Etty Hillesum 1914 - 1943



Etty Hillesum has been considered the adult counterpart of Anne Frank. Like Frank, she was a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. In 1941, life was becoming very difficult for Dutch Jews. There were "whispers" coming from England that Hitler was planning to exterminate the Jewish race; a general attitude of paranoia and suspicion was beginning to spread. Twenty-seven-year-old Etty was not immune from these influences. Suffering from both mental and physical ailments, she sought the help of a student of Jung named Julius Spier. They became intimately involved. It was Spier who encouraged Etty to find God in her heart and to begin to keep a diary. She "began to search for the love that hid in the deepest recesses of her heart." 1

In her diary she reveals how she began to meditate each day, and how slowly but significantly her outlook was beginning to change:

A thousand oppressive fetters are shaken off. Now freely I do breathe. I feel strong and with resplendent eyes I look around. I've stopped wanting to possess. I am free. Now I possess everything. My inner wealth is immeasurable.
(March 17, 1941)

In the midst of the pain and suffering surrounding her, Etty found peace in her own heart, in God who dwelled within her. She felt that the need to "root out all hatred and all judgment of our fellow men, even if these men are Nazi's." 2

Etty had always been an intellectual. Although Jewish by birth, she had no real interest in any organized religion. Her thought was influenced by many sources, both Jewish and Christian, including the Bible, St. Augustine, Rilke, and Dostoevsky. 3 In her search for God, however, there came a point when she felt the need to leave her rational investigations behind. Rather she simply needed to be in God's presence.

You have to make yourself passive and listen. Get into touch with that little piece of eternity inside of you . . . Lord, rather give me wisdom, instead of knowledge.
(September 4, 1941)

By the beginning of 1942, Etty's inner transformation began to work wonders for her physical composition as well. Her physical ailments were gone and she found a new energy. She "worked for a while as a typist for the Jewish Council, a job that delayed her deportation to the transit camp at Westerbork," however she ultimately decided to voluntarily join her fellow Jews in going to the camp and was sent there in July 1942. "Her sense of a call to solidarity with those who suffer became the specific form of her religious vocation. But it was not a vocation to suffering as such. It was a vocation to redeem the suffering of humanity from within, by safeguarding 'that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.'"4

Etty Hillesum was sent to Auschwitz in September 1943 and died there on November 30 of that year. She was twenty-nine. Her diary was discovered in 1981 and was published along with her letters from Westerbork under the title An Interrupted Life (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

1 "The Girl Who Learned to Kneel" April 2004 The Mystical Site: https://home.wxs.nl/~brouw724/EttyHillesum.html
2 ibid
3 Ellsberg, Robert "Etty Hillesum: Mystic of the Holocaust" excerpt from All Saints: Daily Reflections of Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses From our Time. http://www.gratefulness.org/giftpeople/hillesum.htm
4 ibid



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