‘To wield this pen as if it were a hammer’

The diaries left behind by Etty Hillesum when she was murdered in Auschwitz reveal a
humanism that could not be sullied even by the evil she saw

Gid’on Lev

Published in Haaretz weekend magazine, April 24, 2020, p. 5

In one of the immense wooden barracks in the Westerbork transit camp, exposed to the
frigid winds of December 1942, a young woman lay on the top of a three-tier, rust-eaten
iron bunk bed, clutching precious items: a pen and a few sheets of paper. The camp,
located in northeastern Holland, was the final station on Dutch soil for 102,000 Jews and
thousands of Gypsies and underground activists before they were transported to death
camps.

Even in the face of her own inevitable death and that of all her loved ones, Etty Hillesum,
28 years old at the time, maintained a rare humanistic-spiritual outlook. “I really see no
other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there,” she wrote. “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” (from “An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of
Etty Hillesum 1941-43,” translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans)

Hillesum’s diaries and letters were discovered by chance almost 40 years after they were
written, and have been translated into many languages.

“She possesses the latent fire of secular believers who, like Janusz Korczak, on the edge
of the abyss, rise to become saint-like,” Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld noted about her
in the preface to the Hebrew translation of the diaries. (Korczak, the director of a Jewish
orphanage in Warsaw, declined an offer of sanctuary and accompanied the children to the
Treblinka extermination camp in 1942.)

Home as hell
Esther (Etty) Hillesum was born on January 15, 1914, in Middelburg, in southwestern
Holland. Her father, Dr. Levi (Louis) Hillesum, a teacher of Greek and Latin, was short
of stature and deaf in one ear; he bore a stoic approach to life and had a dry sense of
humor. Her mother, Riva (Rebecca), née Bernstein, was very different from her husband:
an extroverted, boisterous redhead who fled to Holland alone from Russia in 1907, in the
wake of a pogrom in her native town of Surash.
Etty had two younger brothers: Jacob (Jaap), a brilliant youth who wrote poetry and,
while in high school, discovered several previously unknown vitamins; and Michael
(Mischa), a gifted pianist who as an adolescent was considered one of Europe’s most
promising musicians and composers. The genius in the family sprang from fertile, albeit
unstable ground: Jaap was confined several times to psychiatric hospitals, Mischa was
diagnosed as a schizophrenic at 16.
“Our house is a remarkable mixture of barbarism and culture,” Hillesum wrote of her
home. “Spiritual riches lie within grasp, but… are carelessly scattered about… It is sheer
hell in this house.”

In 1924 the family moved to the city of Deventer, in eastern Holland, where Etty attended
the Municipal Gymnasium, where her father served as assistant headmaster. It was about
then when Etty began to learn Hebrew and took part in meetings of a Zionist youth
organization. In contrast to her brilliant brothers, Etty was not an outstanding student, and
her grades were average. She went on to complete two law degrees, and concurrently
studied psychology and Slavic languages, in Amsterdam.
The first pages of her diaries present a picture of a young woman lacking in self-
confidence and tending to moodiness, which she coped with through eating or sex.

Such was her situation when she happened to attend a presentation by Julius Spier, a
Jewish dealer in metals who had decided to devote himself to psycho-chirology, the study
of personality structure as determined by the physical shape and functioning of the hand.
Spier had undergone psychoanalysis with Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich, and at Jung’s
advice opened his own clinic.

Impressed by Spier’s personality, Hillesum began therapy with him, during which she
was exposed to the possibility of living a deep and authentic spiritual existence. In time
the two became close friends and also apparently had a brief love affair. Hillesum started
to write her diary shortly after meeting Spier, in 1941, probably with his encouragement.

In God’s world
The diary is rife with uncompromising self-observation, although its purpose was
apparently not therapeutic. Indeed, literature was the fulcrum of Hillesum’s life. She
wanted to completely devote herself to writing: “I ought to spend all my life behind a
desk,” she confided to her diary. She believed that prowess as an writer necessitated a
deep and empathetic understanding of humanity, to which end she needed to familiarize
herself with all aspects of humanity within herself.
Hillesum immersed herself in a daily writing regimen, demanding fiercely of herself to
“find really suitable words.” She began writing a novel, which has been lost, and at the
same time set down in her diary a detailed, unbiased account of her life, trying to be as
attentive as possible to everything that was happening – to her feelings, her thoughts, her
desires, as well as to the people she met, the objects around her, plants, colors, books.

“Attentiveness” – aandacht in Dutch – is a term that occurs frequently in Hillesum’s

diary entries. She would, for example, look at an ordinary stone on her porch and write,
“I should like to write a whole book about a pebble... I could live with nothing but a
pebble for a long time and still feel that I was living in God’s great world of nature.”

Perhaps this is the way of true artists? Indeed, George Orwell once related something
similar about himself in his autobiographical essay “Why I Write.” For 15 years,
beginning at age 10, he was making up of a continuous “story” about himself, “a sort of
diary existing only in the mind”, describing to himself every deed and every thing he saw
as he wended his way in the world: “A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the
muslin curtains… Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf.”

