I met a remarkable person earlier this week. In 1941, Etty Hillesum, then a 27-year-old Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, began to write a journal that I have been reading from all week. The journal covers the period from March, 1941, to October, 1942- not a very long time. But, given the background of Nazi occupation that was happening in Europe at the time, the journal records the spiritual transformation of a self-absorbed intellectual into someone in deep communion with God.

We have records of her writings from the time the Nazi oppression in the Netherlands began to worsen, through her family’s relocation to Westerbork, a holding camp for various “undesirables” being shipped weekly to Auschwitz in Germany. The last record we have of her writing is a postcard she threw from the train which carried her from Westerbork to Auschwitz. It was found by some farmers and mailed. It said, “We have left the camp singing.” Odd words, one might conclude, to have been written by someone who knew full well what that train ride to Auschwitz meant. But they were words written after months of profound and wonderful discoveries about God, even in the midst of circumstances that were destroying the faith of many others.

As she watched the slow destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam, she wrote:

“The jasmine behind my house has been completely ruined by the rains and storms of the last few days, its white blossoms are floating about in muddy black pools on the low garage roof. But somewhere inside me the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as profusely and delicately as it ever did. And it spreads its scent round the House in which You dwell, oh God. You can see, I look after You. I bring you not only my tears and my forebodings on this stormy, grey Sunday morning, I even bring you scented jasmine.. I shall try to make you at home always. Even if I should be locked up in a narrow cell and a cloud should drift past my small barred window, then I shall bring you that cloud, oh God, while there is still the strength in me to do so.”

After several months at Westerbork, where conditions became more and more crowded and more deplorable as more and more Jews were passed through it, Etty wrote these words of almost unimaginable meaning:

“You have made me so rich, oh God, please let me share Your beauty with open hands. My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God, one great dialogue. .At night, when I lie in my bed and rest in You, oh God, tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer.”

Etty, her parents, and a brother and sister died at Auschwitz in November, 1943. The diaries and journals written by Etty before and during her time at Westerbork were not discovered until 1981. They have been published under the title An Interrupted Life-The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. The book has since been translated into 14 languages and deserves to be read by many others for years to come. Others, many others, need to know that, even in the worst of circumstances, it is possible to leave “the camp singing.”
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Here are some other quotations from Etty Hillesum’s journals. They are part of a spiritual feast, served by Etty, and nourishing for generations to come:

“ALAS, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”

“We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.”