AN INTERRUPTED LIFE: THE DIARIES OF ETTY HILLESUM, 1941-43 (Het vestoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943)

Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1981

Etty Hillesum's diaries under the title An Interrupted Life (1983; Het vestoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, 1981) are one of the treasures of world literature. They were written by Hillesum from age 27 to 29. She wrote them from the very beginning with publication in mind, which accounts for the elegant style of her rhetoric. Prior to her internment in Westerbork and her subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, she gave the diaries to a friend in the hope that they would be published even if she did not survive.

The diaries have a dialectical construction: Hillesum's fear for eventual death in the concentration camps is played against her irrepressible, exuberant zest for life, fueled by her joyous sexuality with the psychotherapist-palm reader Julius Spier and with a man identified as Father Han, as well as her ever-deepening spiritual relationship with God, which she defines in terms of a personal relationship with the deity. Another aspect of her indefatigable joie de vivre is her study of great authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Gustav Jung, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Saint Augustine.

The dichotomy between Hillesum's joy for life and fear of eventual annihilation at the hands of the Nazis is expressed in this passage: "Because I am still so young and utterly resolved not to go under, and also because I feel that I am strong enough to pull myself together, I tend to forget how deprived we young people have become and how lonely. Or have I simply been anaesthetised? Bonger is dead, Ter Braak, Du Perron, Marsman, all are dead. Pos, and Van den Bergh and many others are in concentration camps." Hillesum describes the desire to hold on to a feeling of inner peace while her outer world lapses into catastrophe. She explicates both the difficulty and the necessity of holding on to this inner peace in the face of increasing terrorization: "More arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers. We seek the meaning of life, wondering whether any can be left. But that is something each of us must settle with himself and with God. And perhaps life has its own meaning, even if it takes a lifetime to find it. I for one have ceased to cling to life and to things, I have the feeling that everything is accidental, that one must break one's inner bonds with people and stand aside for all else. Everything seems so menacing and ominous, always that feeling of total impotence."

Hillesum's religious outlook appears to have been influenced by Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality with the teaching that everything is temporary and that one cannot cling too closely to worldly things and people. Too close a bond to the worldly leads to sorrow because nothing lasts forever.

In another passage she describes the importance of literature in her search for self-realization: "Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it mature inside you until it has become part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing." This exposition reveals how the study of literature is a major component of Hillesum's inner strength. Another major component of her inner strength is her unabashed enjoyment of her sexuality: "I only know that I love him, a bit more every day, and that I ripen beside him into a genuine and adult human being." Literature and sexuality help Hillesum to keep some semblance of inner tranquillity in the awareness and expectation of impending disaster.

Hillesum discusses religion as an important internal bulwark against Nazi terror: "The threat grows ever greater, and terror increases from day to day. I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it, as one might into a convent cell and then step outside again, calmer and stronger and more collected again. I can imagine times to come when I shall stay on my knees for days on end waiting until the protective walls are strong enough to prevent my going to pieces altogether, my being lost and utterly devastated."

Generations of postwar readers have drawn inspiration and wisdom from Etty Hillesum's undefeatable spirituality when she herself was in the midst of a grave spiritual crisis. An Interrupted Life is therefore among the greatest books of the twentieth century.

—Peter R. Erspamer