Etty Hillesum

Front matter

Ria van den Brandt

ETTY HILLESUM

An Introduction to Her Thought

Preface

Chaos Discipline Writing Reading War Resistance Wisdom God Testifying Body Love

Life

Bibliographic Notes

109 119 131

Translator’s Foreword

One of the main tasks a translator has to set himself is to do justice to the style of the original. In Etty Hillesum: An Introduction to Her Thought 1 had to do justice to two styles: the author’s, Ria van den Brandt, and the style of her subject, Etty Hillesum, who is quoted extensively throughout this book.

I hope that I have succeeded in rendering Van den Brandt’s transparent and unadorned text into an equally transparent and unadorned English text. I have also made an effort to be as precise as possible, because Van den Brandt always picks her words carefully.

Where the Hillesum quotes are concerned I was faced with the problem that many English speaking readers of this book are probably familiar with the English edition of the diaries and letters, Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and published in 2002. For the sake of these readers I have tried to stay as close to the existing English translation as I could. However, at times this was impossible.

In accordance with the Anglo-Saxon translation tradition Arnold J. Pomerans (1920-2005) chose above all to produce a readable text, cleaning up the style of the original. He has done an admirable job for believers in this method of translating; his English edition is a wonderful read and the sentences are never awkward but always smooth and flowing. Whenever Pomerans encountered a puzzling sentence he made an honest guess as to what Hillesum could have meant and used that, suddenly making an obscure passage crystal clear. This approach, I’m sure, is pleasant for a lot of readers.

But Pomerans has done more than that. In an effort to either protect Etty Hillesum's legacy against the astonishment or even indignation of the readers, or to protect the readers against the harsh way Etty Hillesum at times expressed herself, he periodically censored the original. A passage about Hillesum's unborn child that is dealt with in this book is a good example of this censorship. In the original diary entry Etty Hille-

10 TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD sum addresses the little embryo in her womb with these words: “I assault you with hot water and gruesome instruments.” Pomerans lets her say, “I assault myself with...” In the original diary Etty Hillesum continued, “I shall fight you patiently and relentlessly until you have dissolved into nothingness.” This too was a bit too cold-blooded for Pomerans, who left out one word, giving the sentence an altogether milder character: “I shall fight patiently and relentlessly until you have dissolved into nothingness.” This, I fear, is only one of many examples. In these instances I have of course followed the original diary. Moreover, because I feel that the inquisitive reader has a right to be informed, I have added explanatory footnotes whenever Van den Brandt deals with a passage where the English edition of Hillesum’s diaries and letters withholds things from the English-speaking reader.

Harry Monkel

Preface

On September 7, 1943, a freight train containing 987 Jews left the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, in northeastern Holland, for Auschwitz. Twenty-nine-year-old Etty Hillesum was in the twelfth car. In the first freight car were her parents, Louis Hillesum and Riva Hillesum- Bernstein, and her younger brother Mischa Hillesum. The Hillesum family did not know exactly where they were going, but they did know that they were going “to the East’, and that “the East’ did not bode well for their future. Etty Hillesum threw some postcards from the train. Apparently she wanted to reassure the friends who stayed behind, for she wrote, “We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be traveling for three days.” And, on a postcard to Maria Tuinzing, the last line reads, “Will you wait for me?” This short sentence later proved to be the last one from her written legacy. Etty Hillesum never returned from her long journey; she was killed in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to the Dutch Red Cross her date of death was November 30, 1943. Her parents also perished in Auschwitz, her brother Mischa in Warschau.

The Brief Life of Etty Hillesum

Esther (Etty) Hillesum’s brief life began on January 15, 1914, in Middelburg, in the southwestern Dutch province of Zeeland. Both of Etty’s parents were Jewish: Levie (Louis) Hillesum (1880-1943) and Riva (Rebecca) Hillesum-Bernstein (1881-1943). Riva was born in Potchev (Russia). In 1907 she went to Amsterdam after a pogrom. She was registered as a Russian teacher and in 1912 she married the classicist Louis Hillesum. After the birth of their eldest child in 1914 the Hillesums had two sons: Jacob (Jaap) Hillesum (1916) and Michael (Mischa) Hillesum (1920). In 1924 they moved to Deventer, in the eastern province of Overyssel, where Louis worked as a classics teacher and deputy principal at the local grammar school. From 1928 to 1940 he was the school’s principal. Being Jewish, Louis lost his job in October 1940, five months after the German invasion, and in 1943 both parents were forced to move to Amsterdam. During the great raid of June 20 and 21, 1943, they were rounded up with their youngest son and deported to Westerbork. By that time Etty was already in the camp. Jaap would later be deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. He did not survive the Holocaust either.

