War-Time Insight

Many of those who have gone before us down the frightening corridors of war and terrorism, have left us the security that can be found only in God's faithfulness. This weekly column will help us touch for ourselves the faith of Christians, Jews, and Moslems, many of whom have suffered death at the hands of terrorists, even at the hands of each other. The radiance of their peace shines a light on the world's fragile path.

Ettie Hillesum was a brilliant young Dutch woman who died in Auschwitz. She was only 29. While sharing her very intimate moments of prayer and struggle through a life torn apart in monstrous ways, she traces the journey of the mystic that each one of us has undertaken, the way beyond all mental and physical affliction into the realm of the timeless, the deathless:

"I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life. And I continue to grow from day to day, even with death staring me in the face. For my life has become extended by death. . . Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable horrors - it is all as one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty whole."

Later she wrote, "Many accuse me of indifference and passivity when I refuse to go into hiding; they say that I have given up. They say everyone who can must try to stay out of their clutches, it's our bounden duty to try. But that argument is specious. For while everyone tries to save himself, vast numbers are nevertheless disappearing. And the funny thing is I don't feel I'm in their clutches anyway, whether I stay or am sent away. I find all that talk so cliché-ridden and naïve and can't go along with it any more. I don't feel in anybody's clutches; I feel safe in God's arms, to put it rhetorically, and no matter whether I am sitting at this beloved desk now, or in a bare room in the Jewish district or perhaps in a labour camp under SS guards in a month's time-I shall always feel safe in God's arms. They may well succeed in breaking me physically, but no more than that. I may face cruelty and deprivation the likes of which I cannot imagine in even my wildest fantasies. Yet all this is as nothing to the immeasurable expanse of my faith in God and my inner receptiveness."

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork by Ettie Hillesum, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans