Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life: Searching for the Human

80 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 ETIY HILLESUM'S AN INTERRUPTED LIFE: SEARCHING FOR THE HUMAN by Bernard Weinstein Dr. Weinstein is Professor of English at Kean College of New Jersey, where he is involved with an oral history project of the Holocaust Resource Center. He has published other essays on the Holocaust and is currently writing a biography of Michel Thomas, educator, Holocaust survivor, French Resistance fighter, and counter-intelligence officer during World War II. There is a special poignancy in reading the diary of one who did not survive the Shoah, for in such a memoir, as in a Sophoclean tragedy, the audience knows the protagonist's fate, at which the protagonist can only guess. At the same time the protagonist's words resonate with the hope, the ambition, the desperate energy, and, sometimes, the "enlightenment" that precede terminal despair. Esther ("Etty") Hillesum, the Dutch-Jewish diarist, died in Auschwitz, probably on November 30, 1943.1 Her parents and her brother Mischa were probably already dead by this time; the older of her two brothers, Jaap, survived the death camp only to perish in transit as he was returning to Holland after the war. Lacking the perspective of a survivor, she was still able to transcribe with evolving awareness what was developing around her. Yet, what is even more extraordinary, Etty was able to complete and to record in less than three years an internal evolution that took her from self-involvement to cosmic consciousness and dialogue with God, and, finally, to the translation of her spirituality into activity in behalf of her fellow Jews on the verge of extinction. On July 10, 1942 Etty wrote, "... I shall wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer and my words will have to be so many 'Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries afBuy Hillesum, 1.941-1.943, trans. Arno Pomerans (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 277. Btty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life 81 hammer-strokes with which to beat the story of our fate and of a piece of history as it is and never was before" (p. 181). Originally she had wanted to become a writer, not to chronicle suffering in the Shoah (there is little of the wrenching detail in her diary of the genre we call Holocaust testimony), but rather to unshackle herself, as a self-liberating woman might some four decades later, from "so many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go" (p. 1). She probes like a novelist into her character's life and motivation. Her diary begins on March 9, 1941, with heady and nervous anticipation ("Here goes, then") and launches almost immediately into her adeptness as a lover and her concern that longing for a man might possibly inhibit her freedom. Ironically, though, it is one man, Julius Spier, to whom Etty is both erotically and spiritually drawn, who is her major catalyst to self-affirmation. Born into a relatively affluent background, Etty, who was 27 when she began keeping the diary, seemed only peripherally affected by the fate of Jews in other parts of Europe. It has been pointed out that the abundance of Jews designated "privileged" in Holland fostered "an illusion of security" among many Jews and those Dutch sympathetic to them.2 The first anti-pogrom strike in Europe had broken out in Amsterdam one month before Etty began her diary, and, what was surprising, some nine months after Holland's capitulation: ... the February strike was for many Jews the greatest experience of the whole war. The reason for this was simple: for once, albeit for but a little while, they did not feel their Dutch compatriots were leaving them in the lurch. Behind them now stood openly a group of their fellow-citizens, men with whom they had lived at peace for centuries. This group dared to brave a ruthless enemy, and was ready to sacrifice life and property-for them.~ The mandatory wearing of the Star of David did not begin until April 1942. After this ruling, forced relocation to Westerborkand immediate or eventual deportation to Auschwitz of Sobibor became the order of the day. Meanwhile Etty lived in a...