In Deventer the Hillesums were members of the Jewish Congregation until 1937, but they did not take part in Jewish religious life. The Hillesums hardly ever went to the synagogue and they did not keep the Sabbath. Nevertheless daily life in the Hillesum household did have some Jewish traits. According to Frits Grimmelikhuizen, co-founder of the Etty Hillesum Center in Deventer, Riva was in some ways a genuine Yiddish Mama: continually talking about food and expressing her motherly love with typical Jewish dishes such as “chicken soup, chicken legs and hardboiled eggs”.' Yet, contemporaries called the Hillesums’ a chaotic and messy household with a Slavic rather than a Jewish atmosphere. According to the Belgian historian Els Lagrou, Louis Hillesum, who was himself the grandson of a rabbi and had had an orthodox upbringing, had “deliberately broken with the protective but restricted environment of his youth”. His Eastern-European-Jewish wife’s personal history was of an altogether different kind. Lagrou wrote that “from her homeland she brought a full understanding of what it means to be persecuted as a Jew”. She was generally characterized as a difficult woman (boisterous, chaotic, dominant, unbalanced), but this difficult disposition probably had to do with her traumatic past. Though very critical of Riva, Etty realized that life had been no bed of roses for her mother.

' Cfr. Frits Grimmelikhuizen, Frits, Een mens kan hier niet gedijen....: Een geschreven en/of gesproken familiealbum over Etty Hillesum en haar familie in Deventer, Amsterdam en Westerbork, Deventer, Etty Hillesum Center, 2003 (in-house publication; earlier editions in 1999 en 2000).

2 Cfr. Els Lagrou, Etty Hillesum, 1914-1943: Een historisch-biografische studie, Leuven, 1985 (Master’s thesis, Catholic University of Leuven).

Etty Hillesum completed primary school and grammar school in Deventer. She read a great deal, especially in the books from her father’s library. Right from childhood she was interested in her Russian roots. She read Russian literature and wanted to master the language. San van Droogen, one of her fellow pupils at grammar school, remembered her as an “attractive, merry pyknic, funny, intelligent and with a clear, highpitched voice”. At grammar school Etty took an optional Hebrew course and joined a Jewish youth movement for a time. Els Lagrou characterized this movement as a heterogeneous club “without ties with the Jewish Congregation or the Zionist movement”. On June 13, 1932, she graduated and left Deventer to study law in Amsterdam. It is likely, Lagrou proposed, that after earning her BA on June 6, 1935, she took a break from law to concentrate on studying Russian. She may have had lessons from her mother in the same period. In 1937 she returned to the study of law while also teaching Russian to a group of enthusiasts. In the summer of 1939 she received her MA, but she appears to have been completely indifferent about her new degree. She remained very interested in the Russian language and culture, and attended lectures in Amsterdam and in the old university town of Leiden, near The Hague. Her diaries reveal that her future aspirations had nothing to do with her law degree. Rather she saw herself as a psychologist and writer.

In the thirties Etty Hillesum lived in several lodgings in Amsterdam. In the spring of 1937 she moved to the Gabriél Metsustraat near the Rijksmuseum. In exchange for some housekeeping duties she was given a room in the mansion of the accountant and widower Han Wegerif (1879-1946). Han Wegerif, whom Etty called “Pa Han” (Dad Han), became her lover. The other occupants were Wegerif’s son Hans, the German housekeeper Käthe Fransen, the student Bernard Meylink and, from 1942 onwards, the nurse Maria Tuinzing. Until her final departure this house would be Hillesum’s home base. It was here that she first began her diary on March 9, 1941. Keeping a diary had everything to do with her meeting the German-Jewish refugee Julius Spier (1887-1942). Julius Spier was a palm reader and a Jungian trained depth psychologist: a psycho-chirologist. After some hesitation on her part he became her therapist and probably advised her to write down her feelings and thoughts in a diary. Spier’s maxim was “Become who you are!”. The daily writing was meant to help her with the depth psychological process of self-realization. It was Spier’s intention to liberate people from things that hindered their growth, such as “inhibitions, inferiority complexes, false ideas”. One of his unorthodox methods was wrestling. When Etty met the palm reader she must have been ready to organize her mind, and Spier was just the person she needed: “He would bring order to my inner chaos, harness the forces now at loggerheads within me.” In spite of her skepticism Etty could only conclude that “this complete stranger, this S. with his complicated face”, worked miracles for her. She soon fell under the influence of “his magical personality” and felt strongly attracted to him. Extensive parts of her diary addressed her amorous feelings for Spier.

