillesum as emblematic of Christianity betray a fundamental misunderstanding of her outlook. Etty Hillesum did not want to be absorbed by any party discipline of whatever type.
Even in a superficial reading of the diaries, it is striking that not all occurrences of the word ‘God’ have the same meaning…We start from the use of the word ‘God’ early on in the diaries. This use should probably be viewed as an imitation of a stylistic figure that we find in Hillesum’s paragon Rilke. For Rilke, God was not a transcendent personality, but something enclosed within himself. One could even wonder whether his use of the name ‘God’ was not merely a literary device for better illustrating his own ideas. ‘God’ into some passages in her diaries—as an imaginary figure to whom she spoke because doing so made it easier for her to articulate her thoughts. God is not accountable to us for the senseless harm we cause one another. We are accountable to Him! While others considered God responsible for the war crimes that people committed, Etty Hillesum was able to demarcate the matter clearly. People are responsible for what people do. God has nothing to do with it. The question is not, Where was God during the Shoah? The question is, Where were the others during the persecution of the Jewish people? Etty Hillesum not only retained her faith in God, she also retained her faith in people despite the atrocities perpetrated every day during those war years. She stated repeatedly that people should not hate one another, but that we should work to reduce, if not eliminate, the hatred in the world. And now that the war is past, the same people must once again rebuild their lives and country together. Seen from this perspective, Etty Hillesum’s view has lost none of its meaning. The circumstances of terror confronted Hillesum with a formidable challenge. On the one hand, she wished to place herself in the role of a compassionate participant in the suffering inflicted upon her people; on the other hand, she wished to assume the role of an artist capable of chronicling this suffering, putting it in writing. These tasks are contradictory, because one evokes the ethics of identification with the suffering victims, while the other seeks the aesthetics of representation of their suffering in art. Emotional proximity to the victim, which borders on self-sacrifice clashes with emotional detachment required in order to articulate the victim’s pain. Hillesum’s response to the Holocaust is that of immersion in self-education as a writer. Gaining self-knowledge will be transformational; it will move her to the next phase because self-understanding will enable her to shape a new attitude toward humanity. Hillesum admonished her people—and we note the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ that she constantly uses—“If we abandon the hard facts that we are forced to face … if we do not allow them to settle and change into impulses through which we can grow and from which we can draw meaning—then we are not a viable generation.” Her final known correspondence carries the voice of one who, to the end, defied terror, hopelessness and despair.
Despite the failure of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust, we must be in a position and remains convinced that, even in the post-Holocaust era, relationships based on an open dialogue among equals are the only thing that will guarantee a humane future for humankind. Confronted with an apocalyptic fate, “rendered all decision making, all moral acts meaningless.” Despite her sadness and sense of “utter defenselessness”, she is determined not to let these feelings take over. “I have my inner strength,” she maintains, “and that is enough, the rest doesn’t matter.” As in Elie Wiesel’s avowal, “There is no such thing as a literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be.” Hillesum wrote: “One should be able to write fairy tales here…The misery here is so beyond all bounds of reality that it has become unreal. Sometimes I walk through the camp laughing secretly to myself because of the completely grotesque circumstances.” As Levinas argues, “no-one can save himself without the Others.” The other is part of my inner self but also a part that extends beyond my “I”, beyond the limits of myself. Etty Hillesum loved most of all “to read life from people.” Letting oneself be read by Etty Hillesum means reestablishing contact with the other and the alien both inside and outside oneself. Her oeuvre is an interdisciplinary, multidimensional study of the other.
Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God—such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing. But when, as in this instance, something is taking place between heaven and earth, one misses everything when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery. He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of transcendence as such— our vis-àvis— contributes to our human responsibility for the eclipse. The manifestation of a disease of the spirit. The cure for such disease lies in the rediscovery of the order of the soul. The existence is existence in awareness of one’s humanity as having been constituted by this tension toward the divine ground. This awareness, emerges in the context of an existence centered on a turning toward the ‘Ground’ (God): it is a living attunement to the dimension of Divine timeless ‘Presence’.It is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase from the Four Quartets, “the point of intersection of time with the timeless.” Etty’s love of existence, however, brought her back to shed light on her fellow human beings who were fighting for their life in the darkness of the concentration camp. Knowing that she could not escape her fate, she embraced her life in that place of the In-Between. She bore the problems of the everyday while keeping herself attuned to the flow of life.
The path holiness, does not lead to an ethereal realm but—as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov insists—takes the subject through the messiness of materiality: “The divine force which man actually encounters in life does not hover above the demonic, but penetrates it.” Whilst the Nazis fled into ideology, Hillesum took the path of Dostoevsky’s Zosima and Alyosha, by entering into dialogue with her world—a movement predicated on proximity to her Other which effected the elimi-
nation of othering. In Dostoevsky’s literary masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov we read: “I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me. Such is my inalienable identity of subject.” It is in this precise sense that Dostoevsky said: “We are all responsible for all, for all men before all, and I more than all others.” Rejecting secular humanism for its failure to prevent the Holocaust, Levinas returned to first principles: a humanism of the Other grounded in Biblical teaching: “Moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but an access to external being: external being is, par excellence, the Other.”
Pope Benedict XVI, during his General Audience of February 13th 2013, made the following observation: “I am also thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin
who died in Auschwitz. At first far from God, she discovered him looking deep within her and she wrote: ‘There is a really 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’ (Diaries, 97). In her disrupted, restless life she found God in the very midst of the great tragedy of the 20th century: the Shoah. This frail and dissatisfied young woman, transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able to declare: ‘I live in constant intimacy with God.’”