Etty Hillesum – History of Sorts

In the End—Love is Stronger than Hate and Death

The title is an excerpt from the diary of Etty Hillesum. Following are a few excerpts of several Holocaust diaries. What I find striking—is that despite the horrors, they still had a glimmer of hope.

Anne Frank
June 12, 1942: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

July 15, 1944: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

December 24, 1943: “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

February 23, 1944: “I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”

March 29, 1944: “It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, and died in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Rutka Laskier
February 5, 1943: “I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began.”

February 20, 1943: “I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion [a Nazi operation] in town. I’m not allowed to go out, nobody is allowed to. The town has been cut off. Telephone connections have been cut off too. Jews are being taken out of their homes. There are constant shootings.”

April 24, 1943: “Today I’m worried. When will this misfortune end? It’s not a life, I am existing. Father is worried, because people have been taken away in Przemysl. Maniu [Rutka’s sister] wants to go to Israel. Mother wants to escape to Hungary.”

April 25, 1943: “I felt the air was again charged with unease, with horror. The sun was setting, and the silence so great that I thought I would hear my own heartbeats. Then shots rang out, a lot of shots, a hundred, no, thousands, each one echoing back from the woods, from the hills, from the distant city.”

Ruth Rutka was born on June 12, 1929, in Krakow, Poland, and died in 1943 at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Chaim Kaplan
October 16, 1939: “A week has passed since the curse of war first descended upon us, and what a week! What suffering! What agony! Warsaw, the city of the wise, has become a city of despair, of darkness, of hunger, and of plague. […] We find ourselves in a dark tunnel without light, and we are swallowed up in darkness.”

December 7, 1940: “Life in the ghetto is intolerable. With the passage of each day, the people grow weaker and weaker. The little food we have is hardly enough to sustain us. The streets are filled with the sick and the dying. Death has become our constant companion.”

February 16, 1941: “The Germans continue to tighten their grip on the ghetto. The walls grow higher, the restrictions more severe. We are prisoners in our own city, condemned to a life of suffering and humiliation. Yet, despite it all, the spirit of the people remains unbroken. We refuse to surrender to despair.”

June 1, 1942: “The deportations have begun. Every day, trains filled with Jews leave the ghetto, bound for unknown destinations. We know not where they go, only that they never return. The streets are filled with tears, with cries of anguish. Yet, even in the face of such unspeakable horror, we must find the strength to carry on.”

April 19, 1943 (during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising): “The ghetto is in flames, the streets filled with the sound of gunfire. The brave fighters of the Jewish resistance are battling the Germans, refusing to surrender to tyranny and oppression. Though the odds are against us, we will not go quietly into the night. We will fight until our last breath, until freedom is ours once more.”

Chaim Kaplan was born on September 19, 1880, in Horoyszcze, Poland, and died at Treblinka Concentration Camp in Poland in 1942.

Etty Hillesum
Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Holocaust, and her diary provides a remarkable and introspective account of her spiritual and emotional journey during that time. Here are some excerpts from her diary:

July 20, 1942: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds. Sometimes a single warm word is enough to heal an open sore.”

August 18, 1941: “In the end, love is stronger than hate and death. It is as strange and mysterious as life itself. It is the force that holds the universe together.”

November 29, 1942: “Sometimes I feel as if I am carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. But then I remember that I am only human, and that I can only do what I can. The rest is in the hands of fate.”

March 15, 1943: “I have made a decision to embrace life fully, no matter what the circumstances. Even in the darkest moments, there is still beauty to be found, still joy to be experienced. I will not let the darkness consume me.”

September 3, 1943: “I am learning to find peace within myself, to accept the things I cannot change, and to find strength in the face of adversity. It is a difficult journey, but one that I am determined to take.”

Etty Hillesum was born in Middleburg, Netherlands on January 15, 1914. She died on November 30, 1943 in Oświęcim, Poland.

Sources

https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/who-was-anne-frank

February 6, 1943 – Rutka Laskier

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kaplan-chaim-aron

https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/jewishaccounts/chaimkaplandiary.html

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hillesum-etty

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No Scruples—Dutch Public Transport and the Holocaust

Something I had not been aware of, but of course, it makes sense that the Nazis also used trams to transport the Dutch Jews to the concentration camps in the Netherlands.

The GVB is the company that runs the trams in Amsterdam and has had that name since 1943. A new film and book titled Verdwenen Stad (Lost City) by filmmaker Willy Lindwer and writer Guus Luijters uncovered a painful truth.

Invoices show that there were approximately 900 tram journeys for the deportation of the Amsterdam Jews, for which the GVB declared and received more than 9,000 guilders (converted to now more than 61,000 euros). The Central Jewish Consultation (CJO) would meet with the GVB and the municipality to request the money back. According to the researchers, the GVB never acknowledged guilt, expressed remorse or offered financial compensation to the deported Jews or their relatives.

