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Trans[ater£from tfie Dutcfi liy Arno[r£]. Pomerans Foreword:liy Eva Hoffman lntroauction ana notes liy ]an G. Gaar[ancft. Etty Hille sum An Interrupted Life THE DIARIES, 1941-1943 ana Letters from Westerbork AN OWL BOOK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK Henry Holt and Company, LLC Publishers since 1866 115 West 18th Street New York, New York 10011 Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Foreword copyright© 1996 by Eva Hoffman Introduction and notes copyright© 1996 by Jan G. Gaarlandt An Interrupted Life English translation copyright© 1983 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Originally published in the Netherlands in 1981 as Het vemoorde Ieven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. First English-language edition published in the United Kingdom in 1983. First American edition published in 1984 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Letters from Westerbork English translation copyright© 1986 by Random House, Inc. Originally published in the Netherlands in 1982 as Het denkende hart van de barak. First English-language edition published in the United States in 1986 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hillesum, Etty, 1914-1943. [Verstoorde Ieven. English] An interrupted life: the diaries, 1941-1943; and, Letters from Westerbork I Etty Hillesum; translated from the Dutch by Arnold ). Pomerans; foreword by Eva Hoffman; introduction and notes by )an G. Gaarlandt. p. em. Previously published (1st work): 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Previously published (2nd work): 1st English language ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. ISBN 0-8050-4894-4 ISBN 0-8050-5087-6 (pbk.) I. Hillesum, Etty, 1914-1943. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Netherlands­ Personal narratives. 3. Jews-Netherlands-Biography. 4. Netherlands-Ethnic relations. I. Gaarlandt, ). G. II. Hillesum, Etty, 1914-1943. Denkende hart van de barak. English. III. Title. IV. Title: Letters from Westerbork. DS135.1\'6H54813 1996 96-2960 940.53 '18'09492-dcZO CIP Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets. First compilation edition 1996 DESIGNED BY KATE NICHOLS Printed in the United States of America 10 98765432 I IS 14 13 12 II 10 (pbk.) Contents Foreword by Eva Hoffman v 1 1 Introduction by ]. G. Gaarlandt x 1 1 z An Interrupted Life: THE DIARIES, 1941-1943 1 Letters from Westerbork 2 3 3 Notes 366 Forewora When we pick up Etty Hillesum's diaries and letters today, we know from the outset what will come at their tragic end. And yet, to start reading them is to be jolted into fr esh surprise. All the writings she left behind were composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, but they resist being read primarily in its dark light. Rather, their abiding interest lies in the light-filled mind that pervades them and in the astonishing internal journey they chart. The trajectory of that journey echoes classical accounts of spiritual transformation; but Etty's pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual young woman-it was idiosyncratic, individual, and recognizably modern. Aside from a fe w fu ndamental fa cts about her fa mily-she came from an assimilated Jewish background-we know little about her early history, her childhood temperament, or the fo r­ mative episodes of her youth. She comes to us unmediated. But an encounter with her is instantly and compellingly direct. Etty wanted, aspired to be a writer, and she has a writer's knack for conveying herself onto the page with fluent immediacy, fo r drawing us right into her personal world. From the firstentr ies she comes across as a wonderfully vivid personality: charming, unaffected, with funds of warmth and an eager appetite fo r pleasure. She enjoyed the quotidian details of her life and de- { vii J scribes them with relish: the motley household in which she lived, the Russian lessons she gave, the walks she took through her beloved Amsterdam. On one level, then, a young woman of her time: emancipated, educated, urbane, with professional am­ bitions and a penchant fo r bohemian lifestyles. She had a variety of lovers, intimates, and a circle of interesting fr iends. She was a percipient observer, aware of the issues and movements of her time: socialism, fa scism, anti-Semitism. Even her passing re­ marks about such things show penetrating and distilled insight. But capable though she was of extroversion and engagement, her most intense need, and gift, was fo r the inner life. Her essential existence, she often reminded herself, took place in the privacy of self-reflection,at a desk covered with pinecones, vases of flowers, and books. The private Etty Hillesum who revealed herself in her diary was impassioned, erotically volatile, restless, and often tor­ mented. In the early entries, she repeatedly records