Contrary to her housemates, Etty hardly took an interest in politics, so initially the war seemed distant in her diary. The two dominant spheres of influence in the diary are the atmosphere in the Wegerif household and the spiritual-therapeutic atmosphere of the Spier circle. Etty’s diary reveals that passionate political discussions often took place in Wegerif’s house. On these occasions Etty’s pacifism raised many an eyebrow. When anti-Jewish measures followed one another in the summer of 1942 Etty wrote, “Bernard’s Jewish friend had them ask me after the latest promulgations, ‘Didn’t I now agree that all Germans should be done away with, preferably hung, drawn, and quartered?’” No, Etty did not agree. She was of the opinion that, through daily practice, every person should strive for an attitude of love and sympathy. Her attitude was nurtured and stimulated by the spiritual-therapeutic atmosphere in which she often found herself: the enclave around Spier, or the “Spier Club”. The Spier Club mainly consisted of female pupils, often religiously inspired. They attended his lessons (twice a week), brought on new candidates, and went to his lectures. The inner core of the Spier Club included Julius Spier, the very devout Henny Tideman (1907-1989) or Tide, and from 1941 onwards Etty. According to the postwar testimony of Hanneke Starreveld, who at the time was friends with Julius Spier and Etty, both Spier and Tideman greatly influenced Etty’s faith in God.

On July 6, 1942, Etty wrote in her diary, “From all sides our destruction creeps up on us, and soon the ring will be closed and no one at all will be able to come to our aid. All the little loopholes that are still left will soon be stopped up.” One way to protect herself against deportation was a position with the Jewish Council, which had been established by the German occupiers in February 1941 as a Jewish organization to administer the Jewish community in the Netherlands. Through this Jewish Council the Nazis imposed their anti-Jewish measures. In spite of her initial objections, Etty took a job with the Jewish Council as a typist on July 15, 1942, at the Lijnbaansgracht (Amsterdam-Centre). Soon thereafter she applied for a transfer to the department ‘Social Welfare for People in Transit’ in Westerbork, where she arrived on July 30, 1942. Through her function with the Jewish Council she had a ‘privileged’ position in this transit camp, allowing her to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. Her first stays in Westerbork were only brief. During her second leave in Amsterdam, on September 15, 1942, Julius Spier, who suffered from lung cancer, died. Etty then proved too ill herself to go back to Westerbork. On November 20th of the same year she had recovered enough to return, but this time too she stayed only briefly.

On December 5" she was back in Amsterdam. In the same month she wrote her first extensive testimony (in a letter) about Westerbork. She stayed in the capital for half a year, to return to Westerbork on June 6, 1943. On July 5, 1943, employees of the Westerbork departments of the Jewish Council lost their special status; Etty was one of them. On July 10, 1943, she wrote to Maria Tuinzing, “This is the last letter [Il be allowed to write for a while. This afternoon our identity cards were taken away, and we became official camp inmates.”

In Westerbork Etty wrote another extensive testimony in a letter about the transport of August 24, 1943. This testimony and the letter of December 1942 were illegally published at the end of 1943 by David Koning in the small book Three Letters from the Painter Johannes Baptiste van der Pluym (1843-1912). Etty did not live to see its publication.

Publication and Reception of the Legacy

For years Etty Hillesum’s descriptions of Westerbork, republished in 1959, 1962 and 1978, were only known in a small circle of readers, but in the 1980s Etty Hillesum suddenly became a household name throughout Holland. In 1981 a selection of her diaries was published as Het verstoorde leven (published in English as An Interrupted Life). The book caused a sensation, and a stream of reprints and translations followed. On account of this great success a selection of her letters was published in 1982 as Het denkende hart van de barak (literally “The thinking heart of the barracks”, published in English as Letters from Westerbork) and in 1984 the almost complete text of the sixth exercise book was published as In duizend zoete armen (“A Thousand Tender Arms Around You”). The Dutch publisher and theologian Jan-Geurt Gaarlandt had taken it upon himself to publish the material. However it had taken quite some time before the manuscript passed into his hands.

