Etty Hillesum’s Struggle to See Clearly: A Story of Two Worlds

Summary

Abstract

This contribution explores the question: how could it be possible to go on trying to see the Nazis as human beings created in the Image of God? It begins with Etty Hillesum gazing at the brutal faces of the guards loading the train destined for the death camps, and explores her reaction to what she sees and how her reaction is a statement of what she has become. The essay then traces how, in the midst of a world collapsing all around her, Etty Hillesum learns to inhabit another inner world which saves her, and which shares characteristics common to the contemplative traditions of all the great faiths. The contribution is a reminder that her story is a story not of one, but of two worlds.

Keywords: description of Nazism by Etty Hillesum, inner world of Etty Hillesum, contemplative practices, metaphors used by Etty Hillesum, silence, prayer, kneeling.

I want to begin with an excerpt from the letter Etty Hillesum wrote to her friends in Amsterdam just two weeks before she went on the train to Auschwitz in which she describes the faces of the guards who are loading the train.

When I think of the faces of that squad of armed, green-uniformed guards – my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been so frightened of anything in my life. I sank to my knees with the words that preside over human life: “And God made man after His likeness.” That passage spent a difficult morning with me.

Within the limits of this contribution, I want to reflect on these words, and more importantly, what lay behind them. And in the process, I hope that we can glimpse something of the inner “feel” of her experience.

This passage comes at the beginning of the long letter of 24 August 1943. It is her greatest contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. In this letter, she uses one of her greatest gifts, the ability to write, so fulfilling one part of her vocation, to see what was happening in all its unvarnished awfulness and to record it. From behind the safety of a window just across from the platform where the train was standing, she looks, she gazes, she seeks to see.