An Interrupted Life

Several times late last year, David Brooks, whose social commentaries I read religiously whenever I can, mentioned the name of a woman I'd heard of often previously, Etty Hillesum. Hers is a name I remembered because it would come up in conversations about a book I did, Things We Couldn't Say, the life story of a woman named Berendina (Diet) Eman. "Have you read Etty Hillesum?" someone would ask, that someone being not just any someone, but a someone whose opinions about things merited some attention. 

Never read her, however. But I knew her because her letters and journals came into print at about the same time Things was published--hence, the frequent references. Essentially, An Interrupted Life is a long "testimony," which make it sound like another Hiding Place, and it is--it does share elements with Corrie Ten Boom. Both are set in occupied Holland during World War II; both honor heroic characters, who, in the face of evil, do wonderful things. 

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also become richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

But Etta was Jewish, not Dutch Reformed. An Interrupted Life is more akin to Anne Frank's Diary. Ms. Frank, of course, was a just a girl; Etta Hillesum was a woman, mid-twenties, almost startlingly free for a significant amount of time in occupied Holland, walking and biking all over Amsterdam while Anne Frank, along with others, was in hiding in what she called "the Annex," an  apartment deliberately hidden away on an ordinary street of the city. Both were Jewish, and both kept journals that explore life itself in ways that seem extraordinarily fine for their time and place.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

Etta Hillesum lived a life that would have been beyond the imagination of Anne Frank, a bohemian life, the unsteady kind of life that Hitler himself used to describe the decadence he promised to wipe out of Germany and eventually all of Europe. Etta's life defined promiscuity. Her journal doesn't indulge in graphic descriptions, but neither is it ashamed about her bed-hopping. Corrie and her sister might well have described Etta as "loose," because by just about anyone's definition, she was.

Like Anne Frank, Etta's life story ends in a crematorium. Once she leaves her native Holland, her life eventually is extinguished, along with 100,000 Dutch Jews.  

Let me summarize. Etta Hillesum's An Interrupted Life tells a far more reckless story than the stories told by Anne Frank, Corrie Ten Brink, or Diet Eman, a different kind of story altogether really, a story that is only tangentially about the SS or life during the Nazi occupation. 

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse — that's quite a task.

Thirty years after people recommended the book, I finally got around to reading it when David Brooks recommended it as highly as he did and still does: 

One of my heroes is a woman named Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered. But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps.

Etty Hillesum's diaries is a classic "testimony" of a woman who moved from sheer self-centeredness to gracious charity, who learned that giving herself to help others was a blessed way to endure immense horrors all around. 

Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields—there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze—and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them.

An Interrupted Life is a remarkable book written by a remarkable woman in the eye of the storm during a remarkably horrible time.