After Etty
The room I rent in Amsterdam is up three steep and creaking flights of stairs. Its desk holds an electric kettle, a catalogue of tea bags in a tin, dark rye slices in cellophane, packets of spreadable yellow cheese, two USB ports, and brochures: canal tours, the Heineken Experience, and the Anne Frank House, a place I haven’t found the capacity to witness—too implosive of the heart, her wide smile of teeth still sharp with newness. Anne Frank copied into her diary a sentence by F. de Clercq-Zubli: in a true book the writer writes themselves free. The book in my bag is like that. I’m here for the ghost of its writer, another young and sanguine person who kept a diary during the war and was killed in a Nazi camp.
Esther Hillesum was in her mid-twenties when the war began. After law school, she had started to study psychology and Slavic languages. Hillesum was bright and moody and charming and she dreamt of practicing Jungian therapy, of seeing Russia, her mother’s birthplace, and of becoming a novelist—later, she wrote, when I will really write.
I leave my room to look for her old house. On the Museumplein, tourists are sitting on the pond’s ledge, taking pictures. I am navigating by Hillesum’s description of the view from the home where she boarded: The red and the white tulip bud, inclined toward each other, the noble grand piano, black and mysterious and complicated, a being in itself, and behind the windows the black branches against the light sky and further still the Rijksmuseum. The meander of her sentences is in my notebooks and my mind; I am studying her journals, which read so intimately that her name to me is Etty, as it was to family and friends.
When I was eighteen or nineteen, I read the abridged version of Etty’s journals unevenly, taking eager instruction from her unconventional sexuality, skipping the passages on God and prayer—I’d already strayed from the Islamic and Christian traditions I was raised in—and almost devotionally assimilating her perspectives on writing. Now I am ten years older than Etty was when she died, and writing and sex are still compelling, but I’m no longer averse to contemplating spirituality. Reading the comprehensive edition of her journals and letters, I allow lines to percolate, absorb incongruities, and follow flurries of references. At home, her words and ideas live in me as I do the laundry, or shovel snow, or wait in the line-up at the grocery store. Muslims refer to adherents of Christianity and Judaism as the people of the book, and have their own poetic text, but Etty’s heavy volume is the closest I’ve come to a book I have faith in. I’ve heard others confide, though only rarely, a text of similar significance to them: A Room of One’s Own, Anna Karenina, Beloved.
Etty’s voice is searching and intelligent and sentient, amusing and confiding, and balanced somehow as she reviews her romances and friendships, reads Dostoevsky, wrestles with the pregnancy she doesn’t want, praises an apple tart, jasmine blossoming in an alley, the shape of a lover’s mouth. Etty was after what she called her oerbron, primal source, and affirmed or admonished her own progress with playful sternness, often writing in direct address to that very deepest in me, that for the sake of ease I call God. Etty is obscure and universal—almost no one in my circles know of her, but her journal has been published in eighteen translations. In part because I am not reading one of those, because her words were in my mother tongue, I drink them like milk.
On the eve of the Dutch surrender to the Nazis, Etty was at her desk when she spotted one of her former professors on what is now the Museumplein. His name was Bonger.
That image, that lumbering figure with the head lifted sideways to the smoke clouds in the distance, I will never forget, she wrote. Etty had gone out to speak to him, taking his arm as they walked. She asked what he made of people’s attempts to flee to England, and whether he thought democracy would prevail. It would certainly prevail, he predicted, but its restoration would take several generations. He was a prominent criminologist and a blustering lecturer; now he seemed deflated. He thanked her for walking with him. The next day she visited a friend’s home and heard that Bonger had shot himself perhaps an hour after their encounter.
I’m at the far end of the square. My nerves hum. This has to be the Gabriel Metsustraat, and its houses are few. Nearing their tight row, I find a small plaque beside a door: in this house ETTY HILLESUM wrote her diaries 1941 1942. I place my palm on its red stone. A pulse that is mine but seems embedded in the wall. One floor up, in the window of her old room—where there had been a table with a fringed cloth, Russian grammar exercises, spring crocuses in an old tin, a cup of coffee while there was coffee, Rilke’s works, slit envelopes, where Etty wrote hundreds of pages meant for her alone until she knew that she wouldn’t survive and gave them to friends to publish—looming in that window is the steel range hood of an expensive kitchen.
