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Etty Hillesum (1914-43) lived in Amsterdam, like Anne Frank, and
like her she kept a diary. 'All the writings she left behind,'
writes Eva Hoffman in her Preface to this edition of her diaries
and letters, 'were composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, but
they resist being read primarily in its dark light. Rather, their
abiding interest lies in the light-filled mind that pervades them
and in the astonishing internal journey they chart. Etty's
pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual
young woman - it was idiosyncratic, individual, and recognisably
modern...The private person who revealed herself in her diary was
impassioned, erotically volatile, restless...Yet she had the kind
of genius for introspection that converts symptoms into
significance and joins self-examination to philosophical
investigation...In the last stages of her amazing and moving
journey, Etty seemed to attain that peace which passeth
understanding...Finally, however, the violence and brutality she
saw all around her overwhelmed even her capacity to
understand...But by knowing and feeling so deeply and fully, an
unknown young woman became one of the most exceptional and truest
witnesses of the devastation through which she lived. '
For the first time, Etty Hillesum's diary and letters appear
together to give us the fullest possible portrait of this
extraordinary woman in the midst of World War II. In the darkest
years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a
celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost
impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance.
The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the
possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most
devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in
1943 at the age of twenty-nine.
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