"The sky within me"

Etty Hillesum's warnings and reminders

Hi everyone. It has been a minute since my last note; inspiration has been hard to find these days. But I read an incredible book last week that I wanted to share — unfortunately, it is a fitting read for our moment, full of warnings at the same time as reminders of our human capacity for hope.

Quickly though before I get to that, I want to announce one new offering: A Somatic Grief Writing Workshop this spring. Join me and my friend and brilliant acting/performance teacher Justine Wolf Williams on May 11th in Brooklyn for a single session in-person workshop where we will explore a combination of movement and creative writing exercises as a means for working through grief of any kind. Please click here for more info and to sign up!

And now to the post:

The book

I think of myself generally as well-read in Holocaust literature; many of you perhaps know that my father was a survivor, who spent four years in the Czech concentration camp Thereisenstadt (or Terezin) between the ages of 7-11. Because of this legacy I have always been fascinated by the Holocaust, probably more so than the average Jewish American girl. But somehow I had never heard of or read Etty Hillesum, a victim who left behind her diaries from the war as well as a number of letters that she sent from Westerbork, the transit camp in Holland that nearly all Dutch Jews passed through on their way to extermination camps.

I learned about Hillesum from a somewhat random source — Pico Iyer’s recent book Aflame: Learning from Silence, which I read prior. Iyer’s book is loosely about the 30 years that he has spent visiting a monastery in Big Sur, California, and the lessons he has learned from his time dwelling in silence. He brings in Hillesum as he is thinking about a central concern of a monk’s life: how to live with suffering. I was intrigued to go find her work because of the way Iyer wrote of her, her strength seeming to grow as her life became more and more endangered.

Hillesum was twenty-seven at the start of her diary, in 1941, living in Amsterdam and in love with her older palm-reading psychoanalyst, carrying out an affair with the even older widower in whose house she lived. The early pages are fascinating for how they present a very modern-seeming life of a single young woman finding her way, wondering about her path, living her day to day life even as the restrictions on Jews in the city become slowly more and more extreme. Hillesum studied and tutored pupils in Russian, she saw her therapist, she struggled with her ambition to be a writer (lots of passages about frustrations with and curiosities about writing that are touching and relatable) — in short, she lived an ordinary, happy life.

As time moves forward, the outside world inevitably infects her private reality more and more. It is a strange thing, to witness this as a modern reader, aware of all that will come and will follow for her and for the rest of the world. It is also impossible to miss the echoes for our own time, as here in the year 2025 we Americans struggle to go about our daily lives as an onslaught of terrible political realities unfolds every day.

On June 14, 1941, Hillesum writes:

…I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest, and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.

And then later -

Thursday morning [10 November 1941]. Moral fear in every fiber. Complete collapse. Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic.

But even with her moments of despair Hillesum maintains a way of seeing life and other people that never abandons beauty and good. Iyer was right to say that this quality in her seems only to grow as the world around her grows more and more difficult. On February 27 1942, she has an encounter with a Gestapo officer, and writes:

I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask, ‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’ …I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be put on the system that uses such people. What needs eradicating is the evil in man, not man himself.

Something else about this morning: the perception, very strongly borne in, that despite all the suffering and injustice I cannot hate others. All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow human beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.

And on Saturday March 14:

I remember a walk along an Amsterdam canal, one dreamlike summer night, long, long ago. I had visions then of ruined cities. I saw old cities vanish and new cities arise, and I thought to myself, even if the whole of this world is bombed to bits, we shall build a new world, and that one too will pass, and still life will be beautiful, always beautiful.

…We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. Airplanes, streaking down in flames, still have a weird fascination for us—even aesthetically—though we know, deep down, that human beings are being burned alive. As long as that happens, while everything within us does not scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.

This — that line about the airplanes — is so chilling to me. I think of our situation now, airplanes literally and figuratively falling from the sky. We are adapting, aren’t we — against our will, many of us, sure, but nonetheless we are adapting. How do we live our lives *without* adapting, as things change, in the way she warns us about? Is it possible, truly, to not adapt?

A photo of Etty inside the book

Another brilliant passage, from 1942:

Saturday night, 12:30. …Humiliation always involves two. The one who does the humiliating, and the one who allows himself to be humiliated. If the second is missing, that is, if the passive party is immune to humiliation, then the humiliation vanishes into thin air. All that remains are vexatious measures that interfere with daily life but are not humiliations that weigh heavily on the soul. We Jews should remember that. This morning I cycled along the Station Quay enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city and breathing in the fresh, unrationed air. And everywhere signs barring Jews from the path and the open country. But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact. They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated, and oppressed. By our own hatred. By our swagger, which hides our fear. We may of course be sad and depressed by what has been done to us; that is only human and understandable. However: our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves. I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above our head.

