The Jungian Inspired Holocaust Writings of Etty Hillesum

To Write is to Act

 

Countdown to release

 

September, 2024

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In less than two weeks this small book of a slice of Etty ‘s words and experiences will be published in the U.S, by Routledge… in two months we will have her ‘Naming’ at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. Naming is a Jewish celebration when a baby is finally here and gets named!  Naming is a sacred act.  Naming is metaphoric for celebrating her identity, life, writing, and action during a time when she was trapped and surrounded by the most hateful and destructive of perpetrators, yet she did not dissociate or deny reality, her presence grew stronger….

 

After the last deportation to the ‘east ‘– Poland – she wrote a letter about her experience of encountering and helping so many of her tribe some truly crazed by this event – how could it be otherwise?  Given her role on the Jewish Council, she lent her ear and steady hand to hold them, help them pack, and calm their spirits as there was nothing left to do but love them.

 

And then, two weeks later, she lost her privileges and had to go herself.

 

Here is what happened in the moment:

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Etty Hillesum—Deportation to Auschwitz, September 7, 1943

 

It came without warning, orders from The Hague.

Mr. Wegerif, Hans, Maria, Tide and everyone else I may not know so well.

It is not going to be easy for me to tell you this. It all happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly. Odd, isn’t it, it seemed unexpected even now, it seemed sudden even now, although we had all been ready and waiting for such a long time. So when it happened she too was ready and waiting. And, alas, she too has gone. … After the leaders of the J.C. had declared that nothing could be done for her, we wrote a letter as a last resort to the 1st Dienstleiter, or in this case Commandant Gemmeker requesting that he intervene personally.

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We felt that something might still be arranged on the train. But that meant getting everything ready before she left, and so the parents and Mischa went off to the train first. And I brought up the rear trundling a well-filled rucksack and a wicker basket with a bowl and cup dangling from it along to the train. And there she set foot on the transport “boulevard,” which she had described just fourteen days earlier in her own incomparable manner. Talking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way, full of sparkling good humour, perhaps just a touch of sadness, but every inch our Etty, the way you all know her. “I have my diaries and my small Bibles and my Russian grammar and Tolstoy with me, and I have no idea what else there is in my luggage.” One of our leaders came up to say good-bye and to explain that he had put forward all the arguments he could, but in vain. Etty thanked him “for putting forward the arguments all the same” and asked me to tell you all how everything went. And what a good departure she and her family had.

So here I sit now, a little sad, certainly, but not sad for something that has been lost, since a friendship like hers can never be lost; it is, and it endures.

Jopie Vleeschhouwer (ET 2002, 666, 667)

 

As the train left Westerbork, as they cleared the doors, the prisoners always sang Jewish songs, particularly the Jewish anthem from Palestine/Israel, the Hatikvah. Most knew they were going to their deaths. Etty also wrote about this, that only in the train could you sing the Jewish anthem. She knew this because no other people were allowed on the platform, only Etty (or someone else from the Jewish Council) when they brought people to the train.

Etty threw a postcard out of the train window on September 7, where it was found by farmers and posted by them, postmarked September 15, 1943:

 

Christine,

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. On sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother, firmly and calmly, Mischa, too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care. Friends left behind will still be writing to Amsterdam; perhaps you will hear something from them. Or from my last letter from camp. Goodbye for now from the four of us Etty

 

According to the Red Cross, Etty Hillesum was killed at Auschwitz on November 30, 1943.

 

Kaddish for Etty Hillesum

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She praised Your Great Name from the unsullied corners

Of her soul. Sifted silence for words,

Weaved them to the sky within.

She insisted on God, demanded dignity,

We can pray anywhere. In a wooden barracks,

In a stone monastery, God is everywhere.

She guarded the inner temple where God

Patiently waited. She lifted and cradled and brought forth

The God who needed us as much as we needed him.

Broken, helpless God in the rubble. God

She would not abandon even when he’d abandoned her.

She praised the God she dug up from her gut

Rooted in stubborn trust. She saved herself.

