Around the time of Spier’s death, Hillesum’s tone in the diary changes. There’s less obsessive self-analysis. She’s more inclined to look outward and to experience the world in a more direct way. “Thinking gets you nowhere,” she wrote in her diary. “It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can’t think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity.”
One day she was sitting in the sun on her family’s stony terrace, gazing at a chestnut tree while listening to the birds. Her first instinct was to capture the scene in words, to explain the sensations of delight she was experiencing.
In other words, I wanted to subject nature, everything to myself. I felt obliged to interpret it. And the quite simple fact is that now I just let it happen to me….As I sat there like that in the sun, I bowed my head unconsciously, as if to take in even more of that new feeling for life. Suddenly I knew deep down how someone can sink impetuously to his knees and find peace there, his face hidden in his folded hands.
For most of her life, she wrote, she had lived in anticipation, as if she were not living her real life, but just some preparation for it. But something shifted inside. She now felt some urgency to be seized by some great ideal she might devote herself to. “Oh God,” she prayed, “take me into Your great hands and turn me into Your instrument.”
She was not religious in any formal sense, but she began to pray. At first, she called herself a “kneeler in training,” because the act of praying felt so vulnerable and uncomfortable. But after a while it seemed as if her body was made for prayer. “Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge….When I write these things down I still feel a little ashamed, as if I were writing about the most intimate of intimate matters.”
In prayer, she wrote, it is
No longer: I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life. It is in these moments—and I am so grateful for them—that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.
In April 1942, the Nazis began their first major roundups of Jews, forcing them to wear the yellow Star of David. Each morning brought more news of arrests, of Jewish families being rounded up and shipped off, of men expelled from their jobs and life shutting down, of rumors about concentration camps and gas chambers. For a time Hillesum simply sought shelter from the storm.
She would walk around her neighborhood and count the casualties. From this house, a father had been taken. From another, two sons. People were being shipped eastward, but none were ever coming back. “The threat grows ever greater, and terror increases from day to day,” she wrote. “I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it as one might into a convent cell.”
But gradually she began to feel called to take some active role in saving her people. “What is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation,” she acknowledged on July 3, 1942. “We can have no more illusions about that. They are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go from there.”
The brutality of Nazism seems to demand a brutal response, and many of us look back and wish there had been more Jewish resistance, more angry determination to go down, if one must go down, fighting. But as the genocide spread, Hillesum did not have that reaction. “I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.”
If the Nazis were trying to extinguish love from the world, she would stand as a force for it. As the world grew heartless, she felt called to enlarge her own heart.
That meant doing what she could to care for her own people, to help the teenage