The publication of Etty Hillesum’s writings was a protracted affair. In 1946 or 1947 former housemate Maria Tuinzing visited the writer Klaas Smelik (1897-1986), with whom Etty Hillesum had an affair in 1934. Tuinzing told Smelik that Hillesum had left him something: a diary in eleven exercise books and a bundle of letters. If she never were to come back, Hillesum told her housemate, she would like Tuinzing to hand over these documents to Smelik. He then should see to their publication. This was easier said than done. Smelik’s daughter Johanna or “Jopie” (1916-2008), who had also been friends with Etty Hillesum, was the only one who could decipher Hillesum’s nearly illegible hand. Smelik sent the transcription she made of part of the last exercise book to several publishing houses; not one showed any interest. The writings were considered ‘too philosophical’. Klaas’ son, Klaas Smelik, junior, who witnessed these efforts, commented, “These were the fifties: the war was not contemplated but commemorated. People wanted to read that the Germans were evil and the Dutch were good. People wanted to read about atrocities instead of an appeal not to hate one another.” Etty Hillesum’s manuscript did not meet this demand. It was probably not only ‘too philosophical’ but also ‘too spiritual’. It wasn’t until 1980 that Klaas Smelik, junior found a publisher who was enthusiastic about the typed out text: Jan-Geurt Gaarlandt. He decided to publish a selection of Etty Hillesum’s writings: Het verstoorde leven (An Interrupted Life).

The Dutch public response to Het verstoorde leven was diverse, intense, and often polarized. For many readers the book was an extraordinary experience, it was a bible de savoir vivre; others repudiated and rejected Etty Hillesum’s writings. She evoked strongly opposing views: she was as an “overgrown selfish schoolgirl” to some and a “saint” to others. What was striking was the focus on Etty Hillesum as a person and the unremitting tendency to judge her wartime behavior. These opinions were all based on the praiseworthy but extremely limited selection of Het verstoorde leven. This suggestive publication paved the way, for some readers, to a hagiographic conceptualization. Gaarlandt’s introduction presented Etty Hillesum as a woman who on being summoned promptly went to Westerbork, who did not withdraw from the “fate” of the Jews (Etty Hillesum used the German word “Massenschicksal” or “common fate” in her diary) and who was a shining personality in Westerbork. While some commentators happily embraced this presentation, others devoted themselves to negate it. For example, the éminence grise of Dutch-Jewish critique, Henriétte Boas (1911-2001), depicted Etty Hillesum as a selfish person who could hardly be identified as a real Jew. It was in some ways a tragicomic situation: multiple commentators claimed a monopoly on the truth of Hillesum’s life and personality despite the fact that none of them had read all of her exercise books and letters. In response, Gaarlandt cleared the way for an unabridged, scholarly edition of Etty Hillesum’s writings. In 1986 all of the available material, edited by Klaas Smelik, was published as Etty: De nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943). Ten of the eleven exercise books that constitute the diary — written from March 9, 1941, to October 13, 1942 — were published. A seventh exercise book, written between April 30 and May 18, 1942, was lost. Apart from the diary nearly all retained letters were included in this edition.

An Introduction to Hillesum’s Thought

Not long before her final departure to Westerbork, Etty Hillesum wrote to Maria Tuinzing, “You ask for a diary. Because it’s you, I’m leaving a silly piece of writing behind; there is a lot of rubbish in it, indiscreet woman!” Clearly then, Hillesum’s diaries were first and foremost personal. She wrote them for herself, a fact often forgotten by commentators. Initially she addressed only herself. In her later, more religiously inspired writings she would also turn to a divine addressee. Her motives were also personal: to create order in her own mind and to master the art of writing. She longed to be a writer. Therefore her diary, apart from being a therapeutic “mud book”, was a workbook for her future authorship. For both reasons she often called herself to order. Supposed lack of discipline or lavish language would lead to self-criticism, mixed with self-mockery: “And now that’s enough fooling about, you useless thing. You squander most of your time and energy on brooding and thinking about things of absolutely no worth.” Her exercise books are full of such admonitions. It is a form of interior monologue that is an inextricable part of such (self-)therapeutic diaries. Normally self-conversations like these do not end up (unless revised) in the hands of the general reader. On several occasions she thought about destroying her exercise books because of “that schoolgirlish nonsense”, but always decided to retain them after all. She placed them in safekeeping, probably not only “as a means of getting in touch” with her old self later, but also as the basis for the writing of a Jewish chronicle “later on”. In her diary Etty Hillesum increasingly expressed her wish to become a chronicler of Jewish life: “I hope I shall remember everything that happens to us so that one day PI be able to retell it all.” She increasingly saw herself as “the ears and eyes of a piece of Jewish history” and also believed that she had a task in Westerbork: “We must keep one another in touch with everything that happens in the various outposts of this world, each one contributing his own little piece of stone to the great mosaic that will take shape once the war is over.”