swings from elation to brooding melancholy, from embracing excitement to depressed withdrawal, from expansive flightsof fantasy to beset­ ting self-doubt. She could easily be seen as one of the scores of over-sensitive, slightly neurasthenic young women from a culti­ vated and coddling milieu. Such categories are not inappropriate; Etty herself thought in psychological terms. But they are also insufficient, fo r Etty had the kind of genius fo r introspection that converts symptoms into significance and joins self-examination to philosophical investi­ gation. The diary is a continuous, animated dialogue with her­ self, a constant drive toward her own truth. She knew how to fo llow subtle movements of her feelings and how to question and criticize herself. Even in states of extreme distress, she re­ tained an unerring sense of emotional proportion, a kind of perfect inward pitch. She recognized her own tendencies to fa lse exaltation and self-denigration, her attraction to grandiose ideas, and her possessive greed; she upbraided herself fo r them, and [ viii } countered them with insistence on moderation, and on the pre­ cise, modest word. "My protracted headaches: so much masoch­ ism; my abundant compassion: so much self-gratification," she wrote severely. Etty knew she had to master her own excesses and conflicts, and to "give some fo rm to the chaos" inside her. Her chosen guide in this endeavor was Julius Spier, a Jungian psychoanalyst cum palm reader and general guru. What can we make of the curious, ambiguous relationship between them? By today's standards, aspects of it seem questionable. As part of his therapeutic method, Spier engaged in eroticized tousles with his patients, which were not, apparently, supposed to lead to sexual intercourse. Etty's descriptions of his tantalizing touches and kisses, of the casual liberties he took with admiring female pa­ tients, strike us as highly incorrect, to say the least. Yet, in putting her trust in this strange mentor, Etty was acting in tune with her time. The interwar decades were a period of eclectic psychoana­ lytic experiments, of eccentric adventures in self-exploration. As is so often true with charismatic figures, Spier's virtues may have been discernible only through personal contact. Etty was some­ times perplexed by him; but even after their relationsip was consummated, she never doubted his integrity or his capacity to heal. She thought of him as gentle, good, spiritually complex; and she threw herself into her "work" with him unreservedly. Perhaps Etty's relationship with Spier belonged less in the category of psychotherapy than in a much older tradition of active philosophical teaching. Because she believed in him, Spier became her "task," the person against whom she tested and questioned herself, the occasion of her struggle and growth. Her most arduous battle was with the problem of sexuality in its modern, fe minine variant. Etty was both seduced and riven by her desires, torn between romantic yearnings fo r submergence and the need fo r independence. Through her real and meta­ phorical wrestlings with Spier, she trained herself to check her impulses and restrain the impetuousness of her needs. She dis- { i X} covered that she could exist on her own without losing herself in another, and fe el affection without making proprietorial claims. In other words, she learned the kind of love that is closer to selflessagape than to urgent eros and that combines deep sympa­ thy with calm detachment. The process of change is always mysterious, but in the middle stages of Etty's diary, it becomes almost palpable. Her writing becomes suffused with simpler, more serious tones. As both her tenderness and detachment deepened, she reported a new seren­ ity, a sense of identity that remained steadily itself. Increasingly, her writing points toward that border where attentiveness to subjectivity meets contemplation, where emotional intuition converges with moral thought. In all of this, Etty had the courage to fo llow the thread of her own experience-and that thread took her fu rther still, in more unexpected and radical directions. Etty never lost her mercurial responsiveness, even as she began to describe states we are accus­ tomed to identify as religious: gratitude fo r all that was given to her, a profound self-acceptance and acceptance of others, and a conviction, not of any specific set of meanings, but of meaning­ fulness itself-of the inward beauty and rightness of life. By winding her way through her own psyche to the point' of self­ reconciliation, she had come to a place where she could fe el the hidden harmony of the world. Of course Etty was making her later journal entries as the world was being torn apart by war, as the atmosphere fo r Dutch Jews turned daily more dangerous, as her friends were being deported and killed.

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