Etty struggled during visits to her parents’ home: It is depressing. It is tragi-comic, I don’t know what kind of crazy household this is, but a person cannot flourish here. In a 1931 family portrait, her father Louis is pulled back in his chair as if in silent opposition to the scene. Etty’s mother, Rebecca, who fled Russia after a pogrom, appears formidable and tense. The youngest child, Mischa, brings them together, one arm around his mother and the other on his father’s knee. Middle brother Jaap is in the background in small glasses and a suit. Etty, in a flowing dress, gives the camera a pensive, scrutinizing look. All her portraits seem to fuse an inwardness with an awareness of performance.
Jaap studied medicine in Amsterdam during the same years Etty was there, and Mischa, who lived with their parents, was a virtuosic pianist and composer. Both were hospitalized at various times for psychiatric conditions, and Etty herself had recurrent depressions, exhaustions, and migraines. In 1941, a friend convinced her to visit the psychochirologist Julius Spier.
Spier was Jewish and a refugee from early Nazism in Berlin. He was fifty-four years old, divorced, and the father of two grown children. After a business career, he had devoted himself to psychology and studied in Zurich with Carl Jung. He had a fiancée in London.
At his sessions, Spier would invite his students and followers to observe him as he read the palms of a volunteer subject. In Etty’s hands, he saw philosophical and intuitive gifts. Spier’s techniques were at odds with the ethics of psychotherapy. At Etty’s first private consultation, for example, he wrestled her into submission in order to measure her physical powers. During the session that followed, he suggested that she give him a little friendship kiss, and at a subsequent one asked, Did you think of me this week? To be honest, I thought of you a great deal.
Etty soon became Spier’s friend, student, secretary, and lover. He kept a number of other female admirers close. Etty was sexually adventurous. She explored making love with Spier and a friend at the same time, and prior to and throughout her involvement with him, also enjoyed a relationship with the landlord at her boarding house, the widower Han Wegerif.
As a teenager, I stared at Spier’s photograph and couldn’t understand Etty’s passion. On this second reading, I feel pulled between concern for her susceptibility to his exploitation and envy at the depth of their contact. We often only realize belatedly that someone with power took advantage of us, and Etty never had that longer retrospect. During the two and a half years of her writings, Spier appears first as a figure of infatuation, then a transformative companion, and after his death from lung disease, a presence Etty recalls with love.
The journals began as homework that Spier assigned. Hanneke Starreveld, a friend of Etty’s, said he encouraged all his clients to keep a notebook to express the innermost material that could be converted into words. Etty started hers a month after meeting him, reluctantly, in writing that her friends would later find laborious to decipher: Great inhibitions, I don’t dare to give things away, to let them flow out of me freely, and yet will have to, should I wish in due course to bring life to a reasonable and satisfactory end.
On the Waterlooplein, while waiting for the Jewish Historical Museum to open, I sip a lukewarm coffee. It is 2017, and if Etty were alive, she would be 103 years old. I imagine her, at the edge of temporal possibility, as a diminutive figure in a belted dress, shoes somewhere between sensible and stylish, watching her city from a wheelchair parked in the sun.
The journals are untouchable under glass; five of the nine found notebooks, thin and spiral-bound, with stained, worn covers of dull blue, gray, maroon, and ochre. One is open, revealing a hurried cursive in which many syllables, and some entire words have been denoted simply as flat lines. A private, almost coded script.
Hanging beside the journals is a roll of faded fabric, printed with a grid of the word Jood in Stars of David, each bordered by a dotted cutting line. That public marking of the Jewish people started in an interval for which the corresponding notebook, number seven, hasn’t been found. Even if it was, the Jodensterren might be absent from its pages: in Etty’s early journals, her attention is inward and otherwise on her immediate community, and the occupation appears only intermittently, like a wind that blows a door open and then shut: a boy has fallen from a plane, a friend needs help preparing his backpack for the night train to incarceration.
For an interval, Etty was protected by unusual freedoms. She worked for a group called the Jewish Council, which meant that while others were receiving their summons for Westerbork concentration camp, she held a pass that allowed her to travel between the camp and home, functioning as a kind of social worker. At Westerbork one night, sleeping women and girls surrounded Etty in three-level bunks. She had heard them lament during the day that they no longer wanted to think or feel, or they would go mad, and Etty prayed: Then let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.
The journals take a gradual turn from introversion to what Etty called the chronicling of her time. But even when early wartime events crossed her mind, she conveyed them with distinctive clarity. For example, I knew that the German occupiers eventually banned Jewish people from riding bicycles. I had absorbed that fact in its plainest form, a class of people without bikes, but it was through Etty’s words that I came to follow it through to its consequences: hours of walking, strengthened muscles, open blisters, exhaustion, shoe soles that wore out and could not be replaced. And when Etty does mention the Star of David badge, after meeting her youngest brother at a streetcar stop, the image is unforgettable: That yellow star fluttered shabbily and with frayed edges on his gray, not too clean, open raincoat, and he waved his heavy suitcase back and forth and had such a cheerful, sweet face: Mischa.