Etty Hillesum never returned from Auschwitz. Still, through her writings her ideas and experiences during the war eventually passed into the hands of the public. The multitude of long and short studies denotes, notwithstanding all criticism, the complex multiplicity of her legacy. Etty Hillesum’s work can be approached from many perspectives and research angles. Her writings are both remarkably imaginative and an important historical-biographical document.

In 1989 the publisher Gaarlandt collected twenty-three reactions in a book, “Ik zou een pleister op vele wonden willen zijn” — Reacties op de dagboeken en brieven van Etty Hillesum (“I would like to act as a balm for many wounds” — Reactions to the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum”). In his preface Gaarlandt wrote that it is “astonishing to read the number of aspects that can be uncovered about her life and writings. Literary, mystic, philosophical, historical, theological, psychological and therapeutic associations bring in material for miscellaneous articles. Kafka, Master Eckhart, Ruusbroec, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Jung, Seneca, Carry van Bruggen, Bonhoeffer, people she is being compared to and linked with, the giants from the world of literature, philosophy and theology.” The quantity of aspects that can be uncovered is “astonishing” indeed, and has resulted in a complicated reception. The authors of the compilation Etty Hillesum in facetten (2003) discussed twentieth century developments of this reception and explored the national and international reactions to the oeuvre.

The variegated reception of Etty Hillesum’s legacy is perhaps the best proof that one can introduce her thought in many different ways. Her writings can be read from many angles, even by the same reader. Through the years, I myself have approached Etty Hillesum’s writings from a variety of angles and research perspectives. For instance, I have studied her reading of Master Eckhart, her deliberately eclectic way of reading, her friendship with Henny Tideman, her descriptions of Westerbork, and a number of other subjects. With each new research perspective and way of reading her work, Etty Hillesum’s legacy reopened itself, and another facet of her thinking became visible. Or, to quote Hillesum herself, “... at every twist of the road the whole vista changes all ofa sudden”. All these sights and vistas constitute the power of her legacy. Hillesum’s writings are evidence of a great receptivity to cogitations about human life and life itself. Part of this power must certainly be explained by the fact that Etty Hillesum wrote for herself alone and that her diary confronts the present-day reader with an uncensored adventure of the human mind. Unseen, like a voyeur, the reader can walk with Hillesum’s thoughts and feelings: big and small, beautiful and not so beautiful, funny and not so funny. Her diary notes let the reader feel with her, clash with her, think with her, search with her, discover with her.

“Every pole has its opposite,” Etty Hillesum wrote, and she assigned herself the task of not only knowing and thinking through opposites, but also /iving them. She found that she should not give way to the urge to unite life’s opposites in a philosophical system: “(Life) cannot be captured in just a few formulas.” She regularly reproached herself for wanting her brain to create a reductive, intellectual understanding of the world: “That is your disease: you want to capture life in formulas of your own. You want to embrace all aspects of life with your intellect instead of allowing yourself to be embraced by life.” She wrote that such thoughts were “compulsive”. Again and again she urged herself to give up all of her fixations in order to do justice to life — to life with all its differentiations. In that sense Etty Hillesum’s mental system is a contrary way of thinking: she rejected a watertight system of truth, and was receptive to anything that presented itself in the unreasoned. Etty Hillesum tried to employ this receptivity to the unreasoned and the unexpected in her way of reading: “(...) one must approach a book in the same way as one approaches one’s fellow men. Without preconceived ideas or demands. Sometimes one forms an image of the work after the first few pages and clings to that image, refusing to let it go — often doing violence to the author. Human beings must be granted their full freedom and so must books. Every expression used by a person or found in a book may cast a sudden and surprising new light, shattering our fixed ideas and the certainty into which they have lulled us.”

