An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943

Adam G. Fuerstenberg was Professor of English at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto.

Picture the naively precocious Anne Frank, just beginning to be aware of her budding feminity, as ten years older and grown into a mature young woman with a raging appetite for life and an intense inner existence. There you have Etty Hillesum, the author and central figure of this remarkable diary. At times mystically, almost transcendentally religious, and at other times radically sceptical, Etty oscillates between optimism and pessimism about the human condition as she experiences and is forced to cope with life as a Jewess in Nazi-occupied Holland. Paradoxically, as her physical world becomes increasingly constricted her inner spiritual and psychological world expands and she matures into a luminous human being deliberately accepting martyrdom in Auschwitz as an expression of her rediscovered kinship with her co-religionists.

The core of her diary describes her attempt to deal with the often contradictory emotions aroused in her by an increasingly erotic affair with her therapist, Julius Spier, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Berlin, disciple of Jung and founder of “psychochirology,” the study and classification of palm prints. Twice her age and divorced, Spier, whose “magical personality” and uncanny gifts of psychoanalysis made him a magnet for women, seems to have dispensed his physical charms to a number of his female student-clients concurrently. Charlatan or hypocrite, the magnetic Spier became the theme and focus of Etty’s emotional and erotic awakening.

Etty (short for Esther) was 28 at the time, the scholarly daughter (she studied psychology and Slavic languages) of well-to-do, assimilated Dutch Jews. Her developing faith took the form of a hodge-podge of Judeo-Christian and mystical musing. The whole mixture could be absurd, but what rescues the whole effort is the freshness of the poetic detail of her observations and the sincerity of her motives as she slowly grapples toward an ethical position described by the editor of this volume as “radical altruism.”

The diary covers the period from March 1941 to October 1942. For a year afterwards she was a social worker at Westerbork, the transit camp from which Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz. She had many opportunities to escape, as she was allowed in her capacity to travel frequently to Amsterdam. Instead, she joined her parents and brother Misha when they were shipped to the death camp in August 1943. She had apparently found a heroic focus in her emotionally confused and complicated life and decided to accept the fate of her family and her people. She died three months later in Auschwitz.