Orwell noted that some people are driven to write by an “historical impulse” to reveal
facts and to document them, others by a “political purpose”, while for some writing is
motivated by an aesthetic enthusiasm for the world and for language. As a young man, he
admitted, such motives seemed remote to him, and by nature he might have been content
to write “ornate or merely descriptive books,” rather like his first novel, “Burmese Days.”
However, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
“turned the scale”: From that point Orwell poured all his talent into political writing.

Rilke as real
For her part, Hillesum followed a similar course. At the outset of her creative path, she
was preoccupied with herself and her writing, convinced that politics had nothing to do
with her. “Reality is not entirely real to me,” she wrote. “A single line of Rilke’s seems
more real to me than moving house or anything like that.” However, the Nazi invasion of
her country, in 1940, provoked an immense shift of consciousness; her writing became in
and of itself an ethical act.

Hillesum began to perceive herself as “a small battlefield, in which the problems, or some
of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep
oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield.” The mature artist, she
believed, is a microcosm of all of humanity. Not only does she identify, understand and
document, but actually lives the events in her consciousness, digests and processes them,
and imbues them with a transformative power that casts a wide net of influence: “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 women.”

For many artists, their oeuvre, the fruit of their own private struggle, is their principal
contribution to society. Orwell and Hillesum are splendid examples of those for whom
this was not enough.

Orwell went to Spain as a journalist to cover the Civil War, but after a short time decided
to participate in the fighting with the Republican forces. He was seriously wounded on
the battlefield by a sniper’s bullet that cut through his throat, a hair’s breadth away from
the carotid artery.

Along with taking determined action in the real, physical world, or perhaps thanks to it,
Orwell devoted himself to writing. He wrote his masterpiece, “1984,” in a small house
that was not even connected to the power grid, on the isolated Scottish island of Jura in
the winter of 1946-47, one of the harshest winters in British history. His physical
condition deteriorated, but he persisted in his feverish work, typing the final draft of the
novel in bed, because he was too weak to walk. Only after he completed the book did
Orwell leave the island and seek medical treatment, but it was too late. He died in 1950,
half a year after the book’s publication, at the age of 46.

For Hillesum, too, writing fed an intense involvement in the world, and was also
nourished by it. In July 1942, the Nazis started transporting Jews from Amsterdam to
Westerbork. Although her name did not appear on the deportation lists, she joined the
deportees of her own volition and worked in the camp’s hospital. 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.

Unbowed by suffering
Hillesum refused to escape or go into hiding, as her 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. “I caught myself saying
it aloud in the night, aloud to myself and quite soberly, ‘So that’s what hell is like.’”
However, her presence there was essential. She felt an obligation to document the events
in the camp as precisely as she could, demanding of herself 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 and of a piece of history as it is and
never was before.” Indeed, that is the experience of reading her descriptions of life in
hell.

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. Like Orwell, who was known as “St. George” with good
reason, she wished to have an impact on the consciousness and spirit of her brethren, and
in that sense to actually save them.

As Prof. Rachel Feldhay Brenner, a scholar of Jewish literature, observed, Hillesum

grasped that the Nazis’ overriding goal was not only to annihilate the Jews physically:
Their diabolical purpose was also to corrupt their souls, to turn them into despicable
creatures, corroded by hate, while thrust into an existential situation like persecuted,
frightened animals. If the victims abandoned their moral values, they would give their
tormentors exactly what they wanted.

Hillesum saw it as her duty to assist her people in preserving their human dignity in the
face of extinction, “to catch and stop them in their flight from themselves and then take
them by the hand and lead them back to their own sources.” This would be very difficult
to accomplish, but it could be done, as she herself showed with her big heart and mind.

“I know that those who hate have good reason to do so,” she wrote, and added, “But why
should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? 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.”

To love, she argued – “childishly perhaps but stubbornly” – was the only response to the
horrific situation into which humanity had led itself. And that included, almost
incomprehensibly, love for the persecutors and murderers of her people – for they, too,
she always sought to remember, were created in God’s image.

“The misery here is quite terrible,” Hillesum wrote from the bowels of hell to a friend,
“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.
“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.”

The final entry in her diary ends with a prayer: “We should be willing to act as a balm for
all wounds.”

With a song
In July 1943, the special status and privileges granted to the members of the Jewish
Council of Westerbork were revoked. They 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.

Two months later, the four members of the family were transported to Auschwitz. Riva
and Levi Hillesum either died on the horrific journey, or were gassed upon arrival at the
death camp. Etty Hillesum perished on November 30, 1943, and Mischa on March 31,
1944. Their brother Jaap apparently died on a death march toward the end of the war.
From the ghastly train car on the way to Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum threw a postcard out
that was found by a farmer and sent to its destination. “We left the camp singing,” she
wrote.