In the year 1942 a young Jewish girl named Anne Frank began writing a diary as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. Almost everybody knows that.
But, what almost nobody knows is that another Dutch Jew, Etty Hillesum, was writing another diary at the same time just a few miles away.
On the surface it would appear that these diaries, both powerful documents from the Holocaust, have much in common. Each recorded the writer’s feelings, both about her personal life and the broader situation. Each writer died in the camps, Frank in Bergen-Belsen, Hillesum in Auschwitz.
But there is much that is different. The diary of Frank was written by an adolescent and tells about events in a small space. Hillesum’s diaries describe life in the city — on the streets and in the cafes. They go beyond the headlines and the lists of regulations. Later, they — as well as the letters she sent from Westerbork to relatives and friends — chronicle her life in the camp, where she sought to be “the thinking heart of the barracks.” Most powerfully, they also describe her remarkable spiritual journey, including some of her highly personal prayers.
Hillesum’s diaries languished, unread, for more than 30 years, until a Dutch publisher got hold of the eight notebooks in 1980. First published in this country in 1982 under the title “An Interrupted Life,” a later edition includes the letters from Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp.
Taught in university courses on the Holocaust, Hillesum’s memoirs have gained a small but passionate following.
Dorothy Richman, who is assistant rabbi at the Conservative Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco, is one of Hillesum’s advocates. She will speak about the diaries and letters at a free “Lunch and Learn” program on Tuesday, Feb. 20 at the Bureau of Jewish Education in San Francisco. The event is part of the annual “Feast of Jewish Learning,” sponsored by the BJE in conjunction with area synagogues, schools and Jewish organizations.
Richman heard about the diaries from a Catholic friend in New York several years ago. “She said I had to read this story and, once I did, I was shocked that I never heard of her,” the rabbi said during a recent interview. “I was captivated.”
The rabbi and the writer were about the same age, 27, when she first read “An Interrupted Life.”
“One of the most powerful points of connection was that one of my friends could have written it,” Richman notes. “It’s almost like reading a record of how someone you know now might have responded in that situation.”
Spiritual though she was, Hillesum was no goody-two-shoes saint. “This is a real person,” Richman stressed. “She has her moods.”
She also had her experience. While Frank was just becoming aware of her sexuality, Hillesum was in full possession of hers. An intense love affair with the charismatic psychotherapist Julius Spier provides a thread that runs through the early diaries. In fact, the opening page contains the sentence: “I am accomplished in bed.”
With time, and as the Nazi noose tightened around the necks of the Dutch Jews, Hillesum’s thought matured. She increasingly drew sustenance from her spiritual beliefs, which — although based in the Jewish faith — were personal, creative and idiosyncratic.
“When I pray, I hold a silly, naive or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God,” she wrote.
As a result, according to Richman, Christians and Jews have claimed the diaries equally.
“She had her own internal system, leading her to God and prayer,” the rabbi said. “I find that I am very inspired by her prayers.”