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Dear Etty

Etty Hillesum endures as a troubling, luminous figure because her spiritual resistance to evil was lived not as abstraction but as a young woman’s radical, intimate, and ultimately fatal discipline of conscience.

In deze onzekere en bloeddorstige tijd is de zachte, onthechte blik van Etty Hillesum welkomer dan ooit

De Groene Amsterdammer · By Marja Pruis · 16 June 2026 · read the original in Dutch →

Beste Etty.

Dear Etty.

Nog maar vorige maand schreven lezers van de Volkskrant op uitnodiging van schrijfster Gerda Blees brieven aan de in 1943 vermoorde Etty Hillesum alsof ze een intieme vriendin was.

Only last month, readers of de Volkskrant, at the invitation of the writer Gerda Blees, wrote letters to Etty Hillesum, murdered in 1943, as though she were an intimate friend.

Dearest Etty.

For Blees herself, Hillesum is “a kind of superhero of the spirit.” When she cannot sleep, she takes An Interrupted Life from her bedside table. “I don’t ask myself what she would have done, but what she would have thought, or how she would have looked.”

Even if we are not bowed down beneath the direct terror she faced, we might learn something from her about holding our ground. Perhaps even about being a good person. That was the idea behind the Etty Hillesum Writing Competition conceived by Blees. A passage from Hillesum’s diary of February 1942 served as inspiration.

At the time she is studying Slavic languages at the University of Amsterdam and runs into a fellow student. He tells her about a mutual acquaintance who has been tortured to death by the Germans. “The beasts, they destroyed him.” He wondered aloud: “What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” To which she replied, as she writes in her diary: “Human beings, yes, human beings, but remember that you are one of them too.” With some self-mockery she notes that she went on “preaching” to this “stubborn, morose” friend with his large purple winter hands. “That rottenness in others is in us too,” she teaches him. “And I really see no other solution than to turn inward to your own center and there to root out all that rottenness.”

A beautiful thought, as humanist as it is timeless: how to relate to the rottenness of humanity that also lurks within yourself. A thought almost too beautiful to be true, even a little repellent when you think of the real murderous Nazi practices of those years and what one might set against them. From many other mouths it would sound powerless and gratuitous, irritating and unctuous. But here it is written by someone of whom we know that she did not merely profess her ideas with words but lived them, until she would be murdered in Auschwitz a year and a half later.

Through her diaries and letters we can follow her becoming at close range, from seeker to seer, you might say, from despairing woman to fighter. A kind of Joan of Arc, but without a sword, inspired by visions and ending at the stake. Five centuries later she was canonized by the pope. That has not quite happened to Hillesum, but in non-papal circles she has indeed acquired the status of a saint.

When her diaries first appeared in compiled form in 1981 under the title An Interrupted Life, NRC columnist J.L. Heldring praised her honesty, her intelligence, her spontaneity, her humor, and at once proclaimed her “the saint of Museumplein.” Hillesum did not in fact live directly on Museumplein, but she looked out over it from behind the desk in her room on Gabriël Metsustraat. The tree directly in her line of sight seemed to her, as the patient witness of her life, a dream biographer.

Funny, that fantasy at twenty-seven of a biographer, tree or no tree. Perhaps because from childhood she had also dreamed of becoming a great writer. She herself made sure to place her diaries in safekeeping in time, with someone she could suspect would have the right connections to get them published. But surely she could not have dreamed that their publication would one day be celebrated in the Concertgebouw on that same Museumplein, albeit only in the early 1980s. Closer to the war, people found her diaries too philosophical, and not concrete enough about the war years.

In the nearly five decades that have passed since the first revelation of her thought, and since she was almost immediately translated worldwide, attention to her has in no way slackened. On the contrary, Etty Hillesum seems more present than ever, as though this uncertain and bloodthirsty age again has a strong need for the detached gaze of a mystic malgré elle. She became a symbol of light and courage.

Think of the writing competition I just mentioned, which drew a broad response, but also of the self-evident way she suddenly appears in a report that journalist Simone Korkus wrote for this magazine in June last year. Netanyahu had begun bombing Iran and the counterattacks had started. “I feel like a repository of precious life,” Korkus wrote, running between home, alarm call, and safe space, trying not to panic.

