Hillesum, Etty (1914–1943)

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Hillesum, Etty (1914–1943)

Dutch intellectual whose diaries, published as An Interrupted Life, have become a vademecum for readers around the world. Name variations: Esther Hillesum. Born Esther Hillesum in Middelburg, Holland, on January 15, 1914; died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943; daughter of Dr. Louis Hillesum (a teacher of classical languages) and Rebecca (Bernstein) Hillesum (a Russian emigre to the Netherlands after a Russian pogrom); graduated from the municipal gymnasium, 1932; University of Amsterdam, law degree; attended the Faculty of Slavonic Languages; began study of psychology.

Selected publications:

Het Verstoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (De Haan/Unieboek, 1981, published in America as An Interrupted Life, Pantheon, 1983); Het denkende hart van de barak (The Thinking Heart of the Barracks, De Haan/Unieboek, 1982, published in America as Etty Hillesum: Letters from Westerbork, Pantheon, 1986).

Etty Hillesum, who was born in Middelburg, Holland, on January 15, 1914, grew up in a house filled with books. After sojourns in Tiel and Winshoten, the family settled in Deventer in 1924, a city east of Holland, where her father was assistant headmaster, then headmaster, of the municipal gymnasium. Dr. Louis Hillesum was a quiet and cerebral scholar; Etty's mother Rebecca Hillesum , who had fled Russia during one of the many pogroms in the 1920s, was the polar opposite—passionate, excitable, and chaotic. It was a "tempestuous" house, Hillesum would later recall. She remembered sitting in her father's untidy, impersonal study, "as were all the rooms in all the different houses in which we ever lived," sitting there in a rage and expressing it with her pen. "Red, green, black," she wrote angrily. "Through the leaves of the green tree I see a girl in a bright red dress." Her desire to write was palpable, an outlet that would offer her clarity in the years ahead. But if there was chaos inside, there was peace outside. "There were cornfields I shall never forget," she wrote, "whose beauty nearly brought me to my knees; there were the banks of the IJssel with the colourful parasols and the thatched roofs and the patient horses. And the sun, which I drank in through all my pores."

The Hillesum children were extremely bright: Mischa, who played Beethoven in public by age six, would be considered one of Holland's finest pianists; Jaap, who was a medical student when he discovered new vitamins at age 17, would win entrance to all the academic laboratories; and Etty, who was always ahead of her friends in school, would be the writer. After attending the University of Amsterdam, where she acquired a law degree, she enrolled in the Faculty of Slavonic Languages.

In early 1937, at age 23, Etty Hillesum moved into a third-floor room in a large house at 6 Gabriël Metsustraat, overlooking South Amsterdam's Museum Square with its concert hall on one end and the Rijksmuseum on the other. She had been invited there by Han Wegerif, a 60-year-old widower, to be a sort of housekeeper. It was a communal household that included the nurse Maria Tuinzing , the German housekeeper Käthe, the social democrat Bernard, and Hans, Wegerif's son. Hillesum also tutored Russian and began an amicable affair with Wegerif the elder.

Throughout her early 20s, she was often ill and frequently felt the need for two-hour naps. A sometime victim of inflamed kidneys and bladder, Hillesum was also plagued by her hated mood-controlling, tri-weekly periods, for which she took a "monthly pound of aspirins." With her iron will, she was determined to grow independent of her body, to learn to accept her moods, and was especially determined to avoid striking out as she had in her youth. She would later refer to this young Hillesum as the "unhappiest person in the world." She had a craving for knowledge, a longing to write, and a need to give meaning. She yearned for discipline as a writer and counted on her habitual state of unease to propel her.

Then at a party, possibly in January 1941, she met Julius Spier. As a psychochirologist, a person who studies and classifies palm prints, Spier had founded a publishing house; he had also lived in Zurich for analysis training under Carl Gustav Jung, who had encouraged Spier to turn psychology into a fulltime profession. In February, Etty consulted Spier for the first time. After three or four therapy sessions, she became his assistant and would eventually become his

lover and "intellectual partner." He was 55, she was 28. But the private lives of these two individuals would soon be controlled by external events.

