Etty

"I see no other solution than to turn inwards and root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned."--Etty Hillesum

I don't know how to write this essay--I don't feel qualified. How does one write about the soul of a young woman whose confessional diaries reveal the inward transformation, from a neurotic, perpetually dissatisfied, and unfulfilled person, self-absorbed and self-interested, to a woman that volunteered to go to a concentration camp, merely to give of herself to others, because of the dialog with GOD that she commenced as the world was falling apart around her?

It is almost as if I were trying to write the article I wanted to write about the Bhagavad Gita. I felt like my fingers, finally, were too dirty to touch the subject. Etty Hillesum, while not known in the same way as Anne Frank, who authored one of the most well-read books in all of history, was an older version, but one whose deep commitment to her inner journey is one of the most compelling documents I have ever had the pleasure to become absorbed in.

Etty lived during the occupation of Holland by the Nazis. Eventually, as part of the Jewish Council, she volunteered to go to Westerbork Transit Camp, one stepping stone toward the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Etty, indeed, finally ended up being deported to Auschwitz, where, on November 30th, 1943, she died. She had been there for two months. She was 28 years old.

But most of An Interrupted Life, her confessional diary, her journey of spiritual self-exploration, is not concerned with the ever-increasing persecutions enacted against Dutch Jews (and others deemed "undesirables" by the occupying Nazi forces), most of the book is a dialog, a steadily-developing portrait of a young woman, whose obsession with the therapeutic techniques of an older, guru-like figure named Julius Spier (who dies by the time she has been transported to Westerbork), and her great love and devotion to him, her steadily increasing devotion to humanity perched on the edge of the abyss, and her refusal to hate those that would eventually see her to her death, is something that I cannot adequately comment upon. Etty starts her journey as a typical, if emotionally confused, and deeply dissatisfied pilgrim soul. By the end of the book, she is treading the path to Nirvana. She has gone to a place where the God she speaks with (she quotes the Book of Matthew several times) is no longer the culprit behind the suffering she and her fellow Jews are experiencing. She writes:

"One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me (God): that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days, and also all that matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much that You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible."

Etty was born in Deventer, Holland in 1914, the daughter of an assimilated (i.e. non-practicing) Jewish family. Her brothers, Jaap and Mischa, both were child prodigies, but Mischa suffered from autism while being one of Europe's up-and-coming young virtuoso pianists. Brother Jaap became a doctor that discovered new vitamin supplements. Her family life has been described as "dysfunctional," even chaotic, her father a weak, retiring figure whose mantra was "all is chaos," and whose escape was his literary studies. He worked as an instructor. The mother, who it is said was "ill-suited" to be his partner (by biographer Patrick Woodhouse), was, by contrast, a woman given to unreservedly emotional outbursts. In between them all, Etty developed a love of poetry, particularly that of Rilke, literature, and the Russian tongue. She graduated from university with a degree in Slavonic languages.

It may have been the need for a strong father figure, on a subconscious level, that drove her into the arms of 62-year-old Hans Wegerif, the owner of a house rented to students. She quickly began an affair with him, but also practiced a plethora of affairs with various men, always seeking something, searching desperately for the love and feeling she was missing, the emotional constraint that informed her neurosis and depression.

She then met Julius Spier, a German Jewish refugee whose chief occupation was a form of "psychoanalytic chiromancy," and who had studied with Jung as a disciple of psychoanalysis. Falling completely under his spell, becoming his Girl Friday and then, eventually his lover, the Reader can find themselves perhaps pitying her needfulness and naivety as Spier, twenty years her senior, comes off as a character whose motivations seem suspect, always. Nonetheless, she credits her fascination with his therapeutic techniques (most quite irregular, such as wrestling) with helping overcome her sense of emptiness and ill-ease with life.

The focus of the diaries begins to subtly alter after having read perhaps a third of the way through. Gradually, Etty's focus, which has always been inward, allows for the introduction of "reality" (which she has hitherto ignored) in the form of relating the restrictions now placed upon Dutch Jews by the occupying Nazi monsters. She tells the reader (herself as she was dictating it, with no knowledge it would ever be read beyond her passing), that stories of Jews being gassed, and other horrors occurring as she was still, remarkably, alive herself, if living in the "Jewish Quarter," could be "of little use." Even if true. (Of course, they were true, and beyond her ability to reckon the scope of how monstrous the crime would become, although at one point she does state, "They mean to utterly destroy us. That should be clear by now.")

Her focus shifts, from the often narcissistic pondering upon her internal world, to a deeper, more real, more satisfying inward life in the presence of God, whose name she begins to invoke more and more, but without the attachment of an institutional religious theology or ideas. She seems neither Christian nor Jew, her God an intensely personal internal force or compulsion to self-sacrifice, to give of herself to the suffering, to go beyond the "morrow," take no concern for it and always find the beauty in life.

She does not even hate or have ill-well toward the German invaders, as, when brought in by the Gestapo for questioning, she states:

“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?’”

