5: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43

I used to read a lot about the Holocaust; my high school History Day paper (which almost sent me to DC, I will have you know) was about the Judenrat in Polish ghettoes.  I took a Holocaust class in college, I've read a lot of memoirs and letters and secondary sources.  I had no idea that this was going to be one of those things that is totally different to read about once you have a kid, and I do realize how asinine that sounds (and I also hate when people say you don't understand any particular feeling if you haven't Experienced the Miracle of Motherhood, god how obnoxious is that?) and yet.  So I was up until the wee hours of the morning playing a dumb game on my phone because I couldn't sleep, because to me at least it turns out there's a difference between reading about babies and toddlers put onto a transport train to Polish gas chambers alone when you don't have a kid and when you do.  Or rather, that it's the alone part that hurts more, now.  So.

Etty Hillesum.  I have a lot of thoughts on this but I just haven't been able to squodge them into any sort of central thesis, so I'm just going to barf them out.  I was honestly dreading this book - I actually have a copy somewhere, and it's the only Persephone book I own but haven't read, but I couldn't find the thing.  For one thing, I don't love reading diaries - memoirs like The World That Was Ours where somebody takes their diaries and works them into a more coherent work are a lot more enjoyable, at least for me.  For another thing, let's just say that there are usually both positives and negatives in reading an ordinary person's life which has become significant because of the events they experienced or the way they died.  On the one hand, the perspective of the common man!  On the other hand, the perspective of the common man.  

So Etty is something of a "grown up Anne Frank", which is pretty fucking reductionist but also true.  She was in her late 20's and living a rather bohemian (which here means "getting it") lifestyle in Amsterdam as the lives of Dutch Jews became increasingly restricted; eventually she was sent to Westerbork, a transit camp, in her capacity as a secretarial worker for the Jewish Council.  As time went on she was stripped of her protected status and then transported with her family to Auschwitz, where she was killed in November of 1943.  The book is about 2/3 diaries, which are very internal and personal, and 1/3 letters sent to friends from Westerbork which were meant more as documentation of camp conditions and events.

And I have to say that it took me a long time to warm up to Etty, and then of course there I was crying at the "end".  (There isn't an end to her diary, as she took her last notebook on the train with her.  There is an end to her letters; she threw her last postcard from her transport train and it was found and mailed.  It is heartbreaking; she signs off "Goodbye for now".) 

Etty is... extremely 27.  Like, really 27.  The true tragedy in this is that she never got the chance to be 37 and look back at her twenties and laugh.  She starts seeing an analyst who I believe I am supposed to call the author of her spiritual awakening but I'll be blunt here and tell you that she starts sleeping with a "therapist" who reads palms and uses wrestling as a therapy tool.  As in, you wear your leotard under your dress when you go to see him and then you and he flop around on the floor and somehow I just don't think this is within modern therapeutic guidelines unless I am way out of touch.  This piece from Psychology Today talks about her personal growth and spiritual maturity gained from therapy but omits the palm reading and rasslin', which frankly I THINK IS GERMANE.

So it's hard to get with Etty on her hero worship of this palm-readin' Svengali (his name is Julius Spier).  I mean, bang your landlord if you like, smash with pianists, go fuck joyously, just be safe, but I can't help but be grossed out when a young woman fills pages and pages of her diary with her growing relationship with a much older THERAPIST, let's ignore the somewhat unorthodox methods, and I'm supposed to see this as some sort of positive because she feels it leads her to a spiritual awakening.  Anyway, that's all I'm going to say about that; I'm sure there are a lot of people who would disagree.

The spiritual awakening, now, that's fascinating.  Remember that this is her diary, so I feel that she's writing not just about her actual mental struggles but also at least somewhat aspirationally; in my mind she's using her diary to talk about how she wants to feel and react to increasingly awful events and realities.  There are a lot of ways people respond to stress; some retreat inward, some do low things they would never have considered before, some rebel - Etty doubles down on lovingkindness.  She's reading a lot of Christian mystics during this period, which I confess is definitely not within my baliwick, so I kept interpreting her inward focus on love, kindness, and unattachment through a Buddhist lens because I've read a lot of material on that side of the Comparative Religions curriculum.  She talks a lot about Matthew 6:43, "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof".  I thought a lot last night about what a necessary perspective that would be for many people in this untenable situation.  You can't leave (in fact Etty meets many people from the SS St. Louis in Westerbork).  Your life gets smaller every day; today you can't go into the parks and you know tomorrow it's yellow stars and the day after you have to turn in your bicycle.  Coffee gets hard to come by, for everybody, and you know food is going to get shorter for you than for your non-Jewish neighbors.  You know, although you don't know the details, that people are being deported east and that they are dying there.  You know that there's nothing you can do to stop the Nazis and that they mean to destroy you and your family and most of the people you care about, and it doesn't matter how assimilated you are.  So what do you do, how do you live?