In Amsterdam, Café Wildschut is the starting point for a walking tour of Etty Hillesum’s neighbourhoods. I’m the only registrant. The guide waves over the crowded patio with a shy flourish and says, This is where Etty and her friends celebrated her graduation from the Faculty of Law.
We move through the contemporary city—the pavements alive with beer drinkers gathered around cast-iron tables, and small children riding on the front of their mothers’ bicycles, and construction crews jackhammering at ancient sewers—an almost hallucinating pair, picturing the years when the Apollobuurt was housing for Jewish German refugees, and the synagogue was shut, and a local high school was the headquarters of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst.
The tour concludes with a finely researched revelation; we’re at the Stadionkade, and the guide points out a bench. This is where Etty Hillesum and Julius Spier would have sat together, he tells me—he has checked the city archives for the age of the bench and the absence of other seating there in the 1940s.
I sit in that phantom space alone as the warmth evaporates from the day. Time curls like incense smoke. Two ducks swim along a canal that is lined with docked houseboats. The neighbourhood seems prosperous and calm. I can sense that history has already shifted its weight since I was a child.
Anyone over forty had been alive during the war then. My older cousins were still subject to conscription, and my mother and aunts and uncles stored big sacks of potatoes, carrots, and onions under the stairs. War is what we often played out in the streets. We chose allied countries on both sides; no one wanted to be Nazis. Occasionally, a car with white plates— German—would pass through our neighbourhood, and we would chase after it. That’s hard to picture now. The witnessed war lives in nursing homes; soon, what happened may still be commemorated, but it will not be recalled.
Westerbork has been, throughout its history, a place of stunning incongruity. It was founded by the Dutch government in 1939 as a refugee camp for Jewish Germans fleeing to the Netherlands; those refugees became inmates when the Nazis took over the following year. After the war, the enclosure was used as a prison for Dutch Nazi collaborators, initially guarded by the remaining Jewish residents. Subsequently, the camp became a training centre for Dutch soldiers sent to repress the independence movement in Indonesia, and finally it was used to house refugee Indonesians who had fought for the colonial army but were then refused Dutch citizenship.
During Etty’s months there, Westerbork was a transit camp for Auschwitz and other extermination sites, and therefore had two irreconcilable purposes. It was meant first of all to prevent panic or mutiny among the detainees, and dispel within the wider Dutch population the rumours of death camps. To this end, there was generally enough to eat. Residents were allowed to send innocuous mail and to receive care packages. There was a school, a synagogue, a theatre, and a hospital equipped to do surgeries. Because many excellent doctors were Jewish, it was among the best hospitals in the country.
At the same time, once a week at midnight, the camp commandant would distribute a list of resident names, up to several thousand, who would be forced within hours to board a train to Poland. Every day, the people in the camp scrambled and negotiated to have themselves and their loved ones placed on other lists of exceptions or deferrals. At any moment the lists that were presumed to be safe could collapse and be added to the transport list. The destination was supposed to be a labour camp, but no one could fail to notice that some transports consisted largely of the sick, the elderly, and the very young.
This is where Etty chose to stay when her travel privileges ran out. Friends begged her to go into hiding instead, even attempting to kidnap her and take her to a rural location. She told them, You don’t understand me, I want to share the fate of my people.
Mischa also turned down a possible means of survival. The Nazis had granted him exceptional status, in recognition of his musical accomplishments, which meant he could be interned with other prominent Jewish people at a rural estate. He declined because his parents were not exempted, and in response the three of them were immediately sent to Westerbork. Etty was already at the camp and wrote to a friend that the day of their arrival was the blackest of her life.
Where was God is a question some people have felt confronted with when considering the Nazi extermination camps and other twentieth century disasters: where was the intervention of the omnipotent being, or where was mercy. In the journals, Etty’s God is not almighty but internal and elusive, vulnerable to getting lost. She writes: This becomes steadily clearer to me, that you cannot help us, but that we have to help you and through that we help ourselves. And this is the only thing that we can save in this time and also the only thing that matters: a piece of you in ourselves, God. Perhaps her answer, later, would have been that God—whom she describes also as the beautiful and immense feeling for this life that I have within me—could be present only while people protected that capacity inside themselves. She wanted that God to exist in the camp.
Etty, along with her parents and Mischa, was on the transport list on September 7, 1943. Her last known correspondence is a postcard that she pushed through an opening in the train car while they were still in the Netherlands. It was found by a farmer and mailed. None of the Hillesums survived the war. Etty was killed at Auschwitz on November 30th, the specific cause of her death unknown.
