Reclaiming Peace: The Life and Writings of Etty Hillesum

Part 1

Etty Hillesum (1914 - 1943)

Etty Hillesum (1914 - 1943)

I have been told I have an unusual hand - a hand interesting to palm readers. On my left hand, instead of having two parallel lines as most people do, I have a single line, which cuts directly across my hand. In palmistry circles this is called a simian line, which most people don’t have. Having a simian line, according to palm readers, indicated that my heart and head work as one. It indicated, allegedly, quite an intense individual. Now of course, I don’t take such pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo seriously. If this kind of thing has any validity at all, it would be in this narrow sense: palmistry is a means of creating a therapeutic space, a safe space, in which one can intentionally attune to another, and thus perhaps be able to intuit something from them. The simple act of offering another individual your undivided attention has an emotional, healing value to it.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung was interested in our “collective unconscious”; patterns of thought and images within humanity collectively, which surface throughout human history, in primordial mythic traditions, in alchemy, mythology, and the occult. Carl Jung was fascinated by all such subjects, extrasensory perception, UFOs, and indeed palmistry. In the mid-1920s, a respected Jewish German palmist by the name of Julius Spiers moved to Zurich in order to train as a psychotherapist under Jung. Julius Spier developed his own multidisciplinary approach to psychotherapy, in which he used his palm reading skills as part of his patient analysis. In 1928, having benefited from Carl Jung’s tutelage, now in his 40s Julius Spier moved to Berlin to set up his practice. Spier was very much a ladies’ man. His practice became very popular with the women of Berlin, they regarded him as having a ‘magical personality’. As his palmist-psychotherapeutic approach gained popularity, he began teaching, and his success grew. Being a Jew as he was, living in Berlin became increasingly unwise during the 1930s, and so in 1938 he moved his practice to Amsterdam, where he quickly achieved the same level of success. He was giving lectures, and taking on clients, and in 1941 he took on a new very notable 27-year-old client, and her name was Etty Hillesum.

Julius Spier (1887 - 1942)

Julius Spier (1887 - 1942)

Part 2

Etty Hillesum can be thought of as Anne Frank’s ‘adult counterpart’. Both highly intelligent, female Jewish writers, both killed at hands of the Nazis in concentration camps. Etty Hillesum, though, I think offers a far stronger challenge to her readers, because throughout the horror she encountered first hand she ever radiates a radical tolerance. No matter how awful another individual is towards her, she always strives to see the humanity in the other. As she said in her diary, she looks to see the ‘small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by man's senseless deeds.’ Hillesum’s altruism in the face of the world’s greatest evil is incredibly difficult to comprehend. When she finally departed for Auschwitz in September 1943, she did so singing. She had an unassailable belief in the underlying goodness of people, a belief she was able to maintain despite what she experienced, and even despite being destroyed herself by people. She refused to join others in their hatred of the German people. She rose above hate, despite the horror all around her; something she was able to do, because she discovered the peace of God within herself.

Part 3

Dutch people celebrating the arrival of the Nazis in Amsterdam, May 1940

Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch woman who died aged 29 in Auschwitz. She is known to us, and is notable, because of the diary she kept from March 1941 to October 1942, a diary she began writing at the behest of her psychotherapist, spiritual mentor, close friend, and ultimately lover, Julius Spier. In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. At first the occupying Nazi forces did nothing to the Jewish population. Their presence did not affect Etty Hillesum a great deal; she was able to be her provocative, sexually adventurous self, being the popular, party going girl she was. And yet, she began to wrestle with some spiritual angst. She describes this angst as being like a ‘knot of emotions’, holding her back. It was for this reason she sought out Julius Spier, the man who, as a friend had warned her ‘can tell everything about you. From your hands…’ She later described him in this way:  “It’s like this: When [Spier] says ‘This is a table,’ and when someone else says ‘this is a table’, then the two tables are quite different. The things he says, even the simplest ones, sound more impressive, more important, I would almost say more highly “charged” than the same things said by anyone else. And not because he adopts a portentous air, but because he seems to draw on deeper, stronger, and more truly human sources than most others. And in his work he looks for human, not sensational, results, although he invariable causes a sensation just because he is able to look so deeply into people.”  Etty attests that within a very short few weeks, her spiritual outlook on the world had a fundamental shift. Spier introduced her to the Bible, and the writings of St. Augustine, breathing exercises, and practices of listening to her interior self. She felt liberated, and free in a way she had never known. She found a peace and harmony within herself. She felt deeply attuned to Julius Spier, as they were both individuals seeking after the deep truths of the interior self.