Throughout the 1930s, Holland had nervously watched the approach of World War II. The Dutch Cabinet had debated the possibility of reaching an understanding with Adolf Hitler, though Queen Wilhelmina had warned her subjects that neutrality might not last forever, since "Hitler has written a book [Mein Kampf], and the contents might be of some consequence." When German troops crossed the Dutch frontier in May 1940, and German paratroopers landed near The Hague in an attempt to capture the queen and leaders of Holland's Cabinet, Wilhelmina had evaded them by boarding a British destroyer. The queen would remain in Britain throughout the war, regularly speaking to her occupied country by radio. After her prime minister in exile again mentioned trying to reach an understanding with Hitler, she successfully maneuvered to have him replaced.

Wilhelmina became a symbol for the Dutch underground resistance to Nazi rule. Many citizens in the Netherlands began placing the German occupiers' postage stamps in the upper lefthand corner of the envelope, arguing that the upper right hand corner was reserved for stamps bearing the likeness of Wilhelmina. When German authorities declared in 1940 that Jews would no longer be admitted to the civil service, half of the country's professors signed a letter of protest. More than 80% of university students refused to sign a statement of loyalty to the Nazi regime.

On May 18, 1940, Artur von Seyss-Inquart became Reichs Commissioner for Holland. He had been Hitler's helpmate in the Austrian anschluss and deputy to the brutal Hans Frank, governor-general of Poland. Seyss-Inquart promised the Dutch that they would remain sovereign, then tightened his grip. When the Nazis first moved against the Jews in February 1941 and 400 were sent to concentration camps, the Dutch in Amsterdam went on strike. It was the first anti-pogrom strike to break out in European history. After their protest was suppressed, the Dutch took their rebellion underground. Throughout World War II, many concealed and protected Jews.

New York Times Book Review">
Etty Hillesum deserves to be counted among the heroes.
—The New York Times Book Review

Though Jewish by birth, Etty Hillesum had no strong religious affiliation. In her journals and letters that cover the period of Sunday, March 1941, to September 15, 1943, three of the brutal years of Holland's occupation, Hillesum seems to go from a worldly, pleasure-loving woman suffering from "inner chaos" and "spiritual constipation" to a woman of near mystical intensity and compassion. Through her relationship with Spier, she went from someone who would need to blurt, "I too am religious, you know," to someone who "sometimes actually dropped" to her knees.

She strove for goodness, praying for an inner freedom, clarity, and peace of mind:

I allow others to formulate what I ought to be formulating for myself. I keep seeking outside confirmation of what is hidden deep inside me, when I know that I can only reach clarity by using my own words…. Perhaps my purpose in life is to come to grips with myself … with everything that bothers and tortures me…. For these problems are not just mine alone. And if at the end of a long life I am able to give some form to the chaos inside me, I may well have fulfilled my own small purpose. Even while I write this down, my unconscious is protesting at such expressions as "purpose" and "mankind" and "solution of problems." I find them pretentious. But then I'm such an ingenuous and dull young woman, still so lacking in courage.

She felt she still needed a "a steady undercurrent," a basic tune. "My ideas hang on me like outsize clothes into which I still have to grow. My mind lags behind my intuition."

Hillesum lived and wrote in a small room often bathed in sunlight. Her one large window, curtains rarely closed, looked out on a sunny veranda, a fading hyacinth, a cherished tree, and the Skating Club. A bookcase near her bed allowed her to reach out with her left hand and grasp Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare and Kierkegaard. On her desk, where she would fill eight blue-lined exercise books, sat a lamp and typewriter, a black telephone, a Moorish statue, a small Bible, Russian grammars and dictionaries, typing paper, carbons, Jung, St. Augustine, three pine cones, and Rilke's Über Gott, crushed under Russian for Businessmen. In the beginning, she feared deserting her "beloved" desk, her refuge, if she were taken away by the Germans. But eventually she realized that the room would be going with her. "It had become a part of myself," she wrote. "I couldn't have stayed in it all my life anyway … so long as I carry it in me I shall always be able to withdraw into it."