That phrase about the repository is a reference to a diary passage by Etty Hillesum, quoted by Korkus in full later in the piece: “I feel like the repository of a precious piece of life, with all the responsibility that entails. I feel responsible for the beautiful and great feeling for this life that I have within me, and I must try to steer it undamaged through this time, toward a better time.” Korkus knows whom to invoke when she wants, from the heart, to express her sympathy for the inhabitants of the Middle East, from Israel to Iran, Syria to Gaza and the West Bank. Not for the leaders, not for the politicians, but for the people entangled in “an unimaginable web of hatred, violence, and lawless destruction.”

To this day Hillesum’s life and work form a guide, a source of inspiration, a handhold. As intuitively as she scrawled her words into her notebooks, eight of which were preserved in all, by turns high-flown and prosaic and usually all of this at once, and at first directed more toward her inner world than the outer one, so much power did they prove to contain and to unleash. Two and a half years ago a strong, exhaustive biography appeared, Etty Hillesum: The Story of Her Life, written by Judith Koelemeijer. Studies and exegeses appear on her work: The Collected Works of Diaries and Letters (1941-1943) dates from 2021 and runs to 876 pages; comparisons with Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Seneca; feats of close reading such as the recent warm-blooded A Separate Kind of Courage: Etty Hillesum Now, by the literary scholar Jan Oegema, who had already written inspiritingly about her in A Strange Happiness: The Public Religion around Auschwitz. A person with a mission, he calls her, comparable to Jesus, Gandhi, Francis. Stranger and wilder than Antigone, a second, braver self.

The times are uncertain enough to have ears again for Hillesum’s peace-loving message; perhaps that is how one should see it. This year, too, the Flemish, Polish-born writer and philosopher Alicja Gescinska published Women in Dark Times: Ten Thinkers of Lasting Significance, with which she won the Socrates Cup for the best philosophy book. A good philosopher forces you to look beyond your own ideas, she writes in her introduction. And it is precisely of women philosophers that she wants to know how they maintain themselves in a world dominated by men. Etty Hillesum is one of the ten thinkers, alongside monastic types such as Simone Weil and Edith Stein. Resistance can take many forms, Gescinska concludes on the basis of the choices Hillesum made.

And then this month saw the launch of the six-part television series Etty, by the Israeli filmmaker Hagai Levi, known for series such as In Treatment and The Affair. Years ago he began this project because he had been touched by the “extremely modern, extremely intimate, wonderfully written story of a spiritual journey” that he found in her work, and for the series he placed this story in a kind of timeless present.

Well then! With those three words plus exclamation mark, Etty Hillesum began her diary on March 9, 1941. She continued: “This will be a painful and almost insurmountable moment for me: surrendering the inhibited mind to a silly piece of lined paper.”

How many girls or young women will not have begun their diaries like that, and still do? Hesitantly. Shamefacedly. Burning with the feeling of being exceptional. “The thoughts are sometimes so clear and bright in my head and the feelings so deep, but writing them down, that still won’t come.”

Etty was twenty-seven. Someone, an older man of course, with whom she was becoming enthralled, had advised her to start making notes. After a few sentences she already writes something strikingly shameless. Something intimate, perhaps that is better put. She compares her inhibition about giving things away with the “shyly remaining stuck in the breast” of the last liberating cry during “sexual intercourse.” This, apparently, is what we must immediately know about her: “Erotically I am refined, I would almost say seasoned enough to belong among the good lovers (...).”

She was small and full, a little plump. The surviving photographs show a serene beauty in the manner of Carry van Bruggen, curls, thoughtful profile; the cigarette between her fingers completes a sexy image, but there are also photographs, often group photographs, in which she looks more “ordinary,” a little everyday and elderly. Judith Koelemeijer, her biographer, speaks of “a young, sensual woman.” According to one lover she had breasts like “heavy bunches of grapes.” She was thought awkward and shy, but she was not afraid. In no time at all she was sitting on Julius Spier’s lap.

Julius S., yes, consistently referred to by her as S. in her diary. It is impossible to write about Hillesum without bringing in Spier, this man who had already lived a life as a bank director in Germany and who, in his fifties in Amsterdam, converted to psychochirology, that is, palm reading. A biography of him also appeared this year, incidentally: Julius Spier and the Art of Palm Reading, by the historian Alexandra Nagel.

