This morning, Etty Hillesum’s journals were full of touching, insightful and gloomy lines. Of the best:
I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well.
Most ask God for help; Etty speaks of giving it.
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.