She saved God. She made God

Possible. She led God through the darkness

And would not let him go. Dragged his hand

Through the ash, turned his face to his people,

Said, look. Said, stay. The ghosts

Of Auschwitz said to God, You shall not see us

And live. But she held God’s hand,

traced the lines on his palm, said, This

Is your lifeline. Some of us will live.

Some of us will praise Your Name, forever and ever.

Hila Ratzabi*

 

* Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She lives outside Chicago with her spouse and two children.

 

We look forward to our celebration of her “Naming” in the U.S. and the significance of her life as she becomes a chronicler, not only of the darkest

time in European history in the 20th century, but of a pathway to the deepest parts of ourselves to draw from in the most difficult times in our time in American and worldwide history

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August, 2024

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Camp Westerbork: Her Choice

If Chapter 3 is the heart of her development, Chapter 4 is full of her actions evolving from that inner experience. This chapter speaks of the efforts of her community of the Spier Club and her family and friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, to convince her to go into hiding or sign up and get a passport to go to Palestine when the war ended. She did not do that or go into hiding. Why? This chapter reveals the dramatic moment of her intention. This intention and action was quite different for two of best friends -and we learn about those friends, where these differences were points of disagreement and grief for all of these close friends. We learn of Etty’s friends at Camp Westerbork, and the actions and leadership she performed there, impacting those both inside and outside of this transit camp which held people for periods of time before they were deported to Auschwitz - a place no one knew the name of, just that they were going to ‘work’ in the ‘East.’ Several of these friends were Jewish leaders as part of the Jewish Council there in preparing for this new role- which was born after Hitler's "Final Solution' of deporting Jews to the camps that were no longer ‘concentration’ camps but ‘death’ camps.

It was here, approximately two weeks before her own deportation, that Etty wrote a powerful letter that was a description of preparing people of all ages, with infirmities, terrified mothers, screaming infants, frightened children for a deportation. Her friend and well-known Dutch journalist, Phillip Mechanicus was also imprisoned at Westerbork and wrote along side of Etty, sometimes in the same room. He wrote from a very objective point of view who’s diary was also published after the war. Etty took that wrenching description of the chaos of that moment and had it smuggled out to her non-Jewish friends who were in the Dutch Resistance.

This letter is paraphrased in Appendix A.
Finally, Etty and her family are deported unexpectedly. It is a heart wrenching moment and all aspects of her experience are explored. A brilliant young Jewish poet has written a poem, as Kaddish for Etty Hillesum, or a mourner's prayer for the dead - to praise God - Hila Ratzabi ( An award winning poet and is passionate about sharing new ways to nurture and develop Jewish creativity. Born in Rehovot, Israel, and raised in Queens, New York.) This decision, to refuse to go into hiding, has been controversial and possibly mis-understood throughout the years. Was she a martyr? a saint? as many have thought, or was she a young person hoping she would survive but willing to take the risk in order to chronicle the events of the Jewish tribe that she was a part of? In short, can anyone know fully or judge what someone chooses in such unfathomable times?
We will all resonate, at some level with the honest struggling to make meaning at such a time….

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July, 2024

 

ETTY HILLESUM’S DIARY
in Relationship to the Stages of Realization 

“It is a slow and painful process, this striving after true inner freedom.”
Etty Hillesum (ET 2002, 134)

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This is probably the heart of this book - Etty’s evolution through 2.5 years of her diary writing and her letters from Camp Westerbork.

 

I have brought forward a Jungian and Feminine oriented developmental model that includes the final stage that is both personal and transpersonal or a stage that includes touching the Boundless dimension while in a human body!

 

I will include four quotes without naming them in the way I have in the book - so you can see for yourself this transforming …. How would you see these quotes? 

