Les écrits d'Etty Hillesum. Journaux et lettres 1941-1943 (The writings of Etty Hillesum. Diaries and letters 1941-1943. Complete edition). Paris: Seuil, 2008, 1081 p.
Thursday [April 30, 1942], afternoon.
Yesterday, I had this sudden thought: Suffering will always exist, and whether one suffers for this or that reason, it doesn't really matter. Suffering is like love. One must be less and less concerned with the object of love and more and more with the love itself, if it is to be true. One can sometimes suffer more cruelly for a crushed cat than for a whole city bombed, with a crowd of victims. It is not about the object. It is about suffering, about love, about great feelings and their quality. And the fire of these great feelings, of these dominant tones (of the "tones" which burn, interesting expression!) is perpetually maintained and each century feeds the fires with new fuels, but what counts is the intensity of the fire and not the nature of the fuels. And whether we are talking about yellow stars, concentration camps, terror and war is only of secondary importance. And these considerations do not make me any less combative, because moral indignation and taking a stand also belong to the "great feelings". But then a real moral indignation inscribed in a great human framework, and not a small personal hatred, which usually seizes the events around us as a pretext to assuage small personal grievances sometimes years old, unassimilated toxic substances, projected onto a world conflict. –
p. 503
July 2 [1942]. Thursday morning. 7:30 a.m.
It is not below human dignity to suffer. I mean: one can suffer with or without human dignity. I mean: most Westerners don't know the art of suffering, all they know how to do is to eat themselves up with anguish. What most people experience is no longer a life: fear, resignation, bitterness, hatred, despair. My God, that's understandable! But wouldn't depriving them of this life be depriving them of much? And I wonder if there is a big difference between being devoured here by a thousand anxieties, or devoured in Poland by a thousand lice and by hunger. One must accept death as a natural part of this life, even the most horrible death.
And don't we live a whole life every day, and does it really matter if we live a few days more or less? Every day I am in Poland on the battlefields - you can call them that: sometimes the vision of poisonous green battlefields comes to me; every day I am near the hungry, the persecuted and the dying, but I am also near the jasmine and that blue sky outside my window, there is room for everything in a life. For faith in God and for a pitiful death.
It is also necessary to have the strength to suffer alone and not to impose one's anxieties and problems on others. We have not yet learned this and we should train each other to do it, by the hard way if softness does not succeed. When I say: one way or another, I am done with this life, it is not resignation. "All talk is misunderstanding." When I say that, it is understood quite differently than I hear it. It is not resignation, certainly not. What do I mean then? Perhaps this: I have already lived this life a thousand times and I have already died a thousand times. What else can happen to me?
Is this the feeling of a jaded person? No. It is a way of living one's life multiplied by a thousand, minute by minute, and in this way of living there is room for suffering. And it is certainly not a modest place that suffering claims nowadays. And what does it matter, in the final analysis, if in this era it is the Inquisition, in another the war and the pogroms, that make people suffer? Of an absurd suffering, as they themselves say. Suffering has always claimed its place and its rights, no matter what form it takes. What counts is how to bear it, how to assign it its place in life while continuing to accept this life. But am I not theorizing from my desk, surrounded by my familiar books, each of which has a particular relationship to me, and to that blooming jasmine outside, insatiable, bold and tender? Is this just theory, a theory that has not yet faced the test of facts? I don't think so anymore. I have pain in my body and soon I will go with S. to the other end of the city and we will see passing by us many streetcars, which could have transported us faster than our legs, and soon we will be, it seems, really registered, now it is the turn of the Dutch, young girls included ("You do not have the right to leave", said S. yesterday in a decided tone; and Kathe pointed to her canned strawberries and said: "I hope you can still enjoy them", yes these thoughts creep into our daily conversation) and Mischa had to walk to the station yesterday and they must surely be fighting each other at home after 8 o'clock, during these long summer evenings, and I think of Mirjam's and Renate's little pallid children's faces, of the worry that so many people inspire, I know all of this, all of it, every moment, I also know the anxieties of the people, and sometimes I bend my head under this burden, which rests on my neck, and while I bend my head, knowing everything that is happening and what this time is, at the same time, by a kind of reflex, I need to join my hands, I could stay for hours like this - I know everything, I am able to bear everything, I become stronger and stronger, and at the same time I have a certainty: I find life beautiful, worth living and rich in meaning, despite everything. This does not mean that one always stays on top and in pious thoughts. One can be broken, I tired of having walked for a long time, of having spent hours in line, but that too is life - and somewhere inside you there is something that will never leave you again.
p. 641-463
July 3, 1942, Friday evening, 8:30.