An estimated 48,000 Amsterdam Jews were transported by trams to Central Station and Muiderpoort Station between mid-July 1942 and the end of August 1944. From there, trains went to the concentration and extermination camps via the Westerbork and Vught Transit Camps.

Every month, the transport company sent invoices to the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), the agency that coordinated the persecution of Jews in Amsterdam. The Nazis paid the GVB bills with the money that the Jews had to hand in from 1941, as can be read in the book.

The painful truth does not stop there. The most astonishing aspect of Luijters’ discovery is the GVB’s persistent efforts to collect outstanding payments after the war had ended. A note on the final invoice highlighted that the payment was overdue at the time of liberation, and it revealed a hired debt collection agency enlisted in 1947 to recover the 80 guilders owed. This attempted collection, years after the atrocities, has been met with shock and condemnation, underscoring the moral complexities surrounding businesses involved in the Holocaust.

The last two bills, from July and August 1944, were never paid. Anne Frank was transported to Camp Westerbork on August 8, 1944, on one of those trams, as was Etty Hillesum.

On August 8, 1944, the eight people in hiding from the Secret Annex were transported by tram from the House of Detention at the Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen to CS to be taken by train to Westerbork Camp with 65 other Jews.

I am not sure what is worse—the use of the trams or the fact they made a profit from death transports and still tried to make money after the war. The GVB never showed any scruples.

Sources:

https://bnnbreaking.com/world/amsterdams-gvb-sought-nazi-payments-for-holocaust-transports-including-anne-franks-final-journey

https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/het-gvb-verdiende-aan-de-tramritten-waarmee-joden-werden-gedeporteerd-door-de-duitsers-het-waren-praktisch-rijdende-gevangenissen~bdd4acf4/?utm_source=parool&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20240305%7Cdaily&utm_content=Het%20GVB%20verdiende%20aan%20de%20tramritten%20waarmee%20Joden%20werden%20gedeporteerd%20door%20de%20Duitsers%20%E2%80%93%20%E2%80%98Het%20waren%20praktisch%20rijdende%20gevangenissen%E2%80%99&utm_term=306311&utm_userid=&ctm_ctid=2317e5bc05c8c884e7b6eb681398151a

Etty Hillesum—Murdered Beauty

At first, I was reluctant to use the word beauty in the title because we now live in an era where some people might find that offensive, and they will scream about it. I pity them because they lose out on so much.

Etty Hillesum was a beauty in every sense of the word. It may have been too much for the Nazis because they murdered her. She was murdered on November 30, 1943, in Auschwitz according to data from the Red Cross.

Etty (or Esther) was the daughter of Levie Hillesum and Riva Bernstein. She was born on January 15, 1914, in Middelburg in the Dutch province of Zeeland. In 1932 she moved to Amsterdam to study law and Slavic languages. In Amsterdam, she met Julius Spier. He became her teacher and great love. During the war, she worked for the Jewish Council at Camp Westerbork and other places. She wrote several letters from Westerbork and kept a diary.

In March 1937 she took a room at 6 Gabriel Metsustraat in south Amsterdam in the house of an accountant Hendrik (Han) Wegerif, a widower aged 62 who hired her as a housekeeper. He also began an affair with her. She lived in this house until her final departure for Westerbork in 1942, and it was in her room there that much of her diary was written. The small community of people who shared the house with her were important to her. In addition to Han Wegerif, there was his 21-year-old son Hans, a German cook named Kathe, a student Bernard Meylink, and a nurse, Maria Tuinzing, who became one of Etty’s close friends.

The most important relationship of the diary is with the psycho-chirologist (hand reader) Julius Spier. Born in 1887 in Germany, he had come to Amsterdam in 1939. Spier had worked in Zurich with Jung, who had encouraged him to develop his skill in chirology, the practice of psychoanalysis through the reading of people’s palms. He was a gifted and charismatic figure and gathered around him a group of students, particularly women. Etty became part of this group and went into therapy with Spier, developing a close relationship with him and becoming his secretary.

Etty was an intensely alive and sexual young woman, yet she felt plagued by what she called her ‘confounded eroticism”. But what healthy woman in her 20s isn’t interested in sex?

In 1942 she was given a position in the cultural affairs department of the Jewish Council. She worked there for only two weeks, which she calls hell in her diary. In August 1942, she received a call for deportation to Westerbork. Etty left and continued her social activities in Westerbork. As a member of the Jewish Council, she had a special travel visa that allowed her to return to Amsterdam many times before being deported with her family on September 7, 1943.

Just as Anne Frank also wrote a diary, which was released after the war, titled, “An Interrupted Life,” I’ve chosen a few quotes from the diary. The words are profoundly sad but also beautiful and with a sense of hope.

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

“Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others”

“As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.”

“Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.”

