We left the camp singing...

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and it saddens me how anti-Semitism continues to this day. In fact, according to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-semitic incidents across the US reached an all-time high in 2022. How do we bear such sorrow that these events still occur and, indeed, seem to be increasing ?

I have recently discovered and drawn inspiration from the writings of a young Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum, who perished along with her parents at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. The postcard shown here was written by Etty when she was 29-years-old, being transported to Auschwitz from a deportation camp in the Netherlands on 7 September, 1943. The postcard was found by famers outside the camp. It contains the amazing line: "We left the camp singing."

Christine,

Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower’. I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother and Mischa [Etty’s brother] are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be travelling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care. Friends left behind will still be writing to Amsterdam; perhaps you will hear something from them. Or from my last letter from camp.

Goodbye for now from the four of us.

Etty

How did this person, a young Jewish woman from the Netherlands, keep such calm in the face of nationalistic madness and certain death? Thankfully, her journals were entrusted to a friend and were eventually published in 1981. The journals document her thoughts, prayers, and experiences during her time in Amsterdam and in the deportation camp of Westerbork, 1941-43. (Camp Westerbork was the same place Anne Frank would be sent to in 1944 before being transported to Bergen-Belsen where she too perished.)

Here are a few excerpts from Etty's journals, a testament to the hope and love she managed to keep in her heart despite living through one of the worst times in history.

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28 March 1942.  Life is beautiful and I value it anew at the end of every day, even though I know that the sons of mothers . . . are being murdered in concentration camps. And you must be able to bear your sorrow; even if it seems to crush you, you will be able to stand up again, for human beings are so strong, and your sorrow must become an integral part of yourself, part of your body and your soul, you mustn’t run away from it, but bear it like an adult. Do not relieve your feelings through hatred, do not seek to be avenged on all German mothers, for they, too sorrow at this very moment for their slain and murderous sons. Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for... if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge... then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply. And if you have given sorrow that space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich. So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God.

Later, 28 March 1942. I remember a walk along an Amsterdam canal, one dreamlike summer night, long, long ago. I had visions then of ruined cities. I saw old cities vanish and new cities arise and I thought to myself, even if the whole of this world is bombed to bits, we shall build a new world, and that one too will pass, and still life will be beautiful, always beautiful. 

18 May 1942.  The threat grows ever greater, and terror increases from day today. I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it as one might into a convent cell and then step outside again, calmer and stronger and more collected again. I can imagine times to come when I shall stay on my knees for days on end waiting until the protective walls are strong enough to prevent my going to pieces altogether, my being lost and utterly devastated. 

26 May 1942.  But I no longer shut myself away in my room, God, I try to look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and to discover the small, naked human being amidst the monstrous wreckage caused by man’s senseless deeds.  

20 June 1942.  This morning I cycled along the Station Quay enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city and breathing in the fresh, unrationed air. And everywhere signs barring Jews from the paths and the open country. But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact. They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated and oppressed. By our own hatred. By our swagger, which hides our fear. We may of course be sad and depressed by what has been done to us; that is only human and understandable. However: our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves. I find life beautiful and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man and I say so without embarrassment. Life is hard, but that is no bad thing. If one starts by taking one’s own importance seriously, the rest follows. It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself. True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself; when we have all vanquished and transformed our hatred for our fellow human beings of whatever race – even into love one day, although perhaps that is asking too much. It is, however, the only solution. I am a happy person and I hold life dear indeed, in this year of our Lord 1942, the umpteenth year of the war. 

3 July 1942.  Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable horrors—it is all as one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty whole and begin to grasp it better if only for myself, without being able to explain to anyone else how it all hangs together. I wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short. And that is why I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath: so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again, need not to face the same difficulties. Isn’t that doing something for future generations? 

(Above excerpts from Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life the Diaries, 1941-1943.)

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Unfortunately there is not enough space to do justice to all of Etty Hillesum's writing here but I am grateful to have learned about her and to have seen glimpses of her beautiful spirit through her writing. I wish that her short life did not have to end so brutally. I pray that we do not continue to perpetuate hate and fear into yet another generation. I endeavor to some day be as strong as she once was, and leave the camp singing.

There is now a Museum on the grounds of Camp Westerbork with an old railway car that, thankfully, today, runs no more.