girls who were now being rounded up. She was determined not to hate her oppressors, not to relieve her fear through hatred. She lectured herself to never hate the wickedness of others but to first hate the evil within herself.
For the dying, there are no trivial pleasures. As the Nazis tightened their grip on her neighborhood, Hillesum began to appreciate every lovely blouse, every scented bar of soap. She confronted death directly and assumed her own destruction was imminent, and found that by dropping her evasive attitude toward death, by admitting it into her life, that she could enlarge and enrich her life.
Hillesum could have led her family into hiding. Of the twenty-five thousand Dutch Jews who did, roughly eighteen thousand survived the war. (Anne Frank was an obvious exception.) But she resisted pleas to do that. Her biographer, Patrick Woodhouse, argues that there were three reasons for this. First was her sense of solidarity. She belonged to the whole Jewish people and felt she should live a life of connection with her people. If others had to go to the camps, she was not interested in saving herself. Second, she associated hiding with fear and did not want to live a life of fear. Third, she began to feel a sense of commitment, of vocation. She had come to understand her gifts, and to feel that her gifts could be used in service of the Jews of her country as they waited for deportation.
She went to work at the Jewish Council. This was an organization set up under the Nazis to look after the Jewish population. The Nazis gave the orders, and the council, staffed by Jews, decided how to fulfill them. The Jews who founded it worked under the misapprehension that they could mitigate the worst of the genocide.
In June 1943, Etty volunteered to work at Westerbork, a transit camp where one hundred thousand Dutch Jews were held before being shipped east to Auschwitz and other extermination centers. The writings we have from her at this stage are in the form of letters home, not diaries, so the tone is a bit less personal. But that’s also because she had begun to transcend herself. “It is just as if everything that happens here and that is still to happen were somehow discounted inside me. As if I had been through it already and was now helping to build a new and different society.”
Much of her letter writing consists of descriptions of the people she is caring for in the camp, the old who come bewildered and lost, the children who don’t understand. She felt especially sad for those who were formerly rich and famous: “Their armor of position, esteem and property has collapsed, and now they stand in the last shreds of their humanity.”
Sometimes she worked in the punishment barracks serving as messenger between those who had been sentenced to hard labor and their family members in the rest of the camp. Otherwise, her job was to walk around the camp and do whatever it was that needed doing, caring for the sick, helping people send telegrams back home. She was given free access to the four hospital barracks and spent her days moving from bed to bed. The other inmates in the camp describe her, in their own letters home, as radiant and full of warmth. By this point there was a calm and solidity to her writing that was entirely absent before she had taken up her great moral task. Some go to pieces in the face of calamity, or turn desperate, but Hillesum became more mature and deeper. “There are many miracles in a human life,” she wrote to one friend. “My own is one long sequence of inner miracles.”
The rhythm of life in the camp was governed by the train schedule. Each week a train would arrive to take a certain number of prisoners to their deaths, and just prior to its arrival a list would be published of those condemned to go. Hillesum’s letters are filled with descriptions of those sentenced to get on the train. She writes of “the ash-grey freckled face of a colleague. She is squatting beside the bed of a dying woman who has swallowed some poison and who happens to be her mother.”
Her letters at this point often contain bursts of an inner hopefulness.
The misery here is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me,