On October 24, 1941, new measures to isolate the Dutch Jews were put into effect; many lost their jobs and were forbidden to frequent stores with non-Jews. In April 1942, more measures arrived: Dutch Jews were forced to wear a yellow star, the Star of David, and forbidden to walk on several streets. "In the years to come," she wrote, "children will be taught about ghettos and yellow stars and terror at school and it will make their hair stand on end." These were still "minor vexations," however, "compared with the infinite riches and possibilities we carry within us." But that spring of 1942, when the deportations began, her May 18th entry reads, "The threat grows greater, and terror increases from day to day. I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it as one might into a convent cell and then step outside again."

By June 12, Jews could no longer go to the greengrocers or frequent outside cafes. They had to be off the streets by eight, could not travel by tram anywhere in the city, and would soon have to hand in their bicycles. Even if their work or friends were miles away, walking was the only mode of transportation open to them. "Humiliation always involves two," wrote Hillesum. "The one who does the humiliating, and the one who allows himself to be humiliated. If the second is missing … then the humiliation vanishes into thin air."

On June 29, British radio reported that 700,000 Jews had been killed in Germany and its occupied territories in the preceding year, and that all Jews in Holland were being deported through Drenthe Province, across Germany, and into Poland. "What is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation, we can have no more illusions about that." Hillesum fought despair; her recurrent belief that one is master of one's inner resources grew stronger. "Everything we need is within us," she wrote. While schoolgirl Anne Frank went into hiding with her family just a few miles away, Etty began eating less, preparing her body for less, training herself to go without. She also began preparing her mind to suffer with dignity, to live life from minute to minute and to take "suffering into the bargain."

A good lunch, a basket of cherries, a cup of coffee would give her joy. "As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more the good things of life become unexpected gifts which we accept with gratitude." One night, as she took the blackout paper off a window at 2 am while staying with friends, "suddenly there were two stars at the head of the bed. They were not the same stars I see through my window but I felt in touch with them all the same, and suddenly I was quite certain that no matter where I was in the world I would always find stars and be able to flop down on a bed, or on a floor, or anywhere else, and feel absolutely home."

On July 7, 1942, Dutch Jews began to get called up for labor in "work" camps. Etty continued to prepare—for the train, for life in a labor camp. Mentally, she packed and repacked her rucksack. Because of blisters, she fretted about what shoes to take; she wondered if she should pack underwear and food for three days, and whether or not she should take blankets. She would take her small Bible, she thought, and Rilke's Book of Hours and Letters to a Young Poet, and her two small Russian dictionaries. She would have her hair cut short and throw her lipstick away; she would have a pair of trousers and jacket made out of heavy material and would try to see her parents before she went; she would go to the dentist. The thought of suffering from toothache "out there" was frightening.

The Germans intended to move all Jews to Westerbork, a transit camp near Assen in the northeastern Netherlands, near the German border. Though a concentration camp, it was not an extermination camp; but it was to be the last stop before Auschwitz for more than 100,000 Dutch Jews. Ironically, it had been built by the Dutch in 1939 to house some 1,500 Jews who had fled Germany—political prisoners who had been incarcerated in Buchenwald or Dachau. It was now being used by Hitler's Reich as a holding pen. Instead of the 1,500 it was intended for, the Germans were squeezing in 30,000 to 40,000. Westerbork had its own hierarchy: on top, German supervision; below, Dutch supervision in the form of the Jewish Council.

On July 11, the rumors began—rumors about extermination, about the use of gas. They only served to strengthen Hillesum's inner reserve. "I hope they will send me to a labour camp," she wrote, "so that I can do something for the 16-year-old girls who will also be going. And to reassure the distracted parents who are kept behind." Then the packing of the mental rucksack would begin again. She would take the pure wool sweater that Jopie gave her, the two parts of The Idiot, and her small Langenscheidt dictionary. Maybe if she took less food, she could carry more books.

Friends accused her of defeatism. They prodded her to go into hiding, to take an active role in saving herself. "It is not in my nature to tilt against the savage, cold-blooded fanatics who clamour for our destruction," she wrote. "It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction with a resigned smile—far from it. I am only bowing to the inevitable and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that ultimately they cannot rob us of anything that matters. But I don't think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer."

