On Etty Hillesum - Neal Ascherson in 1984 in NYRB:

‘Etty Hillesum was a young woman, a Dutch Jew, who lived in Amsterdam. She was twenty-six when the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands took place. In the spring of 1942, the mass deportations of the Jews began, at first to the huge transit camp of Westerbork in eastern Holland.’

(…)

‘Etty Hillesum was an intellectual who wanted to be a writer. She kept a diary from 1941 onward, but the diary is at first hardly at all and later only indirectly the story of the destruction of the Jews in Holland. It is about herself and her relationships, initially about friends and lovers and then, increasingly, about her own very individual vision of a God. Etty came from a gifted, scholarly family in Deventer, studied law and Slavonic languages at the University of Amsterdam and then applied herself to psychology. By the time the journal begins, Etty had almost completed one major subjective struggle; she had become an independent and sexually liberated young woman, with only residual doubts about her own rather startling style of life, only spasmodic anxieties about the position of men and women. The diaries themselves record a second struggle, as Etty Hillesum in a sense abandons herself to find herself. The notes and entries are at first concerned with expanding her own sensibility, with rhapsodic accounts of emotions and sensations, with injunctions to herself to put more effort into her own self-realization as a writer.’

(…)

‘It would be impossible, for instance, to learn from her diary that Amsterdam was the only German-occupied city in Western Europe in which Jews organized themselves to fight physically on the streets against their persecutors.
My acceptance is not indifference or helplessness. I feel deep moral indignation at a regime that treats human beings in such a way. But events have become too overwhelming and too demonic to be stemmed with personal resentment and bitterness. These responses strike me as being utterly childish and unequal to the fateful course of events…. It is not as if I want to fall into the hands of destruction with a resigned smile—far from it. I am only bowing to the inevitable and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that they cannot rob us of anything that matters.

(…)
She does not exactly “find God,” but rather constructs one for herself. The theme of the diaries becomes increasingly religious, and many of the entries are prayers. Her God is someone to whom she makes promises, but of whom she expects and asks nothing.’

(…)

‘At the time she was living with, or at least sharing the bed of, her landlord, a man in his sixties. But she was on the brink of a new affair with another man much older than herself, and her portrait of this extraordinary person, enriched in entry after entry as she came to love him more deeply, is an unforgettable literary feat. Julius Spier, who was fifty-four when Etty encountered him, was a German-Jewish refugee. He had been a banker and a publisher before becoming, after training analysis under Jung in Zurich, the founder of “psychochirology.” Spier read palms, using palmistry as the foundation for his own strange and liberating brand of analysis. He also practiced therapy by wrestling with his patients, grappling with them, and forcing them to the ground (or sometimes, as with Etty, being floored himself), a technique whose strongly sexual connotations he in no way rejected.’

(…)

‘But he remained for her a liberator. It was not merely that the “magical personality” for which he is remembered steadied and calmed her. Etty learned the self-abnegation that became her creed in the last months in part by overcoming her own possessiveness about Spier, and by recognizing that this was a man she must share with others.’

(…)

‘The Bible and Tolstoy were safely in her rucksack when they closed the doors on her. Later, farmers near the German border found a postcard she had thrown out of the train. It read: “We have left the camp singing.”’

Read the review here.

In her diaries there is an entry that we should not spare the reader.

‘Anne-Marie heard a mother say this to her child on the heath: 'And if you don't eat your pudding sweetly, you'll have to be transported without your mommy!’

What else is there to say: eat your pudding, othewise you will be dported without your mummyy.

Perhaps this is what the undocumented migrants in the US tell their children.

Eat your pudding. Otherwise you will be deported without your mummy.