I am drawn to Etty’s concept of god. I find, as I read her, that a sense of faith, unbidden and amorphous, persists unexpectedly somewhere in me. But the void of her last months, without diaries or letters, disturbs that little pilot light. I can’t know if her theology worked under the worst conditions—and isn’t that required for belief? And then, slowly, listening to the radio news, doing dishes, tucking my child into bed, that expectation starts to unravel. I want something unbreakable, but on this earth, I can’t have it. Dutch poet Lucebert’s famous line, written decades after the war, comes back to me often: everything of value is defenseless. What if god might be flowering or drowning inside of us, on any given afternoon. What if the inner gesture for holding god is similar to how we lift a robin’s fractured eggshell from the grass. What if we sometimes have to breathe god back into each other. And if we die during an interval when god is missing, what if that isn’t failure but circumstance; one for which we deserve to be held.
From Amsterdam, I take an eastbound train. I’ve seen examples of the summons documents for Westerbork, stamped with a date and time, often in the night, to appear at the Centraal Station, and a list of the luggage one was allowed to bring, including one spoon, one mug, and two pairs of socks.
I stop at Deventer, where Etty’s parents lived. In Deventer, Etty wrote, there were grain fields, that I will never forget and where I almost kneeled down, there was the IJssel with the colourful parasol and the straw roof and the patient horses. And then, the sun, that I let in through all pores.
Soon I’m at the IJssel river, and unlike in Amsterdam, where picturing the wartime city means blotting out the crowded, digital present, here the exercise is effortless. The river’s body follows the same curves. Jackdaws and terns sweep over the banks; the air smells of mown grass and mud. A slow barge ploughs a passing furrow in the waves, and church bells ring softly, slowly, rurally.
The Etty Hillesum Centrum is in a former synagogue and Jewish school. Inside the modest space are two permanent exhibits, one on Deventer’s Jewish history and one on Etty’s life and work. A bronze bust, made after her death by a friend who tried to picture Etty at Auschwitz, shows her emaciated hand symbolically holding a pen. A room of paintings depicts Etty’s erotic relationship with Julius Spier. A volunteer explains that the Centrum also educates hundreds of school children annually on xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands, and is a registered reporting centre for victims or witnesses of discrimination.
Hearing that my former country is starting to name racism has both satisfying and melancholy elements: at last, so late—this too has changed since I was a girl. I climb the stairs to the narrow loft with the archive, and settle in with my notebooks. The volunteer brings me coffee and gingerbread.
The range of materials is remarkable—filmed interviews with Etty’s aged friends, the self-published work of a woman who believes herself to have been Etty in a past life, hundreds of popular and scholarly analyses, as well as artistic responses that Etty’s work inspired.
The interview footage both heightens and alters Etty’s reality to me. Here are two of her friends, both presences in the journals: they have grown old, escaped from the bell jar world of the book into reality. Their accents are strikingly upper class, and I am startled to consider that Etty, of the confiding, earthy writing voice, may have sounded like that. My idea of her absorbs new facts: Etty was shy about going to parties alone, she addressed her friends with invented endearments, and they didn’t know of her relationship with her landlord, or of her religious faith.
I go on to Westerbork. The countryside is green and scattered with small villages, but closer to the former camp the landscape turns to heath and pines. Later, the son of a nearby farmer will tell me that his father was able hear the wartime trains at night. If the sound continued in the familiar manner, the train was heading to the city; if it quieted unusually, then it had taken the new bend into the concentration camp.
At the Westerbork museum, over displays of suitcases and shoes, speakers play a recording of Etty’s writings. The camp itself is deeper into the woods, and the trail features an independent exhibit; a scale model of the solar system, in which each step represents approximately 2.5 million kilometres. I do sense a gravitational pull: this place will be the culmination of my search, and I long for it to bring the ghost of Etty closer, and feel the heaviness of nearing the site where a hundred thousand people were imprisoned and sent to their deaths.
The solar system trail ends at the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, a wide, fenced strip of land that contains a row of enormous satellite dishes. The instruments are located here because of the relative absence of cell and radio signals. I pause under the pines to watch the concave instruments, massive and receptive, the air above them shimmering with summer warmth. I wonder what they’ve heard. And then listening, listening everywhere, Etty wrote as instruction to herself, listening to the very ground of things.
The rustic villa of the camp commandant, outside the Westerbork gates, stands enclosed in a glass and steel structure. Sunlight gleams and refracts from the exterior, and is of the present, while the wooden building within, with its flaking green and white paint, seems trapped in an airless past.