“My immediate reaction on meeting a man is invariably to gauge his sexual possibilities. I recognize this as a bad habit that must be stamped out”

“Yes, we women, we foolish, idiotic, illogical women, we all seek Paradise and the Absolute. And yet my brain, my capable brain, tells me that there are no absolutes, that everything is relative, endlessly diverse, and in eternal motion, and it is precisely for that reason that life is so exciting and fascinating, but also so very, very painful. We [women] want to perpetuate ourselves in a man.”

“I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfil its promise.”

“I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream…and life continues…”

“By ‘coming to terms with life’ I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.”

Sources

Etty Hillesum: A life transformed

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/61163.Etty_Hillesum

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/136401/esther-hillesum

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/227368/julius-philipp-spier

Etty Hillesum: God, Sex, and Defiance in a Time of War

https://www.lastampa.it/vatican-insider/en/2018/11/26/news/etty-hillesum-the-woman-who-found-god-during-the-shoah-1.34063034

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Etty Hillesum-A young woman’s life not fulfilled.

Like Anne Frank ,Etty (Esther) Hillesum, also kept a diary during World War 2,describing her experiences of the Holocaust. She was born in the city of Middelburg in the southwest of the Netherlands, on January 15,1914. She was the daughter of Levie Hillesum and Riva Bernstein. In 1932 she moved to Amsterdam to study law and Slavic languages.

She started her diary on March 7 1941, possibly at the suggestion of her analyst Julius Spier, whom she had been attending to for a month. Although his patient, Etty also became his secretary and friend and eventually his lover. His influence on her spiritual development is apparent in her diaries; as well as teaching her how to deal with her depressive and egocentric episodes he introduced her to the Bible and St. Augustine and helped her develop a deeper understanding of the work of Rilke and Dostoyevsky.

Etty was an intensely alive and sexual young woman, yet she felt herself plagued by what she called her ‘confounded eroticism”. But what healthy woman in her 20s isn’t interested in sex?

Rather then go to deep into her life, I feel it is better to reflect on what she felt by using some excerpts from her diary.

“This is a painful and almost insuperable step for me: committing so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper,” The thoughts in my head are so clear and sharp and my feelings so deep, but writing about them is hard. The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go and allowing things to pour out of me, yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love.”

“Only a few months ago I still believed that politics did not touch me and wondered if that was ‘unworldliness,’ a lack of real understanding. Now I don’t ask such questions any more”

“If there were only one decent German, then he should be cherished despite that whole barbaric gang, and because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people”

“I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask: ‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’”

“MONDAY MORNING, 9 O’CLOCK. Come on, my girl, get down to work or God help you. And no more excuses either, no little headache here or a bit of nausea there, or I’m not feeling very well. That is absolutely out of the question. You’ve just got to work, and that’s that. No fantasies, no grandiose ideas and no earth-shattering insights. Choosing a subject and finding the right words are much more important. And that is something I have to learn and for which I must fight to the death: all fantasies and dreams shall be ejected by force from my brain and I shall sweep myself clean from within, to make space for real studies, large and small. To tell the truth, I have never worked properly. It’s the same with sex. If someone makes an impression on me, I can revel in erotic fantasies for days and nights on end. I don’t think I ever realised how much energy that consumes”

“Last night I asked Han in bed, ‘Do you think someone like me ought to get married? Am I a real woman?’ Sex for me is not all that important, although sometimes I give the impression that it is. Isn’t it cheating to allow men to be taken in by that impression and then be unable to give them what they want? I am not really an earthy woman, at least not sexually. I am no tigress and that sometimes gives me a feeling of inferiority. My primitive physical passion has been diverted in many different ways and weakened by all sorts of intellectualisations, which I am sometimes ashamed of. What is primitive in me is my warmth; I have a sort of primitive love and primitive sympathy for people, for all people. I don’t think I am cut out for one man”

“And yesterday I lay on that bed, for the first time naked in his arms, and it was less a night of love than that time. And yet it was good. It was not exciting, there was no ecstasy. But it was so sweet and so safe”

“Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learnt to love Westerbork”

“Can love one person and one person only one’s whole life long strikes me as quite childish. There is something mean and impoverishing about it. Will people never learn that love brings so much more happiness and reward than sex?”

“The misery here is quite terrible; 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.”

“A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one’s innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth the impede the view. So that something of “God” can enter you, and something of “Love,” too. Not the kind of love-de-luxe that you can revel in deliciously for half an hour, taking pride in how sublime you feel, but the love you can apply to small, everyday things.”

Her last words though were not written in her diary, but on a postcard she threw out of the train on transport to Auschwitz.

“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…. We left the camp singing…. Thank you for all your kindness and care.”

Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on November 30,1943, aged 29.

sources

https://archive.org/details/interruptedlifed00hill/page/n3/mode/2up?q=sex&view=theater

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/136401/esther-hillesum#intro