Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 January 2004 21:54:40
...Etty Hillesum 1941-43 is the most profound, moving and challenging book I have ever come across. Discovered it 5 or so years ago and since then it's been constantly in the background of my life ever since. Part of my research at the moment is asking the question 'how can we talk about God after the holocaust, colonialism and the critique of Christianity from feminism?' The following two passages are from letters written from Westerbork transit camp, from which every week a train left carrying 1,200 inmates bound for Auschwitz or Sobibor.
10 July 1943
I have a good friend here. Last week he was told to keep himself in readiness for transport. When I went to see him, he stood straight as an arrow, face calm rucksack packed beside his bed. We didn't mention his leaving, but he did read me various things he had written, and we talked a little philosophy. We didn't make things hard for each other with grief about having to say good-bye. We laughed and said we would see each other soon. We were both able to bear our lot. And that's what is so desperate about this place: most people are not able to bear their lot, and they load it onto the shoulders of others. And that burden is more likely to break one than one's own.
24 August 1943
Whenever misfortune strikes people have a natural instinct to lend a helping hand and to save what can be saved. Tonight I shall be helping to dress babies and to calm mothers - and that is all I can hope to do. I could almost curse myself for that. For we all know that we are yielding up our sick and defenceless brothers and sisters to hunger, heat, cold, exposure, and destruction, and yet we dress them and escort them to the bare cattle cars - and if they can't walk we carry them on stretchers. What is going on, what mysteries are these, in what sort of fatal mechanism have we become enmeshed? The answer cannot simply be that we are all cowards. We're not that bad. We stand before a much deeper question...
And it's that deeper question that I'm chasing like a hound. Even at 9:45 on a friday night!
Did I mention that I've found a darkroom at Street-Level Photoworks for hire for £8 per day - chemistry included?!