Not an easy sentiment to hold on to, clearly. To cultivate “the sky within” us, or even if not to cultivate it, to even remember that it is there. But this idea returns again and again in Hillesum’s writing — she repeatedly describes the two trees outside her window, who become her friends, reminding her of the beauty even in a restricted view. She repeatedly returns to the beauty that she carries inside of her.

On the first of July, 1942:

I can’t take in how beautiful this jasmine is. But there is no need to. It is enough simply to believe in miracles in the twentieth century. And I do, even though the lice will be eating me up in Poland before long.

…I often see visions of poisonous green smoke; I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life.

Here we see how Hillesum was under no delusions about what was happening around her, or about what the creep of restrictions and the death and frequent disappearance of so many she new in Amsterdam meant for her own likely fate. She and others may not have known explicitly about the existence of the gas chambers, but they certainly knew that people were being disappeared into death. Later, in Westerbork, she witnessed train after train loaded with people, and she knew they would not be seen again.

In July of 1942, she got a job with the Jewish Council — in the introduction to the book Jan Gaarlandt describes the Council as formed, as in other occupied countries, “at the instigation of the Germans to mediate between the nazis and the mass of Jews” — and within a couple of weeks she volunteered to serve in the transit camp Westerbork, moreover in the hospital there. As Iyer describes it: “She’s condemned to sleep on metal springs — no mattress or blanket in freezing winter — and to scrounge for food; she’s squeezed into a room that’s six foot by nine, surrounded by the dying. Her life, she writes in the midst of this squalor, is ‘one long sequence of inner miracles.’”

She was able, because of her connection to the Council, to go back to Amsterdam a few times before restrictions forbade it. In her first return visit, which lasted a few months (during which time her therapist died), she wrote:

And with that one shirt in my rucksack I am off to an “unknown destination.” That’s what they call it. But wherever I go, won’t there be the same earth under my roving feet and the same sky with now the moon and now the sun, not to mention all the stars, above my grateful head? So why speak of an unknown destination?

The diary ends at the conclusion of this trip to Amsterdam — after that, all we have of Hillesum’s writing is a collection of letters that she sent to friends from Westerbork. Have you ever read letters sent from a concentration camp? I don’t think I ever had. There is something very different and especially chilling about reading about such a place from someone writing within it, the pen moving at the very moment that the details are unfolding around her. She describes at length what she sees. Before long, her parents and one of her brothers arrive, and Hillesum is caught in a cycle of weekly terror as she tries to prevent them, using her Council connections, from being on the ever-present transport list.

And even as her previous life recedes, as she loses her special privilege, as food becomes more and more scarce, as she witnesses countless deaths and unbearable squalor, she somehow holds onto that “inner sky.”

…People sometimes say, “You must try to make the best of things.” I find this such a feeble thing to say. Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the same time. The two are in balance, everywhere and always. I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is. Every situation, however miserable, is complete in itself and contains the good as well as the bad.

To write this from within a concentration camp! It boggles the mind.

I don’t want to draw too many overt lines of comparison here between Hillesum’s reality and the reality of America in 2025. I fear those comparisons, and I want to believe that no matter the authoritarian playbook we are living inside, we have learned lessons from the past. I want to believe this very much. But reading this book at this moment was chilling not only for the story on its pages.

From Westerbork, Hillesum wrote:

…It is not easy –and no doubt less easy for us Jews than for anyone else—yet if we have nothing to offer a desolate postwar world but our bodies saved at any cost, if we fail to draw new meaning from the deep wells of our distress and despair, then it will not be enough. New thoughts will have to radiate outward from the camps themselves, new insights, spreading lucidity, will have to cross the barbed wire enclosing us and join with the insights that people outside will have to earn just as bloodily, in circumstances that are slowly becoming almost as difficult. And perhaps, on the common basis of an honest search for some way to understand these dark events, wrecked lives may yet take a tentative step forward.

Can we say we have, eight decades later, thought these new thoughts, assimilated these new insights? Can we say we have crossed the barbed wire and joined with the insights others have earned just as bloodily? “On the common basis of an honest search for some way to understand these dark events” — where is that common basis, where is that honest search?

In Sepember 1943 Etty Hillesum was deported with her parents and her brother to Auschwitz. A few days after her train passed out of Westerbork, farmers found a postcard that she had thrown out of the window; she was writing even as she rode to her death. “I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car,” she wrote.

And: “We left the camp singing.”