A life full of meaning, yes, full of meaning – Diaries 1941-1943.
Mounting-Introduction: J. G. Gaarlandt
translated: Petros Georgiouepimeter: Stavros Zumbulakis
ed.. Patakis, 2022, p. 423.

Holocaust literature painfully highlights the victims’ tragic embarrassment in the face of their prescribed extermination. Primo Levi’s pages, seen in the light of his subsequent suicide, stand as a monument to the inability of “those who drowned and those who were saved” (Agra, 2006) to tell, interpret, and definitively close their accounts of the Holocaust. . Anne Frank’s teenage diary describes the suffering of those Jews who hid in order to fit their pulsating life in a secret attic. The hopelessness of flight is expressed in the dead-end exile of Walter Benjamin. The Diaries by Etty Hillesum introduces us to a special place in camp literature, the place of those who consciously decided to give themselves up to destruction, while at the same time trying to give meaning to this decision.

The 27-year-old Dutch Jewess struggled to maintain her humanity and dignity. Her dilemmas remind us that the cruelty of the world does not penetrate all human souls.

The Hilesum case has occupied scholars for decades. The 27-year-old Dutch Jew, born in 1915, stubbornly refuses to go into hiding or flee to America. He decides to volunteer at the Westerbork camp, offering material and emotional support to the thousands of Jews waiting to be sent to Auschwitz. Religious faith, very deep and personal, enlivens her courage. Indeed, Hillesum’s Diary also reads like an extended prayer to some particular god. In a few months she herself would be killed in the gas chambers.

Stavros Zumbulakis’s thoughtful performance highlights the dilemmas Hylesum faced, as well as the roots of the seemingly irrational decision to surrender to destruction. When the possibility of collective salvation disappears from the horizon, does individual flight make sense? And if so, what psychic means could reconcile the individual with the regrets caused by flight from a common fate? Conversely, what considerations can ultimately carry more weight than individual survival?

Hylesum’s position can easily be interpreted as existential and volitional paralysis in the face of horror, or worse, as sterile passivity and fatalism. But when we read her thoughts, we see more complex motives. In a letter dated August 24, 1943, just two weeks before her transfer to Auschwitz, Hilesum notes that three recent escape attempts have led to reprisals and collective punishment: “So the boy took a lot of good friends around his neck …[Π]how will he endure regrets [..] when will he realize what he did? (p. 369). In Hylesum’s eyes, this incident confirms her unwavering position that accepting a common destiny is also the highest expression of solidarity: “It doesn’t matter if I or anyone else goes, what matters is that many thousands of people must leave.” (p. 262).

However, Hylesum’s decision seems strange: we know that she managed to escape the Netherlands long before her life became interchangeable with the lives of her fellow inmates. And yet she decides to stay in the Netherlands in order to alleviate the mental and physical pain of the prisoners who are about to be deported with her meager forces. At the cost of her life, Hilesum acquires the ability to do good here and now, in the world that is given to her, in the dirty camp of programmed souls.

In this light, her choice, however far removed from us, reveals itself as a testament. He reminds us that the imperative of Good must survive the times of terror. Perhaps at the most critical moment in her diary, Hilesum feels that hatred and cynicism have penetrated the soul of one of her fellow prisoners: “He, I believe, has a deep hatred for our persecutors. However, he himself is an executioner. He would have made an exemplary head of a concentration camp” (p. 323). For Hilesum, more than personal salvation is at stake in the Nazi camps: “We have so much to change about ourselves that we should not waste time hating those we call our enemies. And it’s not that there are “executioners” and generally bad people among us… Each of us must turn on himself and… eliminate from his soul all the evil that he sees in others. And we must be sure that the slightest amount of hatred we add to the world makes it even more inhospitable than it already is” (pp. 325-326).

On the last page of the diary, Hillesum defends the usefulness of poetry in the face of destruction: we often “scornfully dismiss the intellectual heritage of artists who lived in times that were considered easier … because they supposedly cannot serve us anything.” Accordingly, it can be argued that Hylesum’s reasoning is incompatible with an age of secularism and individualism such as ours. However, it retains its value. The dilemmas of Hilesum, who fought to maintain her humanity and dignity in turbulent times, remind us that the cruelty of the world does not penetrate all human souls. The penultimate phrase of the diary seems eternally relevant: “We will be a balm for many wounds.”

Mr. Thodoris Tsomidis teaches human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His translations are Against the Heart of Darkness by Edmund Morel (Patakis, 2022) and The Hunger Painter by Franz Kafka (Gutenberg, 2022).