People write and think about Spier in widely varying ways. He was supposedly a fraud, a charlatan; he had a circle of mostly women around him, somewhat mockingly called the Spier Club. I understand what kind of man this was when I read in Koelemeijer’s biography how, one day in the tram, he suddenly gets a potential follower in his sights.

“Is this the Spui?” he asks the woman or girl opposite him.

Only then to say to her: “You sing very well, but you are not a singer.”

She: “How do you know that? Are you clairvoyant?”Zij: ‘Hoe weet u dat? Bent u helderziend?’

“No, I am a psychochirologist and I can see it in your hands.”‘Nee ik ben psychochiroloog en ik zie het aan uw handen.’

“Can you also see what profession I do practice?”‘Kunt u dan ook zien welk beroep ik wél uitoefen?’

He: “Teacher or librarian.”Hij: ‘Onderwijzeres of bibliothecaresse.’

The woman taught at a domestic science school, and was sold. She also took up her singing again.

Etty experienced her first meeting with Spier in his practice in Amsterdam-Zuid as nothing less than a rebirth. The reason she rang his doorbell, on February 3, 1941, was that a housemate had told her how Spier had read his hands. By then she had already graduated with a law degree and was studying Slavic languages. She was gloomy, suffered from headaches and stomachaches, was afraid of the madness in her family.

Her father Louis, who had grown up in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter around Waterlooplein, was a classicist and headmaster of a grammar school in Deventer. Her mother, Riva, had fled Russia and ended up in Amsterdam in 1907. Etty had two younger brothers, Jaap and Mischa, of whom the latter especially, a gifted pianist, was mentally rather unstable, perhaps schizophrenic. There was a good deal of quarrelling and chaos at home, and many moves. Etty was born in Middelburg, on January 15, 1914. For as long as Etty could remember, an aunt had been locked up in an institution because of her delusions, which made the fear of diseased genes more real.

Her mother in particular was experienced by Etty as a source of interference. Always busy and coercive, always preoccupied with food. Her “little father” withdrew into his study. Ogge nebbisj was his motto: it is what it is. A freethinking figure, who himself changed his name from Levie to Louis. The parents and grandparents were indeed Jewish-rooted, both in Amsterdam and in the Russian shtetl, but with the move to Deventer there were also more and more non-Jewish acquaintances and colleagues.

Only with the arrival of the Germans did Etty become aware again of “her chosen bloodstream.” On January 10, 1941, she had to have herself registered. She reports on it in her diary. “Must children under fifteen be registered too?” she asks the official on duty. “Madam, even if they are an hour old.”

Under religious denomination she fills in: none. She no longer went to the synagogue, had outgrown the Jewish rituals.

At question nine it came down to it. How many “Jewish grandparents” were there? To prevent mistakes with unclearly written numerals, the answer had to be filled in with letters. Four, Etty filled in.

With that her fate was sealed, her biographer writes. She was now officially “full-Jewish.” But what was her fate? And in what way did she gradually accept it, or not?

For the time being Julius Spier claims all the attention. “His transparent pure eyes, his heavy sensual mouth; his bull-like heavy build and the feather-light liberated movements,” she notes on those first diary pages. “The struggle between matter and spirit, which in this fifty-four-year-old man is still in full swing. And it seems as though I am being crushed beneath the weight of that struggle. I am buried beneath that personality and cannot get out from under it (...).”

In her too a struggle is unleashed, one between aversion and desire. Aren’t his teeth false, the eyes gray, the mouth very fleshy? “What do you want with that man, that idler, with that dreadful body and that belly?” a friend would later ask. Etty writes in her diary: “I cursed myself like a farmhand and told myself that I am no longer a hysterical schoolgirl.” But he does something to her, immediately.

“All my life I have had the feeling: if only someone would come along who took me by the hand and involved himself with me; I seem capable and do everything alone, but I would so terribly like to surrender myself.” Dorothea Brooke had her Casaubon, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; Hannah Arendt her Heidegger; Etty Hillesum had Spier. She knows it for certain: such a man, so wise and exalted, from whom she can learn everything and who sees her as no one else does, she will never meet again.

Her palms are enough for him to write a “protocol” of her, to speak “redeeming” words about her depressions, her troubled relationship with her family. Thus he sees that she suppresses her feelings, is too focused on thinking, which gives her those headaches and constantly makes her need to lie down for a moment. He does gymnastics and breathing exercises with her. He teaches her no longer to make demands of her parents, which immediately brings a very great calm. There are wrestling bouts, also part of the treatment. Unprecedented physical reactions are aroused on both sides, often ending on a mattress on the floor. Never on the softer bed, for that domain belongs to Spier’s fiancée in London, almost thirty years his junior.

