Etty Hillesum Zine by Liz Fields

Etty Hillesum

About Etty

A Dutch writer, Hillesum grew up in a secular Jewish household with two brothers and her parents. Both brothers were geniuses but both suffered from severe mental illnesses. Hillesum herself often wrote about her struggles with depression and a certain lacking in her life.

Etty lived in constant search. A highly educated woman with a beautiful ability to write, she questioned everything and felt all things deeply.

In her writings, she tells about her experiences of fighting against what society tells her to be as a woman, her family, lovers that she has, and the intense yearnings of her heart.

Most famous for her diaries, Hillesum was alive during the German occupation in the Netherlands- in fact, she started her diary, after the first full year of their occupation. She took a job as a part of the Jewish Security Council, but as most took this as a means to protect themselves from the Nazi’s, she took it as a means of helping her community. She volunteered to go with her family to Westerbrook, a ghetto in which people waited before being shipped off to Auschwitz. One can read more in depth about her life in her book, Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted life.

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The Westerbrook Camp

The Significance of Ms. Hillesum In Westerbrook she stayed and was regarded as a light to the people in the community. She had a deep understanding of what it meant to live, even in the most dire of circumstances. Through different occurrences of her life and different people she had encountered- namely psychotherapist Julius Spier, she entered into a deep relationship with God, or as she wrote: “the ultimate mystery.” Whatever she did in life, she could not hate and vowed to herself that she never would. She believed that to find truth, one must look inside themselves and listen to “the inner murmurs of their soul.” One must constantly be in inner dialogue and have moments of reflection and meditation. That is how people change, how people become more themselves, how people enter into a relationship with this ultimate mystery. Her understanding of God was deep, authentic, and radical.

The way she lived reflected that. Through all of her suffering she was able to find joy. She never denied herself of what she wanted in life. She was not this perfect person but rather someone plagued with desires, questions, and yearnings. She never stopped searching. The way she lived life was seemingly impossible. It is a rarity to find somebody who lives as intensely as she but is still able to live in constant gratitude and pure joy.

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Snippets from Etty’s Diary “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

“Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”

“I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.”

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“I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.”

“I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream...and life continues...”

“Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields-there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze--and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them. ”

The Monument Etty’s monument is more on the more traditional side with an interactive element. It shows her sitting at her desk writing with books and writings on her side. There is also one of her quotes on the podium in which she sits and the sides are lined with barbed wire to symbolize her time in Westerbrook. They do not go as high and the front is open to show that even though her body was imprisoned in the camp, her spirit was free. The back goes up a bit more to leave space for the interactive element and to point towards the heavens since her spirituality was so important to her. The back says her name and leaves space people to write their own entries or questions about life and do the interior work that Etty so often wrote about. There will also be a plaque with instructions on what to do and a bit more about Etty’s life.

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Etty at Fenwick Library

Etty was, first and foremost, a writer.

Because of her love for literature and the beauty she conveyed through her words, I think she would fit best near Fenwick because it is a central location on campus and people will be able to see and visit her monument before and after studying or visiting the library.

Etty in Bryant Park

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If I were to put this monument anywhere in the world, I think I would put her in Bryant Park. Like Etty, the park is an exuberant and peaceful place in which New Yorkers can go to take a moment to breathe in the busy city.

Similar to the on-campus location, the New York Public Library is right in front of the park, so her love for writing is honored in that way as well.

“We left the camp singing...”

- Etty’s final letter, tossed out of the window of the train taking her to Auschwitz