Some people don't, of course.  Some commit suicide, or go numb.  Etty commits to radical goodness; she determines that she'll take suffering as an opportunity for growth and that she'll be the best person she can be, she'll help as many people as she can to the best of her ability.  And she is serious as hell about it; she fills pages and pages and pages with her desperate desire to live in the now, to appreciate the good things she has left to her, to not give in to hate.  To accept the presence of death in her life and learn to live more fully in its company. 

And here's where again I have such conflicted issues with Etty.  Because who the fuck am I to have an opinion on her?  Don't get me wrong, I am worried as hell about the way things are going in America right now, and I'm fighting it as I can, but I don't actually think there's a chance I'll go to a camp, or that my friends will.  Even the baby cages on the border - they're awful, but they aren't Holocaust awful.  Nothing in America is Holocaust awful, and I honestly don't expect that it will be, at least not under current circumstances.  I expect something more like the current situation in Hungary, which is bad but not cattle car bad.  So how dare I judge her from my comfortable seat here with my child yelling at his personal digital assistant in the next room?  

But she volunteers to go to a camp.

And I'm not talking about later, when staying in Westerbork means she can protect her parents a little longer from transportation, get them better food, try to keep them alive.  I'm talking about earlier, when she's working (conflictedly) with the Jewish Council; she volunteers to go to Westerbork thinking she can help people there.  She actually gets passes to return to Amsterdam a few times; on one of them she becomes seriously ill and her pass is extended to a month, and all she can think about is convincing them to let her go back.  Her friends try to get her to let them hide her, to let them try to help her escape, and she won't let them.  And that's just.... that's just something I can't understand.  But then, like I said, who the hell am I to say what's right for her?  I'm just worried that she's so wrapped up in this idea of the imperative of being the best person that she can be that she edges right over into self-sacrifice and martyrdom.

But then is that not a valid choice?  If you were to ask me in a more theoretical way, I'd say that there is no wrong way to be a victim of unimaginable horror.  There are a thousand ways to approach something as incomprehensible as the Holocaust and none is more valid or meritorious than another - to walk into the gas chamber with your head and your dignity high, to dive under fences and tunnel under wire and hide in latrines, to bomb bridges and sabotage trains, to lie to your children to save them, a little, from the terror you're experiencing, to make them drag you off a train clinging by your fingernails - none of these can possibly be wrong or base as a response to genocide.  But when you give me this specific person, who I feel I've come to know, who's refusing a reprieve (possibly temporary, of course) - not giving it to another person, just refusing a Get Out of Auschwitz Free card?  

She wants to help, and to be generous.  And she does help, and I could never do what she does - runs around helping thousands of children who get off a transport from Vught all night one night who go on the next day to a train to the gas chambers of Sobibor, for example, and I think I could never do that - but you can do a lot of things you don't think you can do when you have to, even I know that.  She's working for an inhumane system, working for the Jewish side of the camp administration, but she's also helping people.  I can't imagine what it must have meant to people being processed in and out of this transit camp machine to meet a kind face and a smile; I once started crying when the Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs lady at the Newark airport was nice to me and all I'd dealt with were unhelpful Delta employees and a missed connection.  

But maybe she could have escaped.  People did, of course - even some people in this book, according to the footnotes.  One of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust is its occasional randomness; that sometimes you were passed over.  I can't get over her not trying, as if it's any of my damned business.  (Seriously, I'm not sure if there's anything less my business than your personal response to genocide.)  And it's not like I didn't know, starting the book, that she didn't make it.  So why, exactly, am I so mad at her?  I have to spend a lot more time thinking about it.

One last thing: several years ago my mother and I had an afternoon in Amsterdam, so we did the whirlwind Rijksmuseum "show me your 20 best paintings" tour and went to the Anne Frank House.  I didn't expect to be as moved by the Anne Frank House as I was, just because it's very crowded and you go through very quickly and it seems like such a familiar story, but there are still a few of her film stars stuck to the wall and I lost it.  There's quite a line to get in, so you spend a lot of time standing on the street outside. While we were waiting, a whole gay pride parade floated past on the canal.  It was amazing.  I cried at that too.  I'm a crier.  So look.  Things are shitty, and there are some places where they are phenomenally shitty.  I'm no Pollyanna.  But we also live in a world now where Pride floats by Anne's secret annex.  I think Etty would have liked that.

The Etty Hillesum Research Center at the University of Ghent is dedicated to the study and preservation of Etty's writings.  She would have found that very strange and exceedingly funny.

There's also a museum (website in Dutch) and a monument, which I don't think she would care for.