Les écrits d'Etty Hillesum. Journaux et lettres 1941-1943 (The writings of Etty Hillesum. Diaries and letters 1941-1943. Complete edition). Paris: Seuil, 2008, 1081 p.
January 19, 1942. Monday morning, 10 o'clock.
It seems that a complete balance has been achieved in me. I no longer need to curl up in a corner against the bookcase to "listen deep inside", I am listening all day to what is inside me, even when I am in the midst of people, I no longer need to put myself aside, I regularly draw strength from the most hidden and secret sources inside me. –
p. 336
April 22 [1942]. Wednesday. Noon.
And then live from my own substance. And, in any case, to tend more and more to this: to live from one's own resources. And that's why one must, each time again, forget everything, everything that one has ever gathered, read and heard from others. And I think
that I am going to have to be alone for a long, long time, for months on end, and if I am able to get through this period safely, if I find this courage to be alone with myself for a long time and to search for myself, [to search] for that in myself which is not learned, only then, perhaps, can I say that I am truly born.
p. 474
June 5, 1942. Friday night, midnight, in the bathroom.
But now I have found myself again and all the certainties have come back to me and I have already peeled a lot of potatoes in the sun and I have heard in the meantime that there is still a tone in me that is my own and a melody that is developing, to which I must give a chance and a place and to which I must be faithful.
p. 557
Saturday night [June 20, 1942], half past midnight.
To humiliate, you need two people. The one who humiliates and the one who wants to be humiliated, but above all: the one who wants to be humiliated. If the latter is missing, in other words if the passive party is immune to any form of humiliation, the humiliations inflicted vanish in smoke. What remains are vexatious measures which disrupt daily life, but not that humiliation or oppression which overwhelms the soul. The Jews must be educated in this sense. This morning, as I cycled along the quay of the Stadium, I was delighted by the vast horizon that one discovers at the edge of the city and I breathed in the fresh air that has not yet been rationed to us. Everywhere, signs forbade Jews to use the small roads leading to the countryside. But above this part of the road that was still open to us, the sky spread out completely. Nothing can be done to us, really nothing. They can make life hard enough for us, they can deprive us of certain material goods, they can take away a certain freedom of movement from us, but it is we ourselves who are depriving ourselves of our best strength by a wrong attitude. By feeling persecuted, humiliated, oppressed. By feeling hatred. By showing off to hide our fear. We have every right to be sad and downcast, from time to time, by what we are subjected to; it is human and understandable. However, the real spoliation is what we do to ourselves. I find life beautiful and I feel free. The heavens unfold in me as vast as the firmament above me. I believe in God and I believe in man, I dare to say it sincerely, without false shame. Life is difficult, but it is not serious. You have to start by taking your own seriousness seriously, the rest comes naturally. "Working on oneself" is not morbid individualism. If peace is ever to come, it can only be genuine if each individual first makes peace within himself, if he removes all feelings of hatred for his fellow man, for any race or people, or if he dominates this hatred and changes it into something else, which is no longer hatred, perhaps even into love - or is that too much to ask? But this is the only solution.
I could go on like this for pages. I can also stop. This little piece of eternity that we carry within us, we can exhaust it in a single word as well as in ten large treatises. I am a happy woman and I sing the praises of this life, yes, in the year of grace, I say grace, 1942, the year of the war? And now good night, early tomorrow at 8 o'clock, I hope to be back in front of my Japanese lilies and my dying tea rose. –
p. 607-608
Sept. 17. 1942], Thursday morning, 8 o'clock.
The feeling of life is so strong in me, so great, so serene, so full of gratitude, that I will never again try to express it in a single word. I have in me a happiness so complete and so perfect, my God. What still expresses it best are his words: "to rest in oneself". This is perhaps the most perfect expression of my feeling of life: I rest in myself. And this self, this deepest and richest layer in me where I rest, I call "God". In Tide's journal, I have encountered this phrase many times, "Take him gently in your arms, Father." And that is indeed my perpetual and constant feeling: that of being in your arms, my God, protected, sheltered, imbued with a sense of eternity. It is as if every breath I take is imbued with this sense of eternity, as if the smallest of my actions, the most insignificant word, is set against a background of greatness, has a profound meaning.