The dry grass crunches under my feet. The camp is largely empty, its buildings and facilities dismantled, the old foundations overgrown. I approach what remains of the train that ran through. More than seventy people were forced into each cargo car, sharing one barrel of drinking water and one barrel for excrement. I knew this, but had unthinkingly pictured a modern boxcar. The difference is only a detail, but when I see the two old freight cars of maroon wood, small and low, impossible for seventy people to occupy, the cold wind of the past sweeps through me. The camp’s culture must have been one of desperation, dissociation, and terror.
Etty’s days here started with collecting a thermos from each of her parents, who were in separate barracks, and waiting in line for hot water to bring them tea. Then she checked on Mischa. She consoled patients in the sick barracks and sat by the beds of injured inmates shipped from the prison camps of Amersfoort and Vught. At night she sometimes stood at the registration tables to orient and comfort newly captured families.
In a letter smuggled past the censors, Etty recounts the following:
I sat on a summer night, eating my red cabbage at the edge of that yellow lupine field, that stretched from our food barracks to the delousing barracks, and mused pensively, inspired: ‘One ought to write the Chronicle of Westerbork.’ An older man at my side—like-wise with red cabbage—answered: ‘Yes, but then one would have to be a great poet.’
He is right, one would have to be a great poet, journalistic stories will no longer do.
Etty befriended a journalist, Philip Mechanicus, who was also imprisoned at Westerbork. He would read to her his detailed notes on life in the camp. In their book form, a three-hundred page volume, Mechanicus’ voice is one of eloquent, sardonic resignation, observing people as if he is watching a film. He is a writer using bleak humour because the alternative is collapse. Reading him, I felt steeped in despair, and without Etty’s example I would have believed this to be inevitable in narratives of concentration camps. But her descriptions make me feel something closer to a sense of awe. Etty’s account of a transport night, written to Han Wegerif and other friends in August 1943, makes her journal seem like rehearsal; at Westerbork, she found her material, and gave it brilliant, authentic, and devastating form.
That letter and one other were clandestinely published as a pamphlet during the war, under a disguised title: Three letters from the fine painter Johannes Baptiste van der Pluym (1843-1912). Etty describes the case of a boy who is shocked to appear on the deportation list and, in a moment of bewilderment, hides in a tent. His fellow inmates are sent to hunt for him, on the commandant’s threat to send fifty others to Auschwitz in his place, including his closest friends. The boy is soon found, but then the fifty additional people have to go after all, as a deterrent to hiding. Etty writes of a partially paralysed girl, learning to walk again, who has to get on the train and declines to take a plate, saying she knows that she will die in Poland, and then the Germans will have a plate. She writes of pressing tomato juice to fill bottles for wailing babies. Of a stately old woman whose husband has recently died, remarking that the Germans will not even let her go to the grave beside him. Of the commandant—a man who loved attending performances at the camp’s theatre—unhurriedly riding his bicycle along the train for a final inspection, and of the hands waving family and friends goodbye through the cracks in the wagons, and of the laughter of the armed guards.
Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.
Writing is a translation of our attention, and Etty’s possessed such presence that even within a nightmare she could see a world. When she later wrote to a friend that she still found life in its depths to be wondrously good, she was not speaking from a refusal to acknowledge its horrors, but from an almost incomprehensibly holistic vision.
At the former camp, a tour bus has unloaded. I join their guided walk. People are wearing T-shirts with English slogans, loosened earbuds, blank expressions. I overhear travelers from Israel and Iran.
We do not have to know each other under duress; we only have to behave as groups of strangers do in such a setting, standing not too close together, agreeing that the day is warm. Etty wrote that here, she learned to decipher people, to read life down to its innermost skeleton—but we remain largely inscrutable to one another because although there are refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, and anti-Islamists seated in the Dutch parliament, and white supremacists marching in America, in an immediate sense there’s nothing wrong.
We look at the restored frame of a barracks, and at the old railway tracks, which are now a monument, the ends pulled up so that they curve jaggedly into the sky. Anne Frank and her parents and sister were imprisoned here after their capture, the guide reminds us.
As our tour group dissembles, the next one arrives. I have a sprig of heather that I meant to leave for Etty, to thank her for finding the words. I search for her presence, under the clusters of pine and beech trees, along the sand embankments, through the spectral walls of former barracks, but she seems not to be there at all. Lupins still grow everywhere, past blooming, gone to seed. All I can do is fill my pockets with the dark and rustling pods, to plant when I get home.
Photo by Afonso Azevedo Neves from Unsplash.