One of the world's greatest Diarists

How I came across entries by Etty Hillesum, found in a charity shop years ago. For details of her life and death at the hands of the Nazis see this Wikipedia article

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For 

This book shows selected extracts across the years

The early entries chronicle her life as a Jew in Holland who falls in love with  Julius Spier, her analyst. He is German

I wanted to learn more, and discovered that her complete works have been published, in a parallel text, Dutch to English, in two volumes:

When she realized that her fellow Jews were being held at Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, she volunteered to visit and stay there, for increasing lengths of time, to share her new ability to love everyone and everything, a transformation inspired by her friend and lover Julius. In the end the Nazis, realizing how skilled she had become in calming the often vulnerable internees, didn't allow her out any more, she could not smuggle out diary entries. Instead she wrote numerous letters to concerned relatives of the inmates, and to her own friends. These were collected and published as part of the Complete Works.

Etty was fully aware of her own fate. Most of the inmates thought they were being interned during the Nazi occupation, but she had seen clearly that they would end up on the one-way cattle-trucks  to Auschwitz.

Her last recorded words:

Sitting on her backpack in an overcrowded railway carriage, Etty Hillesum wrote this postcard to her friend Christine who lived in Deventer. 'We have left the camp singing…' she scribbled. Then she threw the card from the train – her last sign of life