Yielding herself up to God

Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. Complete and Unabridged. Edited by Klass A.D. Smelik, Novalis Publishers, 800 pages, 2003

"God is not accountable to us, but we are to him. I know what may lie in wait for us ... and yet I find life beautiful and meaningful."

Etty Hillesum who wrote these words in Amsterdam in 1942 was a young 28-year-old Jewish woman and gifted writer who decided to write a diary during the German occupation of Holland. The diary portrays an inner transformation of an independent woman preoccupied with worldly pleasures and sensuality into a person of great spiritual depth and wisdom. The diaries chronicle Etty's inner growth and have become an authentic classic of 20th century spirituality.

In 1942, she voluntarily went to the German interment camp for Jews at Westerbork in Holland to serve those who were under arrest and detained. However, on Sept. 8, 1943, she and her entire family were transported to Auschwitz. A letter written by an eyewitness describes her final moments on Dutch soil. This person says that as Etty stepped up to and into the dark car of the cattle train, crowded with men, woman and children, "she walked lightly, bearing the burden of these her people, yet caught in an inner calm. She had not been deserted by her God".

Another friend, who survived, saw her get on the train to Auschwitz and relates she was "talking happily, a kind word for everyone she met ... full of sparkling humour. Then the shrill whistle when the train with a thousand victims moved out." She managed to throw a postcard out of the train, which a farmer found and mailed: "We left the camp singing," she said in the card. On November 30, 1943, she died at Auschwitz.

Her friends treasured her memory and after the war they tried to find a publisher for her lengthy manuscript which had been hidden for safekeeping. She had left careful plans for the survival of her diaries and letters, but was unaware that future generations would be able to read her testimony. It took many years to decipher her almost illegible handwriting.

Finally in 1981, 38 years after her death, the known diaries of Etty at that time were published in Dutch under the title "An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum" (226 pages). It is currently in its 23rd Dutch edition and has been translated into 14 languages.

However, this new Complete and Unabridged English edition (800 pages), contains 50 per cent more of the unpublished diary entries, unpublished letters and in addition 113 pages of notes all authenticated and assembled by the Etty Hillesum Foundation in Amsterdam, Holland.

What do the diaries tell us? They begin on March 8, 1941, when Etty, a secular Jew, lives in Amsterdam and is going through a time of personal turmoil and emotional upheaval and feels she is in need of psychotherapy. She consults a psychologist, a Jewish refugee from Germany named Julius Spier. Under the influence of Carl Jung, Spier believed that human well-being and healing called for a spiritual dimension in one's life and to be healed One needed the courage to say "I believe in God", Spier introduced her to the Bible and to St. Augustine and encouraged her to continue her readings on Dostoevsky and Rilke.

Etty falls in love with Spier and has an intense emotional and sexual relationship. However, in the process of her relationship she develops a religious sensibility which gives her daily diary entries an enormous spiritual dimension. The word "God" appears often in her entries and she develops an intense dialogue with the Divine. But her dialogue leads her into meditation and prayerful silence. She records that in a conversation with Spier one day he said, "You know meditation is beautiful." Etty then says "that sort of comment does not sound sentimental or mystical or extravagant when it comes from him, but serious and almost matter-of-fact. Next time I'll ask him, no doubt very childishly, "How does one meditate? Can I learn it too?"

In a diary entry of June 8, 1941 Etty has begun to meditate. It reads as follows:

SUNDAY MORNING, 9:30. "I think that I'll do it anyway: I'll 'turn inward' for half an hour each morning before work, and listen to my inner voice. Lose myself. You could also call it meditation. I am still a bit wary of that word. But anyway, why not? A quiet half-hour within yourself. It's not enough just to move your arms and legs and all the other muscles about in the bathroom each morning. We are body and spirit. And half an hour of exercises combined with half an hour of meditation can set the tone for the whole day.

"But it's not so simple, that sort of 'quiet hour'. It has to be learnt. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions ... the clutter is ever present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one's innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view. So that something of God can enter you, and something of 'love' too."

However, Etty's spiritual development through meditation did not lead her into a solitary withdrawal from life, but into the thick of the world of activity and to giving herself to others. She throws herself into concern for social justice, service to. the suffering and oppressed and this continues until her death. She had made a conscious decision "to share her people's fate."

Etty soon feels the need to free herself from the obsessive attachment to Spier. Spier dies suddenly in 1942 but Etty has already come to love the message more than the messenger. Eventually, God becomes the most vital aspect of her life. In one of her diary entries she writes:

"There is a deep well inside me, and in it God dwells ... There are people who pray with their eyes turned to Heaven, they seek God outside themselves. And there are those who bow their heads and bury their faces in their hands. I think that they seek God inside."

Etty is one of the latter seeking God inside and she continues, "All that is left is the will to yield myself up to God ... a desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body or rather my body seems made and meant for the act of kneeling."

Some months before her death, Etty was speaking to an old friend who was a Communist activist: "a dogged old class fighter" as she describes him in her diary. She argues against the class struggle and then says "I see no alternative: each of us must turn inward and destroy in oneself all that we think we ought to destroy in others and remember that every action of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable." Her Communist friend is astonished and dismayed. "But that," he says, "is nothing but Christianity." Etty replies "yes, Christianity, and why not?" Observers point out that Etty lived and died a Jew but her insights into the teaching of Jesus are deep and incisive and played a major role in her spiritual development.

According to the Red Cross, Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz on November 30% 1943. Etty who had turned down the efforts of her friends to go into hiding and wished" to share her people's fate" finally ... returned to her God.

Paul Harris is an author/editor of eight books on prayer. His most recent book is Frequently Asked Questions about Christian Meditation: The Path of Contemplative Prayer (Novalis Publishers, Toronto, Canada) He can be reached at paulturnerharris@aol.com

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