Become who you are: that was his adage. Of the Germans he said: but surely they are not all criminals. The only answer to hatred, in his view, was not hating. That attitude of reconciliation and acceptance immediately drew her enormously to him. Spier taught her to read the Bible. He activated her writing by encouraging her to keep a diary. In January 1942 she writes a long letter to Spier, a Yearly Confession, her first sample of a writer in the making. The letter was written, but unfortunately not preserved.

Until mid-June of that year she is too full of Spier to have an eye for what is happening in her occupied city, or so it seems when you read her diary. She goes through all the phases of possessiveness and jealousy; she wants to be the number-one woman of the Spier group. A complicating factor is that she rents a room from Han Wegerif, an older widower with a grown son living at home, with whom, without any of her friends knowing it, she has had a relationship for years. In the corridors this amiable and quiet man with a pipe is also called “Pa Han,” including by her. “Surely honesty does not consist in telling each other everything,” she swore to her feeling of guilt toward him in her diary. If she did reveal something of herself, she felt afterward fragmented and sad.

Is Etty, who for me by now too is sufficiently contained in her first name, as Renate Rubinstein became “Renate” to all and sundry, someone who consciously withholds things from those around her? Or is she simply a young woman who refuses to be pinned down? Who lives several lives alongside one another, as people do? And of whom, therefore, divergent testimonies have also come down to us.

She was said to be a cheerful and enjoyable person, but others saw first and foremost someone deathly shy and uncertain. She had a roguish glance that betrayed how well she knew what she had to offer as a lover. She had a swaying, slow way of walking. She had eczema on her arms, which looked a little dirty. Dangerous woman, judged one friend. Pushy and nerve-racking. Another: she did not go to bed with every man, but she did with every second man. How strangely she is behaving, her friends thought when she began talking more and more often about God. That airy idealism, surely that did not suit her at all?

Perhaps to grasp Etty fully you have to be a film director, someone who can make her into a multidimensional character. Someone struck in the midst of life, in whom everything is happening at once, who is young, impressionable, impulsive, high-flown, searching, radical. In the television series Etty we see a contemporary young woman cycling through Amsterdam, with a Freitag bag on her back that I also own. It is and is not the past; the houses in Zuid that she enters are old-fashioned, the landline telephones, the curtains. The diary texts are partly delivered by voice-over, solemn and intense, high-flown, certainly in contrast with the “are you okay?” with which friends look worriedly into each other’s eyes. In the street there is the tinny sound of permanent surveillance as we know it from The Handmaid’s Tale. The city is occupied, there are signs, but it becomes clear only slowly that this is indeed the historical situation. The soldiers wear caps and speak German. A Jewish Council is seated on the canal, where the desperate jostle one another, hoping for exemption from deportation.

The intimacy of the diary is difficult to turn into scenes; sometimes, for instance when Spier draws his ink roller over Etty’s palms, it is as though a picture book has been brought to life. Oh, so that is how the wolf lay waiting for Little Red Riding Hood.

At other moments more metaphorical images have been sought for ever-tightening regulations. A growing column of cyclists moves through the city to surrender their bicycles collectively somewhere by the IJ. Before everyone’s eyes they are mechanically compressed onto a great scrap heap. Voice-over: “Everything I lose is one thing fewer to lose.”

The growing crisis of conscience of a “real” human being, whom you see dancing, crying, showering, fighting, comes closest above all when Etty’s texts are given free rein, without the noise of a reenacted reality. A friend who works for the Dutch Broadcasting Service has an illegal recording studio in the basement of his house, where she speaks her diaries into a recorder. An ingeniously devised situation, because the friend can ask her questions, especially when the complicated concept of God makes its entrance into her diary.

“God, I need a sign,” Etty writes when a summons for deportation has arrived for her. Can she obtain an exceptional position through a job with the Jewish Council? Can she help others by means of doctors’ statements? “Without us it would all have been even worse,” someone from the Jewish Council tells her. She herself discovers: “It is one great filthy mess.” And then it is a matter of waiting for the sign. “That which is inside me must take form and guide me. What must I do?”

“Aha,” says the friend opposite her in the recording studio. “So it is a God after all.”