It's true, I'm still sitting at the same desk, but I feel like I have to draw a line at the bottom of everything I've written so far to continue on a new tone. When you have a new certainty in your life, you have to give it a shelter, find a place for it: what is at stake is our loss and our extermination, no illusions about that. One wants our total extermination, we must accept this truth, and it will already be better. Today, I felt for the first time an immense discouragement, and I must settle it. And maybe, or rather certainly, it comes from yesterday's four aspirins. And if we must die, let it be with grace. But I didn't want to express myself so bluntly. Why is this discouragement only now reaching me? Because I have blisters on my feet from walking for so long in the city in this heat; because so many people's feet are bruised from not being allowed to take the streetcar anymore; because of Renate's pale little face, forced to walk to class on her little legs in this heat, an hour's walk each way? Because Liesl stands in line for hours to be refused green vegetables? For infinite things that, taken separately, are details, but constitute so many operations of the great war of extermination that we have been declared. For now, everything else still seems grotesque and unimaginable: S. who can no longer enter this house to find his piano and books; and me who can no longer go to Tide's, etc.
I add to this what Netty wrote to S. It is still valid: this conviction that I carry within me that my expectations will be fulfilled, that one day I will go to Russia, that one day I will be one of the many Little Links in the chain that will connect Russia and Europe. It is a certainty that I feel that is not shaken by this new certainty: they want our complete extermination. I accept this new certainty. I know it now. I will not impose my anxieties on others and I will not be resentful if they do not understand what is happening to us Jews. But one certainty should not be eaten away or weakened by another. I work and live with the same conviction and I find life full of meaning, yes, full of meaning in spite of everything, even if I hardly dare to say it in society. Life and death, suffering and joy, the blisters on my feet bruised from walking and the jasmine at the bottom of my garden, the persecutions, the countless arbitrary cruelties, everything, everything is in me and forms a powerful whole, I accept it as an indivisible totality and I am beginning to understand more and more - for my own use, without being able to explain it to others yet - how everything fits together. I would like to live a long time to be able to explain it one day; but if this is not given to me, well, someone else will do it in my place, someone else will pick up the thread of my life where it broke, and that is why I have to live this life until my last breath with all the awareness and conviction possible, so that my successor will not have to start from scratch and will encounter fewer difficulties. Isn't this a way of working for posterity? After the announcement of the latest anti-Jewish measures, Bernard asked me, on behalf of a Jewish friend, if I was not satisfied this time, and if I did not think that "they" should be massacred to the last, and preferably filleted one after the other.
p. 643-644
Friday morning [July 10, 1942].
One time it's a Hitler, another time Ivan the Terrible, for example, in one century it's the Inquisition, in another, wars, plagues, earthquakes, famine. In the end, what counts is the way to bear, to support, to assume a suffering that is essential to this life and to keep intact through the ordeals a small piece of one's soul.
p. 672
July 14 [1942], Tuesday evening.
Many people would think I was crazy and totally out of touch with reality if they knew what I think and feel. Yet I live with all the reality that each day brings. The Westerner does not accept "suffering" as inherent in this life. That is why he is always unable to draw positive strength from suffering.
p. 684
Wednesday evening [July 15, 1942].
And this is the greatest suffering for most people: their total unpreparedness; they perish miserably right here, before they have seen the shadow of a work camp. This attitude makes our defeat total. Really, really, Dante's hell is a light comedy next to it. "This is hell," he told me the other day, very simply and in the tone of objective observation. At times, I feel as if I can hear bellowing, screaming and whistling in my ears. And the skies are so low, so threatening. This does not prevent, however, a light and playful humor to appear in me from time to time - it never abandons me, without turning to black humor, at least I don't think so. Slowly, over the months, I have matured and grown so much in anticipation of the moments we live in, that I don't feel any panic, I continue to consider all things with foresight. So what I have been doing these last few years at my desk has not been all "literature" and intellectual games.