But her brother Jaap continued the pressure, urging her to take a job with the Jewish Council, which would spare her from internment at Westerbork. Eventually, she did so, despite feelings of having "done something underhand." In retrospect, the Jewish Council was misguided. Goaded into existence by the Nazis, it had been formed to arbitrate between Jews and Germans: the Nazis would hand out edicts and the Council had no choice but to implement them. Since the directives were inevitable, many Council members felt they could at least ease the Jewish burden. Hillesum was not so sure. "Nothing can ever atone for the fact, of course, that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgement in due course."

On July 15, 1942, she began work as a typist in the Council's Cultural Affairs Department. In that building of stone floors and overcrowded corridors, she was assigned to a small room with 100 voices and typewriters chattering together. Even then, she would steal a few moments to sit in the corner and read Rilke. Though it was a long trek to work on blistered feet, she would trudge a few blocks out of her way to find a flower stall. To her, a red anemone was just as real as all the misery she was encountering.

But Hillesum only lasted two weeks at the office of the Jewish Council; that July, she volunteered to accompany the first Jewish group sent to Westerbork. She was convinced that she could be of more use in the camp as a "social worker" for the Council. On the heath in Drenthe Province, Westerbork was frequently plagued by mud and sandstorms, though one section of the camp, wrote Etty, looked out on "a field of yellow lupins stretching as far as the delousing barracks." Inside its barbed wire, it contained row upon row of wooden barracks, each without electricity, each with three-tiered narrow plank beds left over from the Maginot Line.

"Whenever yet another poor woman broke down at one of our registration tables, or a hungry child started crying, I would go over to them and stand beside them protectively, arms folded across my chest, force a smile for those huddled, shattered scraps of humanity and tell myself, 'Things aren't all bad, they really aren't that bad.'… Sometimes I might sit down beside someone, put an arm round a shoulder, say very little and just look into their eyes…. And at the end of each day, there was always the feeling: I love people so much." But Hillesum was not quite ready for the constant interaction that internment demands. She castigated herself for wanting isolation. In the dormitory, she would "fling them a piece of myself and run away."

Her diary stops that first month in camp, between July 29 and September 5, 1942. Hillesum had a travel permit for furloughs to Amsterdam occasionally, to bring out letters and return with medicines. On August 14, 1942, during one of these short leaves, she took sick and could not get back for three months. Most of the time she was bedridden, with intestinal hemorrhage or stomach ulcer (the doctors weren't sure). She managed, however, to visit her parents in Deventer and her dear friend Spier, who was seriously ill. On September 15, 1942, the day the Gestapo came to take him to Westerbork, he died.

Though she returned to camp on November 20, 1942, two weeks later she was back in Amsterdam and admitted to the Netherlands Israelite Hospital because of gallstones. She was away from the barracks for another six months. In early June 1943, she returned to camp. By now, she was traveling with one shirt in her rucksack and a very small Bible.

There had been a massive "Jew hunt" throughout the Netherlands that October. Train after train pulled up at Westerbork, threatening to engulf the camp with a tide of humanity. Every Monday, a train pulled in; every Tuesday, a train pulled out. In all, 93 trains would leave Westerbork for Auschwitz, 70 people to a sealed car, bucket in the middle for sanitation, 1,000 men, women, children, and babies to a train. In her notes to friends, the descriptions of the transports had such enormous power that two of her letters were secretly published in book form by the Dutch Resistance in an attempt to ignite the countryside.

Just now I climbed up on a box lying among the bushes here to count the freight cars at the front for the escorts. The freight cars had been completely sealed, but a plank had been left out here and there, and people put their hands through the gaps and waved as if they were drowning.
The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face—and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.

Call-ups for the Tuesday outgoing transports were issued in the dark of night, just hours before the trains left. If the quota was not filled, more Jews were seized at the last minute. Thus, no one could be sure they would not be on their way to Poland and certain death the following morning.