Westerbork Concentration Camp

Many Jews at the time in the Netherlands thought there may not be systematic persecution against them after all, but it was not to last. As anti-Jewish regulations started to kick in, it became apparent that the Jewish population in the Netherlands was under threat after all. Etty Hillesum refused to hide, either physically or in plain sight by playing down her Jewish identity. She wanted to be wholly present to reality, and that meant accepting what the world has in store for her, positive or negative. Talking to God in her diary she says, “Alas, there doesn’t seem very much You yourself can do about our circumstances, our lives… you cannot help us but we must help you to defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last…” And so, she commits herself afresh to pursuing her own spiritual development as of utmost importance. She speaks in her diary of joy, and the beauty of life, while at the same time experiencing persecution. She writes how she cannot hate another, that all such hate is simply part of our human condition, just as much in her and in Gestapo officer screaming at her. She always thought well of others, even if they were oppressing her.  “There are, it is true, some even at this late stage putting their vacuum cleaners and silver forks and spoons in safe keeping, instead of guarding You dear God. There are those who want to put their bodies in safe keeping, but who are nothing more now than a shelter for a thousand fears and bitter feelings.”

Etty Hillesem in 1939

Etty Hillesem in 1939

“But the babies, those tiny piercing screams of the babies, dragged from their cots in the middle of the night to be carried off to a distant land. I have to put it all down quickly, in a muddle, because if I leave it until later I probably won’t be able to go on believing that it really happened. It is like a vision, and drifts further and further away. The babies were easily the worst.”

In northern Holland, there was a temporary camp set up for the Jewish population called Westerbork. In order that Etty Hillesum might minister to the Jewish people suffering there, in order that she might lead some of these people to the peace she knew in God, she voluntarily entered that camp, rather than being sent there by force. When she saw anger and hatred in others, she thought of the interior pain that must be inside of them. She longed to minister to people at that level. On the 7th September 1943, under the order of an SS commander, Etty was deported to Auschwitz with her parents, and her brother.

‘Good Bye for now. We left the camp singing’ - Etty

Amen.

Holocaust Memorial Service

You gave us up to be devoured like sheep
   and have scattered us among the nations. 
You sold your people for a pittance, 
   gaining nothing from their sale. 
You have made us a reproach to our neighbours, 
   the scorn and derision of those around us.
(Pslam 44:11-13)

How does a gathered church, a gathered community of worshippers, lament and grieve in common, in the face of great cruelty?

When pain is just mine – just my anger, just my sickness, just my tears - we naturally retreat inwards. We shut ourselves behind doors, and behind faces of ‘everything is fine’. Pain separates one from another.

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem By Rembrandt

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem By Rembrandt

A lament is defined as a passionate expression of grief and sorrow. As a gathered people, to enter into a lament is to say we are not alone, such pain is universal. Perhaps it is in our past, perhaps we are living it now, or perhaps it is to come, but ultimately we are not alone in our pain.

This service is a collective lament in the face of an unjust world, in the face of genocide, in the face of the horror one does to another. Out of shared sorrow comes hope, comes forth a vision of what might occur. Lament opens our heart to wrestle with the spectrum of human experience, for sorrow leads to comfort. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Seventy-one years ago the Nazi death camps were liberated by the Soviets, the British, and the American armies. Today we remember the millions who perished at the hands of the Nazis, and we remember the other genocides and acts of ethnic cleansing in our modern times.

It is said that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. For this reason this morning we invoke this spectre of unimaginable suffering and cruelty. That we might never forget. But more still that we might recognise this spectre at work today, where genocide is not a distant memory, where people are driven from their homes, and where religion and ideology are warped into a cruel vehicle of bloodshed, injustice, and intolerance.

We weep with the dispossessed, with Abdul Salam who escaped the on-going genocide in Darfur, for families ripped apart, divided by towering walls, for a people marked with bands around their wrists, with a people held hostage under a black flag of hatred.


How can we fathom such cruelty? So many silenced. So much lost.

Listen, Lord! Hear my prayer for justice!
Listen to my plea.
Hear my prayer,
For my lips do not deceive.
My judgment comes from you,
For your eyes see what is right
...

In Psalm 137 we heard the cries of a dispossessed people. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Words of pain and despair. Words of anger, to wrestle with God. Has he forsaken us?

