Etty Hillesum
By Roland Ashby
“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history”, said Caribbean Poet Derek Walcott. I would go further: the fate of humanity must be to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
But tell that, I hear you protest, to the Palestinian and Israeli families whose loved ones, particularly children, were brutally slain in the recent bombings.
Tell it to those fighting desperately to free themselves from the yoke of oppression in Myanmar and Hong Kong.
Tell it to First Nations Peoples in the Americas and Australia, and to all those whose lands were stolen, people massacred, and ways of life eradicated by European invaders.
Tell it to the Jews slaughtered in their millions in Nazi concentration camps.
But amidst this tragic litany of lament another faint voice can be heard: The voice of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943.
Despite the horrors of life in a concentration camp, she speaks of God “ripening” within her, to the point, author Robert Ellsberg says, “She felt one must hold fast to what endures – the encounter with God at the depths of one’s own soul and in other people”.
Ellsberg continues: “In the face of her impending death, she endeavoured to bear witness to the inviolable power of love and to reconcile her keen sensitivity to human suffering with her appreciation for the beauty and meaning of existence ... This affirmation of the value and meaning of life in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary became her guiding principle. In the midst of suffering and injustice, she believed, the effort to preserve in one’s heart a spirit of love and forgiveness was the greatest task any person could perform.”
“You cannot help us”, Etty writes to God in her journal, “We must help You to help ourselves. That is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.”
She adds: “There must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?”
“Ultimately,” she concluded, “we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
It’s not difficult to understand why people become consumed with hate in our world. Many are justified in becoming so. But, as Etty came to understand, if we fail to recognise and hold fast to “the little piece of God” in us, the darkness will triumph.