After a night in the hospital barracks, I took an early morning walk past the punishment barracks, and prisoners were being moved out. The deportees, mainly men, stood with their packs behind the barbed wire. So many of them looked tough and ready for anything…. But the babies, those tiny piercing screams of the babies, dragged from their cots in the middle of the night…. The babies were easily the worst.
And then there was that paralysed young girl, who didn't want to take her dinner plate along and found it so hard to die. Or the terrified young boy: he had thought he was safe, that was his mistake, and when he realised he was going to have to go anyway, he panicked and ran off. His fellow Jews had to hunt him down—if they didn't find him, scores of others would be put on the transport in his place. He was caught soon enough, hiding in a tent, but 'notwithstanding' … 'notwithstanding', all those others had to go on transport anyway, as a deterrent, they said. And so, many good friends were dragged away by that boy. Fifty victims for one moment of insanity. Or rather: he didn't drag them away—our commandant did…. Small bottles of milk are being prepared to take along with the babies, whose pitiful screams punctuate all the frantic activity of the barracks.

Week after week, Hillesum met the trains and saw them off. Then one Monday, on June 21st, as she stood in the rain to greet another incoming train, she was stunned to see her parents and brother Mischa alight from a teeming car. A rare feeling of despair came over her. She wasn't worried about herself, she wrote friends; she had accepted her fate, "but living in fear for your loved ones … is something I can't bear."

On Monday, July 5, when Hillesum learned from others that her parents were on the list for the next morning's transport to Auschwitz, she spent most of the day climbing the German chain of command, cajoling those higher and higher up. Though 2,500 evacuees left the next day, she had managed to keep her parents off the list, only to learn they had been put back on for the following week. That afternoon, she fainted twice in the middle of the barracks. She was right, she said; she could handle anything, except for the suffering of her family. "It's best to be on your own…. That's very important."

On July 10, she wrote a friend that she could no longer save her parents, that it would be their turn to leave for Poland soon, and her brother Mischa insisted on going with them. Though she felt it was cowardice, she did not want to be on the same train. She couldn't stand the idea of seeing them suffer. "I would like to pack their cases with the best things I can lay my hands on, but I know perfectly well that they will be stripped of everything (about that we have been left in no doubt), so why bother?" She concluded her letter with a casual by-the-way: her identity card had been taken away; she was now an official camp inmate.

In September, a letter arrived at the large house at 6 Gabriël Metsustraat. Addressed to Maria Tuinzing, it was written by a campmate of Etty's named Jopie Vleeschouwer. On September 7, 1943, it said, Etty, her mother, father, and brother Mischa were put on transport, though she "wanted to go through the experience without the pressure of family ties." He watched as she stood on the platform, "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." Her mother, father, and Mischa were in car #1, she in car #12. Soon after the train had pulled out of Westerbork, Hillesum tossed a postcard out the slotted window of the train. It was found by Dutch farmers outside the camp and mailed for her. It read: "We have left the camp singing."

After three days, the train reached Auschwitz. That day, September 10, 1943, her father and mother were gassed. Mischa would die on March 31, 1944. (Her brother Jaap, who was allowed to remain in Amsterdam much longer because he was a doctor at the Hollandse Schouwburg, was sent to Westerbork in the beginning of 1944. Though he survived the camps, he died returning to Holland.) On November 30, 1943, two months after the death of her parents, the Red Cross reported the death of Etty Hillesum. She was 29.

Hillesum, who had always intended for her diaries and letters to be published, had asked Maria Tuinzing to be their guardian. Through the years, friends had submitted them to publishers, but they had been turned down. Then one day, those eight exercise books, written "in a small hard-to-decipher hand," were given to Jan G. Gaarlandt. In October 1981, 38 years after her death, her diaries were published in the Netherlands as Het Verstoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (later released in America as An Interrupted Life). After 14 reprints, 150,000 copies were sold in Holland. "For churches, universities, schools, discussion groups, and thousands of individual readers, the book has become a Vademecum," wrote Gaarlandt. (A vademecum is a handbook or a book carried as a constant companion.) It has been published in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Italy, England, and the United States. In May 1982, Etty's letters were published as Het denkende hart van de barak (The Thinking Heart of the Barracks) and published in America as Etty Hillesum: Letters from Westerbork.

On April 1, 1942, a prescient Etty Hillesum had written: "All that matters now is the 'deep inner serenity for the sake of creation.' Though whether I shall ever 'create' is something I can't really tell. But I do believe that it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding one's inner life. And that too is a deed."