In this book I have tried to adopt Etty Hillesum’s receptive way of reading to approach her own writings. I have composed the book in such a way that it is possible to have a whole new vista “at every twist of the road”. This made it necessary, when selecting the themes and quotations, to have a wide range of the diverse and at times conflicting thoughts. I did not want to fill in her written legacy on the basis of one dominating idea, but to grant them their “full freedom” as much as I could. Thus, I selected twelve themes or angles that do justice to the multiplicity of her writings and visualize Hillesum’s typical changes of perspective. These twelve themes run analogously with twelve chapters, that each contain three sections. The chapter sequence is not arbitrary. By means of the first nine chapters I chronologically traverse Hillesum’s life, beginning with the chapter Chaos. After all, for Etty Hillesum chaos (in her parents’ home and beyond) was the reason to begin her diary. In the next three chapters (Discipline, Writing, Reading) 1 show how Etty Hillesum, after meeting Julius Spier, therapeutically disciplined herself, largely with writing and reading. The fifth and sixth chapters (War and Resistance) shed light on her thoughts about the war, the persecution of the Jews and her views on resistance, starting from the preceding developments. The seventh and eighth chapters (Wisdom and God) are about her perception of wisdom and the remarkable growth of her faith in God. The ninth chapter (Testifying) concentrates on her last stage of life in Westerbork and her testimonies. In the chapters Body, Love and Life I change perspective again and reinterpret her writings from other angles. The chapter Body: Etty Hillesum’s body, her female body, played an important role in her consciousness-raising process. Directly linked to that was her thinking about femininity and love. Those who think with Etty Hillesum, will think with her about love; not just about her “all-embracing love”, but also about her erotic cravings and inner struggles. One of her greatest loves was her love for life. Her account can be read as a personal expedition to explore “real life with all its nuances and elements of surprise”. That is why the last chapter is called Life. When Etty Hillesum wrote that she felt “the guardian of a precious slice of life”, she made an appeal to herself and to the reader to keep and pass on this same “precious slice of life”.

That's the real tragedy of it. There is a small fortune here in talent and human worth, in both Father and Mother, but unused, or at least not put to good use. They wear you out with their unsolved problems and quickly changing moods; it’s a chaotic and pitiful situation, which is reflected in the utterly disorganized household.

Our house is a remarkable mixture of barbarism and culture. — Spiritual riches lie within grasp, but they are left unused and unguarded, are carelessly scattered about. It is depressing. It is tragicomic, I don't know what kind of crazy household this really is, but no human being can flourish here. 8 August 1941

It is sheer hell in this house. (...) Anyhow, I sprang from this chaos, and it is my task to pull myself out of it. 13 August 1941

Etty Hillesum writes with love and humor about both her parents, but you cannot say she has nothing but positive memories of her childhood. She describes her parents’ household as chaotic and sad. This is not a onceonly observation, it is something she observes on a regular base and writes about in her exercise books. Whenever she visits her parents in Deventer she is overcome by the chaos that dominates the parental home. This dominance is no small thing for Etty Hillesum. It has affected both her life and the lives of her brothers Jaap and Mischa, and it is still affecting her. From a very early age she experienced chaos at all levels. Etty Hillesum feels that she “sprang” from her parents’ chaos and decides to “pull herself out of it”. But what was this chaos in the parental home really like?

Chapter One 25

The chaos in the Hillesum household must have been of a different caliber than the chaos in the average Dutch household in the 1940s. Louis (Levie) Hillesum is a Jewish intellectual, a classicist. Contemporaries describe him as a quiet, withdrawn man, a kind of scholarly recluse. The contrast could not be bigger with his wife Riva Hillesum-Bernstein, who is described as “busy, chaotic, extroverted and dominant”. She is of Russian-Jewish descent. At the age of twenty-five she ends up in Amsterdam after a pogrom. She meets Louis Hillesum, and they marry in 1912. When Etty is born on January 15, 1914, it is Riva Bernstein’s eighth year in Holland. The rest of the Bernstein family has by then moved from Amsterdam to the United States. Riva Hillesum-Bernstein has to live without her family. She is alone with her introverted Dutch husband. Nobody knows, though everybody suspects, that her flight to the Netherlands has been a turbulent and a traumatic one. When she is described as “busy, chaotic, extroverted and dominant”, no doubt her past has something to do with it.