Twisted rails--a monument at the museum at Westerbork

One more time for a different platform--this terrific book I just read. The essay is till a WIP.

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For many moons I've been told by friends I trust that I really need to read An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum. If you are not one of those friends, Etty Hillesum was a grown-up Anne Frank, a Jewish woman living in the heart of Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. 

Both of them kept intense journals. Both unflinchingly recorded the richness of their hearts' desires amid the suffering. Both kept notebooks that, given their honesty amid the strife, today offer crucial testimony to the horrors of a very real extermination plan.

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.

The Dutch chapter of that insanity was more successful than elsewhere in occupied Europe. In 1939, the Netherlands Jewish community numbered 140 thousand. When the war ended, less than 40 thousand remained. Some nations lost more Jewish people, but the percentage was unequalled. Among those who perished were Anne Frank, 16, and Etty Hillesum, 29, along with both of their families. 

The journals are remarkably similar and shockingly different. After the war, Anne Frank's father did some editing, removing things he thought didn't need to be said. Etty Hillesum had no familial editor. An Interrupted Life is amazingly candid. 

But then it's fair to say that while the Hillesums and the Franks shared their Jewishness, they shared little else. Etty, clearly a resident of Dutch intelligencia, seems largely unaffected by the occupation for almost 100 pages of the diary. Not until the yellow stars were codified does she say much at all about the German presence all around.

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

But then, her attention is with the pressures of her own roiling interior life, a life that's so nakedly offered up in the journals. Today, Etty Hillesum was polyamorous, entertaining several different partners frequently, perhaps because to her, sexuality seems to be just another characteristic of her humanness. In a way, sex is itself therapy, as her mentor and guru appears to believe. In the Me-Too era, Julius Spier would certainly lose his license and probably his freedom. But Etty Hillesum was not an unwilling partner. "I don't think I am cut out for one man," she says baldly.

But the philosophizing gets lost in the intensity of her reflections once the Jews, the  community she is part of--if only tangentially--begins to be bullied. Those conflicts/horrors lead her to consider deeply the difficult question she faces ever more darkly--how to live sanely in an insane world. 

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.

That quest grows more pressing when her status as a member of the Joodse Raad, a Jewish council created by the Nazis to buffer relationships, grants her a unique position in the camp at Westerborg,the last stop between Holland and the death camps. Once there, Etty Hillesum lives a calling she shapes to minister to those hopeless many who hopelessly watch the trains depart.

Thirty years after people recommended the book, I finally got around to reading it when David Brooks spoke highly of it: 

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.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork is unlike any other book I've ever read. Her life, her spirit and her creed deconstructs our ideologies. Evangelicals would be shy to claim her; she sleeps around and undergoes a self-inflicted abortion because, she says, she chooses not to bring a child into an impossibly cruel world. 

Militant Jewry would despise her passivity, even blame it for the deaths of thousands of Jews, who chose not to fight but to get on the trains lock-step. Benjamin Netanyahu has Etty Hillesum in mind when he refuses to reign the IDF. "Never again," his people say today as they destroy Gaza. There shall be no more  passivity. Most Jews would find her adoption of Christianity unsettling--she drew great strength from New Testament readings, from Saint Augustine, from Thomas a' Kempis.

Feminists would find her unshakable emotional attachment to Julius Spier embarrassing. And me? I loved the book. I should have read it years ago. 

But I was disgusted with myself. I found it so easy to be judgmental.