In 2008 a BBC television drama was aired called ‘God on Trial’; a fictional story about the Jews in Auschwitz putting God on trial, questioning if God had broken his covenant with the Jewish people.

Scene from 'God on Trial' 2008.

Scene from 'God on Trial' 2008.

Fictional maybe, but maybe not. In the context, in the moment, it seems plausible, so appropriate, that God must have been put on trial. Maybe just in the hearts of men and women in those forsaken places, but put on trial none the less.

In the course of that drama, some cry that to even question God in this way is blasphemy. Some point to science, and how absurd it is to think that here, on this insignificant rock in a universe so vast, we might be a chosen people. There is no God to find guilty. Some give accounts of the cruelty they experienced at the hands of Nazis. ‘Where is our free will?’ they cry. Some discuss the cruelty of God in the Old Testament, who would kill firstborns, flood and destroy all humanity, order a chosen people to take a land by force and crush all inhabitants. Perhaps God’s very nature is cruelty.

As the trial concludes one pleads, ‘They took away our property, our names, cut our hair, took away our children, even the fillings in our teeth. Don’t let them take our God too. The covenant is ours. God is ours, even if he doesn’t exist… We should keep him.’ And yet, they conclude that God is guilty as charged; a covenant breaker. And then the doors of their block open, and Nazi officers come to take them away.

‘What do we do now?’ one cries out. Now God is guilty what do we do now? ‘Now we pray’ another replies.

Is this not the very apex of a lament? To accuse your God of negligence, when all hope is lost, and when darkness is closing in. In the Nazi holocaust, two thirds of all the Jews in Europe perished, some six million. And that number rises to eleven million when you include all the other non-Jewish victims. The Polish people, the Romani people, priests and pastors, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Free-masons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, all those refusing to ‘Heil, Hitler!’ Those who spoke out against the Nazi war machine.

It seems to me that in the lamenting of these people - Anne Frank feeling guilty, the priest Martin Niemöller regretting not taking a stand when the ‘other’ was persecuted, and in the grieving of the Jews as is echoed throughout the Hebrew Bible, throughout their persecuted history, in the death camps themselves - God was profoundly present.

To say that God is everywhere and in everything does not mean that God is the cause, directly or indirectly, of everything that happens. These horrible things that happened, are happening, and will happen again, do not fit into a God ordained plan. This is the blasphemous thought: there is no puppet master. To ask where God is, to lament in the face of injustice, to dream of what could be, is to act contrary to the wealthy and powerful, who so often want to treat this earth as if it belongs to them more than others. More to me than them. In our self-centredness we see our complicity in the greatest sort of evil.

The Yellow star Jewish people had to wear under the Nazis. 

The Yellow star Jewish people had to wear under the Nazis. 

But, the psalmist declares, the earth is the Lords, and the fullness thereof. God is the encompassing reality, she is the encompassing spirit in which we all have our being, and to recognise this as such is to not place my individual self at the centre of the universe, but the ‘other’, our neighbour, the outward motion of love.

In this respect then then, to lament with your brother or sister is one of the most selfless acts, a humanising act. To feel another’s pain, to enter into cooperate paining, brings our focus and our attention off the self and opens us to each other, to that universal hurting. Lamenting is worship!

It was in the desert, in the wilderness, that the Jewish people came to understand the worth of God. And echoing this, it was in the wilderness that Jesus came to understand the worth of God. Lamenting is part of the journey of faith, from isolation to the presence of God.

To lament is to invite a new spirit of reconciliation, a new hope, a new dream of what is going to be. It begs for that new beginning! It inaugurates it. It claims it as a reality of what is to come.

Jesus hangs upon the cross. He laments, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This is the start of Psalm 22: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer…’

Out of lament comes new hope. It claims it as a reality of what is to come. Psalm 22 concludes:

The poor will eat and be satisfied;
    those who seek God will praise him—

All the ends of the earth
    will remember and turn to God,

and all the families of the nations
    will bow down before him,

They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it!

Out of lament comes greater recognition of our shared humanity. A deeper longing to ask, ‘how are you really?’. A society that takes the common good seriously. A standing up for the persecuted and marginalised.

Listen, Lord! Hear my prayer for justice!
Listen to my plea.
Hear my prayer,
For my lips do not deceive.
My judgment comes from you,
For your eyes see what is right
.

Amen.