Patrick Woodhouse - Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed

Etty in her room, c. 19378
Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

I knew that I would have to undergo
many transformations.

(Etty Hillesum, 27th July 1942)

The Watchtower at Westerbork today
Patrick Woodhouse

The publication (initially in 1986) of the journals and letters of Etty Hillesum made available an utterly distinctive modern chronicle of conversion: a Confessions of St Augustine for our own day. Because it is for our own day, however, it is not simply a story of someone finding their way to a settled traditional allegiance. And because of its setting, in the midst of the atrocities of the Holocaust because this is the history of a young woman killed in Auschwitz at the age of 29 we could hardly expect it to be anything like a consoling record of homecomings and solutions. Not, of course, that Augustines great work is that kind of record at all and Etty Hillesums texts can perhaps help us read that and similar classics with a new eye for their complexities and unfinished business. But here is a quintessentially modern mind and sensibility gradually being changed in such a way that there is no escape, not only from speaking about God, but no escape from the challenge to speak for God.

Those who have read the published letters and diaries will know what an exceptional witness they give to the dawning of God in someones awareness, but thus far there have been relatively few discussions of the recurring themes. We need help in tracing the patterns, and help too in connecting this passionate and idiosyncratic voice with the more familiar idioms of traditional faith and practice without in the process so domesticating her that she ceases to give the unequivocally contemporary witness that makes her so extraordinary.

In this book, Patrick Woodhouse has offered just such help, respectful at every point of Ettys distinctiveness and not trying to make her an orthodox martyr. Anyone studying her with the help of these pages will emerge convinced that she can properly stand with Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria Skobtsova as a signal representative of what has been called the death-cell philosophy of the twentieth century: the discovery of a real and completely, powerfully transforming divine faithfulness, present even in the depths of the nightmare of totalitarian inhumanity. Etty Hillesum deserves to be read far more deeply and extensively than she has been thus far, and this book is a clear and moving invitation to such a deeper and more sustained reading.

+ Rowan Cantuar:

Lambeth Palace

S Teresa of Avila, 2008

On 9th March 1941, a 27-year-old Dutch Jew named Etty Hillesum living in enemy-occupied Amsterdam made her first entry in a diary, which, together with the letters she later wrote from a transit camp, became one of the most remarkable set of documents to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. They tell the story of a life, which, in just two and a half years, was entirely transformed.

The dark and ever-threatening background to the diary are the terrible events of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which at that time was sweeping across Europe. In July 1942 this persecution was to take this young woman into Westerbork, the transit camp for Dutch Jews on their way to the east; and eventually, in September 1943, to Auschwitz, where she died.

Under the pressure of these appalling events and through a relationship with an unusual Jungian therapist who had a huge influence upon her, Etty was to emerge as an inspirational figure: inspirational for those who knew her at the time and with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp, and inspirational for all whose lives, through her diary and letters, she has touched since. Through her vivid writing we meet a young woman who shaped and lived a spirituality of hope in the darkest period of the twentieth century.

Following the narrative of her life, the book begins by exploring the process of personal change that occurred in her as she emerged from an insecure and chaotic past. As her confidence grew and she discovered a more integrated self, she began to talk about a sense of God and to pray. She describes herself as the girl who could not kneel and yet who learned to pray. It was, at first, hesitant and faltering, and she was embarrassed by it, but slowly her growing inner life to which she constantly returned became all important to her, sustaining her more and more as the persecution intensified and the world around her darkened. As the noose tightened, and the realization grew in her that her people were helpless and faced an inevitable destruction, a new and intimate understanding of God was born in her heart.

It was her rich spiritual imagination and the sense of inner depth which colours all her writing, which enabled her, amidst the evil and suffering that she describes so graphically, to see the world differently. In the hellish conditions of the camp she continued to insist, extraordinarily, that life is meaningful and good. How could this be? She was not mad. Under the pressure of the suffering she did not become detached from reality for she describes everything around her so vividly: the overcrowding, the mud, the cruelty, the traumatized broken people, the weekly cattle-truck train taking its pitiful load of exhausted humanity away to the east, from where they were never heard from again she is the chronicler of it all. But despite everything, she continued to have a deep sense of the goodness and beauty of life.

Above all else that was remarkable about her, Etty Hillesum refused to hate. While others around her dealt with their fear and reinforced their resistance by hatred of the German occupiers, Etty refused to hate, and she held to this conviction to the end.

Her courageous story leads into profound understandings about the nature of God and how suffering and sorrow can be redemptive, not destructive. These emerged out of the struggles of her inner life, and the insights she arrived at were not easily gained. What we witness in the diary, and through her letters to her friends, is a battle to go on living with hope and integrity even as the world around her collapses. Her greatest weapons in this are her love of people, her deep sense of God within, and her passion for truth.

As death approached, the faith that she held to so courageously became everything to her. But, perhaps surprisingly, Etty was not a religious person at least not in the institutional sense of that word. She belonged to neither synagogue nor church and shows no interest whatever in institutional religion. Her route to God was initially through psychotherapy and an exhaustive, relentless and disciplined grappling with the self, which led to the discovery of the hidden inner depths of the human soul.

This makes her a woman for our time, when institutional religion is in decline and yet the hunger for authentic spirituality is more keenly felt than ever. Etty speaks across the boundaries of religions, pointing to a way of being human that transcends such divisions and overcomes the evils of violence and hatred. It was a way that was tested to the uttermost and shone through under the most terrible circumstances imaginable. Her story rekindles confidence that the way of faith is not, as so many sceptical voices in todays world suggest, an absurd and misguided delusion.