Portrait of Etty Hillesum. Place, date and photographer unknown. Public Domain. Source: nationaalarchief.nl.
EXHIBIT PRESENTATION:
SATURDAY, FEB 15, 2020
1:15 PM | SECOND FLOOR AUDITORIUM
Flyer PDF | Flyer JPG
Exhibit on the wartime writings of Dutch-Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1941-1943)
The year is 1941. In Amsterdam, Etty Hillesum, a young, emancipated, secular Jewish woman starts keeping a diary at the request of her therapist. She scrupulously records her every thought, change in mood, and the often banal events that punctuate her daily life. As the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands impose increasingly harsh measures on Dutch Jews, however, Etty realizes that she also needs to make sense of the outside world and its frightening reality.
This exhibit documents Etty’s extraordinary journey to her core, where she discovered a sense of meaning, not just in her own life, but of life itself in an increasingly strong sense of the presence of God. In the conflagration of war and mass murder, this young woman remained determinedly free. She responded to the horrors of her time with a growing desire to love and embrace every aspect of life, from the rare cup of coffee that could be found during wartime, to the flowers of the Westerbork transport camp, where she volunteered to serve her fellow Jews as they waited to be sent to the extermination camps in Poland, to the very people who sent her to her death. In the face of what she herself called “hell,” Etty wrote to her friends that, nonetheless, “a human being is a remarkable thing.”
How does a person come to make such an assertion? Drawing upon Etty’s diaries and letters, this exhibit traces the mysterious and complex journey that culminated in her final written reflection on a postcard thrown from a train window as she was being deported to Auschwitz in September 1943: “Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ We left the camp singing.”
