I knew Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) thanks to the books of the philosopher André Comte-Sponville, who, for his part, owes his discovery of the young woman to his friend Christian Bobin. This Dutch writer of Jewish origin, who tragically died in Auschwitz in November 1943, is one of the most remarkable spiritual and literary figures of the 20e century.
“Reading his diaries and letters, which constitute the totality of his work, I feel – and I am not the only one – such a strong feeling of having been introduced into his intimacy that I take the liberty of designating it henceforth by his first name alone, a practice which in other cases irritates me”, writes the historian and essayist Tzvetan Todorov in rebellious (Le livre de poche, 2017), a book in which he pays tribute to rebels who knew how to oppose the unacceptable while preserving a high moral conscience. I’ll do like him, just talking about Etty.
Born in Middelburg, the Netherlands, to a cultured secular Jewish family, Etty is a playful and, in her own words, sensual young woman. She likes comic theater, dance, literature, philosophy and men. She adores her father, a doctor of literature, but the family atmosphere, weighed down by an overly intense mother and two brilliant brothers, but struggling with mental health problems, encourages her to leave the family nest to pursue studies in law. , in Amsterdam.
In 1941, she met the German-Jewish psychotherapist Julius Spier who, while becoming her old lover – he was 27 years her senior – would change her life by accompanying her in a self-analysis centered on the transition from love to self to love of neighbor and universal love. This love to which she aspires “is an acquiescence to the totality of existence”, with its joys and its sufferings, summarizes Todorov. Etty writes about it in a moving and luminous way in her diary.
How, indeed, to love life, all life, when one’s country has been under the Nazis’ boot since 1940 and the Jews are subjected to all the violence there? Etty knows she and her family are going to die, but she refuses the hate and continues to sing about the beauty of life. “When one has an interior life, it does not matter, no doubt, on which side of the gates of a camp one is. In 1942, she even volunteered to become a social worker in the Westerbok transit camp, from where she was deported with her family to Auschwitz.
In It’s a tender thing that life (Albin Michel, 2015), Comte-Sponville says he is overwhelmed by this journey. “I love and admire him”, he does not hesitate to write. “She is alive and true, fragile and indestructible,” he continues. How one would like to be her friend, her husband, her son, her lover! She is happy and free, despite the war, despite the Gestapo, despite the “extermination” she sees coming. His diary is “one of the greatest spiritual texts that I know, one of the most astonishing, and certainly the one that moves me the most”, confides the philosopher. Etty is a miracle.
French-born Quebec playwright Jean-Marie Papapietro shares this admiration. In Etty Hillesum, voices in the night (Pleine lune, 2022, 88 pages), a “theatrical adaptation in three movements”, it revives the young woman who accepted to suffer without resigning herself and without succumbing to hatred.
I don’t know Papapietro, but, if I rely on Brigitte Haentjens, “to see one of his productions is to go beyond the boundaries of appearances and know how to welcome the words and intimate vibrations of people”. This is a spirit that suits Etty well.
We find her here, ardent, magnificent, all in interiority, who responds directly to an “Interrogator” seeking to understand his attitude before the Shoah, his refusal to flee in solidarity with his family, his rejection of hatred towards his executioners. and his relationship to a “beggar god, a wounded god who hides in the most secret of each individual”, a god whom Etty says she is ready to help if he is in distress.
In the second movement, Etty, in July 1942, explains to a resistant friend, who deplores his fatalism, that the only solution to the disaster is to root out the hatred in us. In the third movement, finally, in an out of time, Etty reiterates her love of life, despite the evil, denounces the infernal bureaucratic mentality which transforms people into “human resources”, declares God innocent of human misfortune and explains that it it is by kneeling down to consent to one’s weakness and obscurity that one can hope to approach the truth. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s beautiful.
“One does not emerge unscathed from frequenting Etty’s writings,” wrote Todorov. In effect. We come out of it much more humble and perhaps a little better.