Remembering Etty

21 April 2006

…Most people here are much worse off than they need to be because they write off longing for friends and family as so many losses in their lives, when they should count the fact that their heart is able to long so hard and to love so much amongst their greatest blessings. —Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) She describes the time of the yellow stars, this strange time in Holland when stars have only just begun to be sewn onto the clothes of the Jews. She and her friends are defiant and yet despairing. They huddle together near the warm stove with their cigarettes and their precious, rationed coffee and sew on their stars. But then, she writes, something changes in her, shifts inside her, as she leaves to go home and sees a young man wheeling crazily round and round the fountain in the square. He has this huge yellow star sewn—bang!—in the middle of his chest. A yellow star circling the water fountain. She speaks of the loneliness of the young. It is the middle of the war and many of their teachers at the university have been sent in front of the firing squad. She feels like the young have now to guide themselves (rudderless) through this terror. She has the sudden impulse to rush up to the professor as he comes out of the lecture theatre into the cold blue night. She puts one of her arms around him, and under avenues of plane trees all emptied of leaves they walk through the freezing air to the skating rink. She writes: … he seemed a broken man and good through and through and he was suddenly as defenceless as a child, almost gentle, and I felt an irresistible need to put my arm around him and lead him like a child … The next day she finds out that he has shot himself. Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman of 28 who, on the advice of her Jungian therapist, began to write a journal. The journal covers the years 1941–1943 until she volunteers to work as part of the Jewish Council in the Dutch camp of Westerbork. This camp served as a kind of holding station for people who were being sent to Poland and concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. From Westerbork she wrote long letters to her friends and family back in Amsterdam. These

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MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

Remembering Etty

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