About Etty
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman from the Netherlands, died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine. In March of 1941 she began a practice of journaling in a personal diary and writing letters to friends and family. We have her diary and we have a great many of her letters. In her writing we find the remarkable path she took into the depth of her own being where she found God, and then emerged from a place of union to love everyone including and especially her captors with a profoundly compassionate and wise heart. Etty was transformed by her suffering and that of her fellow Jews and came to the conclusion that while she understood that those who hate had reason to do so, she could not choose anything but love for herself.
An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork contains the collected works of Etty Hillesum from March of 1941 to September of 1943. In just a few short years Etty went through a remarkable spiritual transformation.
A number of variables conspired to make Etty’s life fertile ground for her spiritual transformation and awakening:
All families have their troubles, but Etty’s family seems to have been particularly troubled by a turbulence brought on by mental and emotional disturbance in her brothers and her parents. Etty left her family of origin with a great many insecurities and neurosis which led to her many stormy and sexual relationships.
Etty was a phenomenally passionate aspiring writer and artist. Her passion existed as a storm inside her that she sought to both ride and tame. Her passion came out in her poetic way of processing life, intimate relationships with friends and romantic partners, her elevated intellectual abilities, and her searching engagement with the world and the people in it.
Perhaps because she longed for a strong father figure where her own was found lacking Etty was in a relationship with two older men. One, Han Wegerif, owned the residence in which she lived with some other boarders as a young adult. The other, Juluis Spier, was the great love of her life. Spier was a very gifted intellectual and psycho-chirologist (reader of palms) who was deeply influenced by the great Swiss psycho-analyst, Carl Jung. Neither of these relationships would be considered particularly healthy or appropriate by our standards, however, as we journey with Etty we will see how they were catalysts for transformation for her. In particular, Spier’s therapeutic methods will appear strange, off-putting, and inappropriate to many readers. Their relationship was complicated by many factors, not the least of which was that he was her therapist and he was engaged to be married to another woman.
Etty’s entire story is set against the backdrop of the Nazi campaign of terror, war, and murder. As she writes the Nazi’s are closing their grip around Jews all over Europe and they are increasingly present in the Netherlands.
Etty is convinced that love is the only right response to suffering. As her story unfolds the reader can watch Etty discover that God dwells within her and become increasingly convinced and finally certain “that the earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter.”
