Etty Hillesum

Dutch Jewish writer. A student of Slavic languages and law at the University of Amsterdam, she began keeping a diary in March 1941, at twenty-seven, on the suggestion of a Jungian therapist named Julius Spier with whom she was working — and falling in love. The diary was her training ground. She started messy, anxious, full of self-doubt. Over two years she became something remarkable: a young woman who, inside the gathering catastrophe of the Nazi occupation of Holland, did the hardest possible inner work — refusing to hate, refusing to despair, refusing to flatten the people around her into "Nazis" or "Jews." In July 1942 she took a job with the Jewish Council, which gave her access in and out of Westerbork, the transit camp. She could have used the position to protect herself. She used it instead to walk in and out, bringing comfort to people about to be deported, and finally to volunteer to go with them. "I want to be there," she wrote, "in the thick of what they call 'horror,' and still be able to say: life is beautiful." She was deported to Auschwitz with her family in September 1943. She died there on November 30, at twenty-nine. Her diaries and letters survived because she gave them to a friend on the way to Westerbork. They were not published until 1981, as *An Interrupted Life*. Core teaching: the inner life is a place no one can take from you. You can choose, even in hell, what kind of person you become. Love and clear-eyed honesty are not opposites; they are the same thing. Key works: *An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943* and *Letters from Westerbork*.