Session Eight
(pages 235 - 256 November - December 1942 , Letters from Westerbork and Amsterdam)
Etty is in Westerbork. As a member of Jewish Council she is able to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. She makes the trip a dozen times before finally staying in Westerbork for good. At one point she is pretty sick and ends up staying in Amsterdam for almost 3 months.
The Jews in Westerbork live in constant fear of the train that comes through the camp once a week. The train is loaded with people who are transported to the extermination camps.
Etty has been asked to write a description of Westerbork for a friend, so she sets out to do just that in these early letters. Mud is a constant theme. Mud and barbed wire. “Somewhere inside one must have a great deal of inner sunshine to deal with all the mud” she writes. Then “the barbed wire is more a question of attitude.” An old man who apparently does have a great deal of inner sunshine proclaims that it is not he who is behind the barbed wire rather it is them he says as he points to a village in the distance on the other side of the wire.
Etty and her friends on the Jewish Council try to keep people off the trains that come through weekly but they can’t “keep everyone back as indispensable to the camp.”
After the first train leaves under her watch she thinks for a moment that she will never be happy again, then she realizes that “where there are people there is life.”
“Of all the shortages in Westerbork the shortage of space is surely the worst.”
In Westerbork where she sees extraordinary suffering and unimaginable cruelty Etty concludes that those who hate have good reason to do so, but she will not hate. Her great breakthrough is this - “the earth will become habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the 13th chapter of his first letter.”