He wrote to me in one of his first letters, "And whenever I can dispense around me a little of this overflow of strength, I am happy."
It is certainly better that you have brought my body to cry "halt!", my God. I absolutely have to get healthy again to accomplish all that lies ahead of me. Or is this just another conventional view? Even a sickly body will not prevent the spirit from continuing to function and bear fruit. Nor from continuing to love, to "tune in" to yourself, others, the logic of this life, and you. Hineinhorchen, "listening within", I wish I had a properly Dutch verb to say the same thing. In fact, my life is nothing but a perpetual "listening within" to myself, to others, to God. And when I say that I "listen within", in reality it is rather God within me who "listens". What is most essential and deepest in me listens to the essence and depth of the other. God listens to God.
How great is the inner distress of your earthly creatures, my God. I thank you for bringing so many people to me with all their distress. They are talking to me calmly, without paying attention, and suddenly their distress is revealed in its nakedness. And I have before me a small human wreck, desperate and not knowing how to go on living.
This is where my difficulties begin. It is not enough to preach you, my God, to transmit you to others, to bring you to light in the hearts of others. It is necessary to find in others the way that leads to you, my God, and to do this it is necessary to be a great connoisseur of the human soul. You must be trained as a psychologist. Relationships with the father and mother, childhood memories, dreams, feelings of guilt, inferiority complexes, in short, the whole panoply. In all those who come to me, I begin a careful exploration. The tools that I use to make my way to you in others are still quite rudimentary. But I already have some of them and I will perfect them slowly and with great patience. And I thank you for giving me the gift of reading the hearts of others. People are sometimes like houses with open doors for me. I enter, I wander through corridors, rooms: in each house the furnishings are a little different, yet they are all alike and one should be able to make each one a sanctuary for you, my God. And I promise you, I promise you, my God, I will look for a home and a roof for you in as many houses as possible. It's a funny picture: I'm going to look for a home for you. There are so many uninhabited houses, where I will introduce you as an honored guest. Forgive me for this rather unrefined image. Here I am again quoting Rilke: "For in truth, even the greatness of the Gods depends on their misery: on the fact that, no matter what dwelling we preserve for them, they are nowhere as safe as in our hearts." -
p. 718-720
September 20 [1942], Sunday evening.
Jopie, sitting on the moor, under the big starry sky, in a conversation about nostalgia: "I don't have any nostalgia because I'm home." For me it was a revelation. We are "at home". Wherever the sky stretches, one is at home. Everywhere on this earth is home, when you carry everything inside you. –
I have often felt - and still feel - like a ship that has just embarked a precious cargo; the moorings are cast off and the ship sets sail, free of all hindrances; it releases in all countries and takes on board everywhere what is most precious. –
One must be one's own country. –
It took me two evenings to decide to tell him my most intimate story. Yet I really wanted to tell him, as if to give him a gift: "Yes, you know, I came out of my house at night. It was so beautiful, you know. And so I, so I, oh, it was so beautiful." And only the next night I managed to tell him: so I knelt there on that vast moor. He was breathless, he was silent, he looked at me and then he said, "How beautiful you are." -
p. 726
Wednesday, September 30, 1942
To remain faithful to all that one has undertaken in a moment of spontaneous enthusiasm, too spontaneous perhaps.
To remain faithful to every thought, to every feeling that has begun to germinate.
To remain faithful, in the most universal sense of the word. Faithful to oneself, faithful to God, faithful to what one considers one's best moments.
And, where we are, to be one hundred percent present. My "doing" will consist in "being" there. Now there is a point where my fidelity must be strengthened, where I have failed more than elsewhere in my duties: it is my fidelity to what I must call my "creative talent", however thin it may be. Anyway, there are so many things waiting to be said and written by me. It's about time I got started. But I shy away under the most diverse pretexts, I fail in my mission. It is also true, I know it well, that I must have the patience to let what I have to say grow within me. But I must contribute to this growth, go ahead of it.
p. 742