And these last eighteen months could make up for a lifetime of suffering and persecution. They melted into me, they became me, those eighteen months, and accumulated in me enough provisions to last a lifetime without starving.
p. 688
Letter to two sisters from The Hague. Amsterdam, late December 1942. (excerpt)
If we save only our skin and nothing else from the camps, wherever they may be, it will not be enough. What matters, indeed, is not staying alive at all costs, but the way to stay alive. It sometimes seems to me that every new situation, whether it is better or worse, carries with it the possibility of enriching man with new insights. And if we leave to the decision of fate the harsh realities with which we are irrevocably confronted, if we do not offer them in our heads and hearts a shelter to let them decant and turn into maturing factors, into substances from which we can extract meaning, - it will mean that our generation is not armed for life.
I know, it is not so simple, and for us Jews even less so than for others, but if, to the general destitution of the post-war world, we have to offer only our bodies saved at the price of the sacrifice of everything else, and not this new meaning springing from the deepest abysses of our distress and despair, it will not be enough. From the very walls of the camps, new thoughts will have to radiate outwards, new intuitions will have to spread clarity around them and, beyond our barbed wire fences, join other new intuitions that will have been conquered outside the camps at the cost of as much blood and in conditions that have gradually become just as painful. And, on the common basis of a sincere search for answers to the mystery of these events, our lives, which have been thrown out of their course, could perhaps take a prudent step forward again. That is why it seemed to me such a great danger, to hear it repeated constantly around me: "We don't want to think, we don't want to feel, the best thing is to armor ourselves against all this distress."
But doesn't suffering – in whatever form it presents itself to us – also belong to human existence?
p. 823-824
Letter to Han Wegerif and others. Westerbork, Tuesday, June 29, 1943. (excerpt)
This morning, as I was washing up with one of my colleagues, I opened my heart to her and said something like this, "The fields of the soul and spirit are so vast, so infinite, that this little pile of physical discomfort and suffering hardly matters anymore; I don't feel like I've been deprived of my freedom and, deep down, no one can really hurt me."
Yes, my children, it is so, I feel penetrated by a strange melancholic serenity. If it happened that I wrote you a desperate letter, do not take it too tragically, it was only the fruit of a fleeting moment, it is allowed to suffer, but not to sink into despair.
p. 857-858
Letter to Johanna and Klaas Smelik and others. Westerbork, Saturday, July 3, 1943. (excerpt)
The night a convoy left, a young Dutch gendarme said to me with a sad look on his face, "A night like this makes me lose five pounds; and still, one has nothing to do but hear, see, and be silent." This is also why I don't write to you much. But I digress. I only wanted to say to you: yes, the distress is great, and yet it often happens to me, in the evening, when the past day has sunk behind me into the depths, to walk with a supple step along the barbed wire, and always I feel rising from my heart -I can't help it, it's like that, it comes from an elemental force- the same incantation: life is a wonderful and great thing, after the war we will have to build a completely new world, and with each new exaction, with each new atrocity, we will have to oppose a little extra love and goodness to conquer over ourselves. We have the right to suffer, but not to succumb to suffering. And if we survive this time, unharmed in body and soul, especially in soul, without bitterness, without hatred, we will also have our say after the war. I may be an ambitious woman: I would like to have a small word to say.
You talk about suicide, you talk about mothers and children. Of course, I understand all that, but I find this subject unhealthy. There is a limit to all suffering. A human being may not be given more suffering to endure than he or she can - and if the limit is reached, he or she dies of his or her own accord. There are people here who sometimes die of broken spirits, because they no longer understand the meaning of their trials - young people. The old, the very old, still root themselves in a more powerful soil and accept their fate with dignity and stoicism. Ah, here we see so many different people and we are surprised by their attitude towards the most difficult questions, the ultimate questions.
I'll try to describe how I feel, but I don't know if my picture is right. When a spider spins its web, it first throws out the main threads, and then climbs into it itself, right? The main artery of my life already stretches far ahead of me and reaches into another world. It seems as if all present and future events have already been taken into account somewhere in me, I have already assimilated them, already lived them and I am already working on building a society that will succeed this one. The life I lead here does not diminish my energy capital - the body does decay a little, and one sometimes falls into abysses of sadness - but in the core of one's being one becomes stronger and stronger. I would like it to be the same for you and for all my friends, it is necessary, we have so much to live and to do together. That's why I'm shouting to you: hold on to your inner positions once you have conquered them, and above all don't be sad or desperate when you think of me, there is really no need. –
p. 864-865