The words you are about to read were written by Etty Hillesum in 1941.
Jewish, young, intelligent, passionate and passionate about life; despite knowing that the darkness of history was clouding all of Europe, she never stopped admiring the beauty of life.
Indeed, the more darkness envelops her, the more she sees light everywhere.
In March 1941 she begins writing a Diary, the secret witness to her therapeutic journey with the psychochirologist Julius Spier. That Diary will become her most beautiful poetry and a gift to all of us, privileged readers of her words.
Etty learns to bloom wherever life has placed her and, although she professes no religion, she will come to know God and let Him accompany her all the way to Auschwitz. She writes in her last note, thrown from the train and later reaching the right hands: “God is my refuge... We left the camp singing.”
She dies on November 30, 1943.
On December 31, 1941, with the Netherlands now occupied by the Nazis, she writes:
“It is almost half past eight in the evening: the last evening of a year that has been for me the richest and most fruitful, and at the same time the happiest of all. And if I had to explain in one word why this year has been so good... then I would have to say: because of my great awakening.
Which also means being able to draw on my deepest strengths.
Now I sometimes find myself having to kneel suddenly beside my bed, even on a cold winter night. Listening inwardly. No longer letting myself be guided by what approaches from outside, but by what rises up inside. It is only a beginning, I realize that. But it is no longer a wavering beginning; it has its foundations.
I feel so “normal” and so well - without those terribly deep and tormented thoughts and those heavy feelings -, completely ordinary, yet full of life and very deep, a depth that I also feel as “normal.”
Etty’s Diary is one of the few books that can truly change those who read it. It is a “place” to which one can return whenever we need to drink from a source of life. It is a “landscape” to admire when we wish to look from a “higher” point of view.
A point of view so “high” that we can accept it as “possible” only by virtue of the fact that a young girl told it to us and lived through it.
“People often become agitated when I say: it makes little difference whether I or someone else is the one who has to leave; what matters is that thousands of people have to leave. It is not even that I want to run into the arms of my death with a resigned smile. It is the sense of the inevitable and its acceptance, the awareness that ultimately they cannot take anything away from us. It is not that I want to leave at any cost, out of some sort of masochism, or that I wish to be torn away from the very foundation of my existence - but I doubt I would feel well if I were spared what so many others must instead endure.
People tell me: a person like you has a duty to save herself, you have so much to do in life, you still have so much to give. But whatever little or much I have to give, I can give it anyway, whether here in a small circle of friends or elsewhere, in a concentration camp. And it seems to me a curious overestimation of oneself to consider oneself too precious to share a “mass fate” with others.
If God decides that I have so much to do, fine, then I will do it, after going through all the experiences that others can go through as well. And the value of my person will be revealed precisely by how I know how to conduct myself in the new situation.
And if I cannot survive, then people will see who I am by the way I die.”
(July 11, 1942)
Maria Cristina Corvo
