A friend lent me a copy of Etty Hillesum’s diary, An Interrupted Life. I had never heard of her before. Now considered a mystic of sorts, she lived in Amsterdam and kept a diary from 1941-43. On September 7, 1943, she and her family boarded a train to Auschwitz. She dropped a postcard from the train window—found later near the tracks—on which she wrote:

“We left the camp singing…Good-bye for now from the four of us.”

There’s a quotable thought on nearly every page of her diary.

A selection:

“So let this be the aim of meditation: To turn one’s innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view.”

***

“I still lack a basic tune; a steady undercurrent; the inner source that feeds me keeps drying up and, worse still, I think too much.”

***

“A poem by Rilke is as real and as important as a young man falling out of an aeroplane [sic]. That’s something I must engrave on my heart.”

***

“Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity.”

***

“Do whatever our hand finds to do and don’t take thought for the morrow. Make your bed and carry your dirty cups to the kitchen and face the rest as it comes.”

***

“Oh, Lord, give me fewer thoughts first thing in the morning and a little more cold water and exercises.”

***

“I no longer plumb the depths of despair. My sadness has become a springboard. In the past I used to think that I would always be sad but now I know that those moments too are part of life’s ebb and flow and that all is well. This is a sign of confidence, of very great confidence, even in myself. I have gradually come to realize that I am going to manage my life properly.”

***

“If you have a rich inner life…there probably isn’t all that much difference between the inside and outside of a [concentration] camp.”

***

“I do believe that it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.”

***

“Every pretty blouse I put on is a kind of celebration. And so is every occasion I have to wash with scented soap in a bathroom all to myself for half-an-hour. It’s as if I were reveling in these civilized luxuries for the last time. But even if I have to forego them one day, I shall always know that they exist and that they can make life pleasant and I shall think of them as a great boon even if I can’t share in them any longer. For whether or not I share in them isn’t really the point, is it?”

***

“I have the feeling that my life is not yet finished, that it is not yet a rounded whole. A book, and what a book, in which I have got stuck half-way. I would so much like to read on.”

***

“The misery here is quite terrible and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire and then time and again it soars straight from my heart—I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.”

***

Hillesum died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943. She was twenty-nine years old.

In 2006, the Etty Hillesum Research Center was founded at Ghent University in Belgium.