The Other Dutch Holocaust Diarist

by Ted Merwin

When we think of a young Jewish diarist from Amsterdam who was murdered by the Nazis, it is Anne Frank who springs immediately to mind. But for Susan Stein, the writer and performer of the new one-woman show, “Etty,” based on the writings of another Dutch Holocaust victim, Etty Hillesum, her subject’s story is equally significant and equally compelling. Directed by Austin Pendleton, “Etty” is one of the offerings of the Sixth Annual East to Edinburgh Festival, which previews shows that are bound for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this summer.

Hillesum was born in 1914 to a highly assimilated Jewish family in the town of Middelburg; her father was a classics teacher and her mother was a refugee from Russia who had survived a pogrom. She took a law degree, but at the urgings of her therapist and lover, an influential Jewish chiro-psychologist (an analyst who specializes in hand readings) named Julius Spier, she became interested in religious writings, especially the Bible and the works of St. Augustine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Rainer Maria Rilke. “He dug up God in me,” Hillesum wrote of Spier.

She kept a diary beginning in early 1941, and continued to write even after she was imprisoned in Westerbork, the transit camp that was the last stop before Auschwitz. In 1943, she slipped a card through the slats of the cattle car that was taking her, along with her parents and younger brother, to Auschwitz; it was retrieved and mailed by a farmer. The Jews, she eerily wrote, “left singing and in peace.” Her diaries and letters were first published in the early 1980s in a staggering 900-page volume that The New York Times Book Review lauded as “unsurpassed in Holocaust literature.”

In a telephone interview with The Jewish Week, Stein called Hillesum “an intellectual and a very modern woman, who had many lovers, but never married.” She noted that Hillesum and Frank, who lived only a few miles from each other, had much in common, although Hillesum was 15 years older. “Both refused to become hating machines. Both continued to believe in the goodness of mankind. And both held onto a world even when that world was annihilating them.”

Stein has performed the play at the Anne Frank Center in New York, as well as in Holland and Belgium. She concedes, however, that Hillesum has received relatively little attention, especially from the Jewish academic community. She attributes, this, in part, to Hillesum’s unconventional views of religion, which led her to experiment with a variety of faiths, including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. While she lived and died a Jew, “everyone who reads Etty has his or her own Etty,” Stein believes. “There are many mansions in the world that she’s created.”

“Etty” runs from July 23-26 at the 59E59 Theatre (59 E. 59th St.). The play will be performed at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, July 23, 9:15 p.m. on Friday, July 24, 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, July 25, and 7:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 26. For tickets, $15, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200.

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