27 January 2025
A Balm on so many Wounds: Etty Hillesum’s Diaries 1941-1943
Etty Hillesum in 1939 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
This year to mark Holocaust Memorial Day we have been looking at diaries and other autobiographical documents. As my colleague Olga Topol writes in her blog post, “The diaries of these individuals are not merely archival records; they are powerful reminders of the human capacity for resilience and creativity in the face of adversity.”
One remarkable example of that resilience are the diaries written by Etty Hillesum in Amsterdam. She acknowledges the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but manages to rise above them and does not let the horror dominate her writings. She records the growing evidence of “the interrupted life” around her. She writes it all down, starting on 9 March 1941 and ending on 10 October 1942 with the wish “One should like to be a balm on many wounds.”
She writes very openly about love, sexuality, about her struggle to find God, to root out hatred, including hate towards Germans. More than anything else she wants to serve others. She gets a job at the Jewish Council helping Jewish citizens navigate the laws imposed on them by the German authorities. When the deportations of Jews to the Westerbork transit camp started, she volunteered to accompany them.
Jewish citizens of Amsterdam obey the order they received in the post to come to the Olympiaplein in Amsterdam South to be transported to Westerbork. Image from an edition of Het Verstoorde Leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (Bussum, 1983) Blog post author's own copy
Jewish people were told they were going to work in Germany, so many went. Those who didn’t were either taken from their homes or had to go in hiding. Many people did not have the means to hide, and Etty felt she could not abandon them, so she voluntarily went to Westerbork, out of solidarity.
Aerial photo of Westerbork Transit Camp, Drenthe, Netherlands taken in March 1945 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
At Westerbork she worked as a social worker, which allowed her to travel many times between the camp and Amsterdam. She had ample opportunity to go into hiding to save herself, but she refused to do so. Inevitably, on 7 September 1943, Etty and her family, who had arrived in Westerbork a while earlier, were put on a transport to Auschwitz. One of Etty’s friends who saw her off writes in a letter to friends that Etty was “her normal cheerful self, having a word of encouragement and kindness for all she met”. Etty wrote a postcard to another friend and threw it out of the train. It was found by farmers and posted. It says that “they had left the camp singing”. As soon as they arrived in Auschwitz on 10 September, her parents were sent to the gas chambers. On 30 November the Red Cross reported Etty’s death. Her brother Mischa died on 31 March 1944, and her other brother Jaap died on his way back to the Netherlands after having been liberated from Bergen-Belsen.
Before Etty went to Westerbork she gave her diaries to her friend Maria Tuinzing, who passed them on to a writer, Klaas Smelik. He and his daughter Johanna, who transcribed the diaries, started looking for a publisher for them in 1947. No-one wanted to publish them; they were considered “too philosophical”.
It was only in 1981 that the diaries were published in Dutch as Het verstoorde leven (An Interrupted Life). Since then, interest in and research into Etty Hillesum and her work have only grown. There are conferences, books and two museums; one in her birth town of Middelburg which opened in 2020 and one in Deventer. Translations of the diaries into French, Italian, English, German, Danish and Finnish followed.
Etty Hillesum’s diaries with a page of her handwriting. Reproduced in Judith Koelemeijer, Etty Hillesum: het verhaal van haar leven (Amsterdam, 2022) YF.2023.a.27.
Why not let the diaries speak for themselves?
The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face — and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension. (8 June 1943)
And if there were only one good German, then he would be worthy of protection against the whole barbaric gang and because of that one good German one should not pour one’s hatred onto a whole people. (15 March 1941)
And if God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God. — The surface of the earth is gradually turning into one great prison camp, and soon there will be nobody left outside. … I don’t fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I’ve even dropped the pretence that I’m out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well. But I mustn't have heroic illusions about that either. (11 June 1942)
Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Language Collections, specialist Dutch.
References/further reading:
Etty Hillesum, Het verstoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, 18e druik (Amsterdam, 1986) YA.1988.a.1992 (English Translation by Arnold J. Pomerans, An Interrupted Life: the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 (London, 1999) YC.2004.a.8709.
Etty Hillesum, Drie brieven van den kunstschilder Johannes Baptiste van der Pluym (1843-1912): met twee reproducties, uitgegeven en van een toelichting voorzien door A.C.G. Botterman-v.d. Pluym. (Apeldoorn, 1917 [i.e. Haarlem, 1943]) Cup.406.b.78. (Letters written to David Koning from Westerbork in 1943 and published clandestinely the same year.)
Philippe Noble, ‘De dagboeken en brieven van Etty Hillesum in Franse vertaling: Het dubbele filter’ In: Filter: tijdschrift over vertalen, Vol. 9, nr 3 (2002) pp. 37-48. YF.2007.a.229
Oord, Gerrit van, ‘Het dagboek van Etty Hillesum in Italië’ (Nijmegen, 2002) In: Filter: tijdschrift over vertalen, Vol. 9, nr 3 (2002) pp. 49-56.
Veel mooie woorden: Etty Hillesum en haar boekje Levenskunst,edited by Ria van den Brandt and Peter Nissen (Hilversum, 2017) YF.2018.a.20211.
Spirituality in the Writings of Etty Hillesum: Proceedings of the Etty Hillesum Conference at Ghent University, November 2008, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik et al. (Leiden, 2010). Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 11. YD.2012.a.877.
Klaas A.D. Smelik, Reading Etty Hillesum in Context: Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary author (Amsterdam, 2018) YD.2018.a.3834
The Lasting Significance of Etty Hillesum’s Writings: Proceedings of the Third International Etty Hillesum Conference at Middelburg, September 2018, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik (Amsterdam, 2019) YD.2021.a.1416. Also available online free of charge.
Etty: de nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik, Gideon Lodders, Rob Tempelaars. 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1987) YA.1989.a.8106.