 

1. Here in this strange family, there is such a remarkable mixture of barbarism and culture that you are stripped of all your strength …In the past, my picturesque family would cost me a bucket of tears every night. I can’t explain those tears as of yet; they came from somewhere in the dark collective unconscious. Nowadays I am not so wasteful of this precious fluid, but it is not easy to live here. (ET 2002, 83)
    

2.  Hearkening to myself, to others, to the world. I listen very intently, with my whole being, and try to fathom the meaning of things. I am always very tense and attentive. I keep looking for something but I don’t know what. What I am looking for, of course, is my own truth, but I still have no idea of what it will look like. (ET 2002, 90–91)
    

3.  I am only at the beginning, but the beginning is there, that much I know for certain. It means gathering together all the strength one can, living one’s life with God and in God and having God dwell within. (I find the word “God” so primitive at times, it is only a metaphor after all, an approach to our greatest and most continuous inner adventure; I’m sure that I don’t even need the word “God,” which sometimes strikes me as a primitive, primordial sound. A makeshift construction.) And, at night, when I sometimes have the inclination to speak to God and say very childishly, “God, things just cannot go on like this with me”—and sometimes my prayers can be very desperate and imploring—it is nevertheless as if I were addressing something in myself, trying to plead with a part of myself. (ET 2002, 438–439)
    

4.  ….. that what they are after is our total destruction, I accept it. I know it now and I shall not burden others with my fears. I shall not be bitter if others fail to grasp what is happening to us Jews. I work and continue to live with the same conviction, and I find life meaningful—yes, meaningful—although I hardly dare say so in company these days. Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable horrors—it is all as one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty whole and begin to grasp it better if only for myself; without being able to explain to anyone else how it all hangs together. I wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short. 
    

5. Oh God, so much suffering and so much love.” She goes on to say that “there is such perfect and complete happiness in me, oh God. What he (Spier) called ‘reposing in oneself.’ And that probably best expresses my own love of life: I repose in myself. And that part of myself; that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call ‘God’” (ET, p 519).

 

This is a taste of how Etty kept expanding her inner and outer viewpoints about her own inner freedom and the reality of what was happening externally.

 

Etty’s life expanded by learning about ‘archetypes’ as an archetypal view of history and politics as well as the ‘union of opposites - holding both. Which we can benefit from, given today’s assault on democracy, worldwide and here in the U.S. as we just experienced the 4th of July.

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June, 2024

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We begin this journey with the historical context of when Etty Hillesum began her diary. While Etty began her diary in 1941, she speaks in it about the year before, when The Netherlands fell to the Nazis on May 10, 1940. We just experienced the D-Day celebration in France with world leaders and veterans still alive, most in their 90’s a few days ago on June 6th. On this day the United States, Britain, and other country's naval personnel landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944, with the goal of ending the war.

 

Etty would be dead by 1943, missing liberation by 8 months... 

 

Back to May 10th of 1940, when she was walking near the skating club at the Museumplain in Amsterdam when she spotted her former law professor, Bonger.

 

She says:

“Hello, Professor Bonger, I have thought a lot about you these last few days, may I walk a little way with you?” And he gave me a sidelong look through those blue glasses and obviously had no idea who I was, despite two exams and a year at his lectures. Still, those days people felt so close to one another that I just continued walking by his side. I can’t remember the precise words we exchanged. It was that afternoon when people thought of nothing but getting away to England, and I asked, “Do you think it makes sense to escape?”

And he said, “The young have to stay put.” And I, “Do you think democracy can win?” And he, “It’s bound to win, but it’s going to cost us several generations.” And he, fearless Bonger, was suddenly as defenseless as a child, almost gentle, and I felt an irresistible need to put my arms round him and to lead him like a child, and so, with my arm round him, we walked on across the Skating Club.

 

Given the Dutch capitulation to Germany, Professor Bonger, an hour after speaking with Etty had killed himself along with hundreds of other academics in Holland that very day.

This is the backdrop to the beginning of Etty Hillesum’s diary writing prompted by starting with a therapist, Julius Spier, a year later. Spier, known as S. in Etty’s journal, as mentioned, was a psychochirologist (a reader of hands) and a psychological practitioner associated with C. G. Jung. He had, in fact, studied with Jung in Kussnacht, Switzerland, in 1928 and 1929. Jung was supportive of Spier’s work as a chirologist for diagnostic purposes and suggested that he open a practice in Berlin, and then when he moved to Amsterdam he did the same thing.

 

This was the beginning of a journey at both the inner and outer dimensions of their lives of such scope, breadth, depth and struggle neither of them could even anticipate it….