***

I have no real idea of how to finish this article. Out of all the books I've read in the last few months, only a few I've finished--Lady Chatterley's Lover, Candide, Treve's The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, The Stranger by Camus, and a book about Cocteau (as well as a smattering of Shakespeare)--out of all of them, none of them have held my interest in quite the same way as An Interrupted Life. Etty begins as a woman "on the verge of a nervous breakdown." She ends by treading the pathway of a saint. Her final pages are a divine prayer to the God Within, who is Yahweh, Christ, Krishna, the Divine Force, all of them, and none of them; the secret voice in the night, when you thrust away from you all the bile that they feed you. Amid persecution and death, she volunteered to accompany her fellow persecuted to Westerbork concentration camp, to be the "thinking heart of the barracks"; to be one step closer to Auschwitz, to hell, to senseless murder and death.

"We Must Help YOU to Help Us."

But by this point, she was a tool of the God Within that she spoke to, every hour of every day. "We must help You to Help Us, God."

In the end, her optimism did not save her. Her mother, perhaps foolishly, wrote a letter of entreaty to the Nazis, begging that her gifted son Mischa, the pianist, should be allowed sanctuary for "talented Jews" in a special safe house, which was accorded a few. The letter infuriated the black-hearted bastard who received it, and he ordered the whole family deported--Etty, Mischa, her mother, and her father. they left, knowing they were going to their doom, singing. Amid Hell, Etty found transcendence.

Many did not survive the trip to Auschwitz, standing packed in like sardines, with no food or water, no restroom facilities, and in the cold and burning heat. Hunger and thirst killed some, and, when they got off the ramp for the "selection," one survivor said, "We thought we were in Hell." The Nazis separated the women and the men. Those who seemed as if they could work (slave labor until worked to exhaustion and death; you came to Auschwitz to simply be utilized and killed) were sent to be deloused; the rest could expect to be gassed in the "shower room" within about fifteen minutes. These were the old, infirm, children too young to work. (Auschwitz had four "crema", crematoriums, burning day and night. One survivor remembers a kapo (Jewish guard of other Jews assigned to duty by the Nazis), telling her, when she asked, "When can I see my family?", that the woman pointed to the chimney and said, "There is your family.")

All possessions were stripped from them. Even their hair. One woman called it a "human disassembly line."

Everyone has seen the images of horror: emaciated bodies, piles of shoes and clothing, and gold teeth. The Soviets found a reported SEVEN TONS of human hair when they liberated Auschwitz. Pure insanity. One madman's debased dream.

Etty Hillesum, who could speak and translate Russian, read Rilke, was refined and intellectual and beautiful, was a sensitive, questing soul, who went from self-doubt and dissatisfaction to a state where even the horrors of Auschwitz could not touch the spirit that burned within her; that grasped the tenuous, ever-shifting hand of a God that Failed, but that she did not "hold accountable" for His failure. (As, in a sense, Man has failed Him, perhaps?)

Etty was so important to her fellow inmates--her kindness, her gentle wisdom, that she was slipped a goodbye note before being deported from Westerbork, by a fellow internee. (Note: Despite our best efforts, we can not find this particular writing at this time.) "The thinking heart of the barracks," was what she signed herself. And, indeed, this seemed to be no lie.

Etty's mother and father died at Auschwitz on September 10, 1943. The date suggests that, according to Wikipedia (An unimpeachable internet source of information), "they either died in transit or were gassed immediately after arrival." Her brother Mischa was moved to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died in March 1944. Her brother Jaap died in April, at Bergen-Belsen, shortly after being liberated by the British Allies.

Etty Hillesum was murdered at Auschwitz on November 30th, 1943. She was twenty-eight years old.

Her beauty, that burning, intense gaze--the soul leaps out from the decayed old image, a picture, of a picture, of a picture--going backward through time. I suppose that, much like Renzo Novatore whom I wrote of yesterday on the 100th anniversary of HIS death, the ghost, that image, will haunt my mind for the rest of my life. (The two writers, of course, couldn't be more opposite in their approximation of life and its meaning.) It is a deep wound of pain to think of that beauty and that seeking passionate soul, snuffed out by the cold, calculated, murderous jackboots of a psychopathic regime; of bland little men in bureaucrats' offices, who oversaw the deaths of millions while planning outings with their families, holidays, totally deaf to the moral imprecations of an angry God.

And it is to Him we must apologize. For our bestiality. For our hatred, waste, and destruction of all that is beautiful. Beauty has eluded THIS AUTHOR his entire life. He lives with beautiful ghosts, ravishing spirits, the ghosts of those like Etty Hillesum, who reach through the decades with the leavings of their minds, their souls.

Her final written words were:

"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."

These were tossed from the train as she was deported from Westerbork. They were found later and preserved by a passerby. She would be dead within three months.

She preserved the inner self, surrendered to the inner life, spoke with God, and begged his forgiveness.

As for myself, I have no idea how to finish this article, or if I should have even written it at all. I'm a man with filthy fingers, and a broken soul, deeply divided between dark and light. And should I touch an angel with my mind? Or, hope to convey beauty from the depths of a tormented spirit? I'm not sure that it's not an act of intellectual vandalism.

I'm not worthy, in a sense, as I was not worthy to write of the Gita. I'm a vulgar man, with filthy fingers.

Rest in peace, angel. They can't hurt you anymore.