“Yes,” she says then. “But it is not quite what you think. I don’t know whether I want to share it; it is too intimate. I want to teach people to bear their suffering better.”

Within a short time Etty Hillesum undergoes an enormous development. Partly under Spier’s influence, partly under the influence of what she reads, especially Rilke, and partly prompted by the exceptional circumstances to which she must find a way to relate. In June 1941, in a reprisal action, three hundred Jewish boys in her neighborhood are arrested and taken to Mauthausen. In her diary she begins to articulate her despair about terror, concentration camps, powerlessness; gradually new concepts come to the fore. Weltinnenraum, for example, as the space she inwardly clears for something she will begin to call God, or “the heavens within me.” Instead of rising up against the occupier, as friends of hers do, she wants in the deepest part of her thoughts to find the good.

More and more strongly she experiences Jewish solidarity in fate. “We Jews.” She is part of the people doomed to destruction; she wants to bear that fate, that Massenschicksal. On behalf of the Jewish Council she goes voluntarily to the transit camp Westerbork, to stand by her people. At first at intervals of weeks, during which she can recover again in Amsterdam; finally to remain there, and to join her parents and youngest brother. There she sees the sun shine, the lupines bloom, and mass murder take place.

Some of her “contemporaries,” that is, writers, columnists, and journalists in the early 1980s, received An Interrupted Life with skepticism. I myself was then taking the course in textual editing as part of my Dutch studies, and Hillesum’s handwriting was a case study. It did not say “in a thousand sweet arms” at all, as had long been thought, but “in a thousand soft arms.” In one way or another disenchantment was the mission; I placed Hillesum in an esoteric corner, if only because I was given her book by the same friend who had earlier given me the collected speeches of Krishnamurti.

Karel van het Reve was then the true semi-saint. When I now reread what he wrote about her at the time, namely that her diary had a strongly “schoolgirl” character, and that Spier got her into his bed by way of “a cloud of profound little talks,” I find him feeble and lazy. Only about his conclusion am I still thinking: “But perhaps it is true that all genuine life of the soul has something schoolgirlish about it, and that without that schoolgirl element there is no life of the soul, only stupefaction.”

It is true that the term “schoolgirl” is deployed disparagingly, but the fact that she was young and female seems to me to be of importance in sensing Etty’s calling and explaining her lasting appeal. In the aforementioned book by Alicja Gescinska, the parallels between her and Simone Weil are striking: a spiritual thinker who internalized the suffering of the world to such an extent that she too succumbed to it at a young age.

Of course it was the Nazis to whom Etty Hillesum succumbed, but the great question that arises whenever she is discussed is: why did she so much want to accept the fate of her suffering fellow human beings? The image has arisen that she more or less singingly stepped onto the train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, after for months gently massaging her fellow camp inmates toward deportation. And perhaps more than that. “I have broken my body like bread and distributed it among the men,” she wrote. “Why not, after all; they were hungry and had gone without for so long.”

Gerhard Durlacher, then fourteen years old, who survived Auschwitz and became a writer after the war, said that his father was driven to distraction by her consolations. “Most of us closed ourselves off in order to survive,” he said, “and when that defensive shield was then suddenly broken down by an emotional conversation, you no longer knew what to do.”

From Westerbork Etty wrote two long circular letters, which during the war were illegally printed under a veiled title, and were republished by Bert Bakker in 1962. Marga Minco experienced the publication as “a revelation.” She was deeply impressed by Etty’s lucid style, her sharp observations of people and conditions in the camp, and the almost superhuman solidarity with her fellow sufferers. Biographer Judith Koelemeijer, too, sees especially in these letters the writer Etty might have grown into, with her soft, attentive gaze for people and situations.

On the final pages of her biography, the various scenarios of the end of Etty’s life are meticulously reviewed. Perhaps this, perhaps that; we do not know. Was she strong enough? Resourceful enough? Even her date of death is an administrative one, which she shares with half of the 987 people who were put on transport on September 7, 1943. She was in wagon twelve, her parents and brother in wagon one. Eyewitnesses saw her going toward the train laughing and talking. She had her little Bibles with her, her Russian grammar and her Tolstoy, not forgetting her diary. What could happen to her?

In the Public Intellectuals series, an evening on Etty Hillesum will take place at De Balie in Amsterdam on Tuesday, June 23, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and information