Remembering Etty Hillesum as I read Tolstoy’s Resurrection

While cleaning out decades of collected paper, I came across four-thin-lined pages on which I’d typed quotes from Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life.

I typed the notes because I had borrowed the book and bracketed what I wanted to copy and remember. The time frame was 1984, when I used an electric typewriter before our first Apple computer. Remember those times?  No cell phones, no social media. Was there even 24-7 news?

Etty’s last words were a postcard thrown from a train in transport to Auschwitz in Germany, where she was murdered on November 30^th, 1943. An Interrupted Life is a collection of her diaries from 1941-43 while in Westerbork in the Netherlands. This was where the Dutch Jews were held until their transport to concentration camps. Etty wrote the following in a diary during this period. This is one quote from those four-typed pages, which I am mailing to the old friend who loaned me the book in 1984. The words in Hillesun’s diary speak for our current times, which are more disturbing each day. And I hear these particular words, as if a command has been given to me, who often visits mean-spirited roadhouses.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the lesson to be learned from this war.

This was also Tolstoy’s belief, as shown in Resurrection, his last novel, published in book form in 1900.

My Penguin Classics edition has 510 pages in small print.; and I have to limit how much I read of it each day out of kindness to my aging eyes. I will note this: Resurrection is one-third the length of War and Peace! In his final novel, Tolstoy creates Dmitri Nekhlyudov, who lived by the belief that life had been given to him purely for his enjoyment. How can Dmitri find redemption? Well… at least Dmitri realizes that he needs it, unlike so many seen and heard on 24-7 news.

Etty was a reader and she must have read Tolstoy, who died in 1910, four years before Etty’s birth. Her death was almost six months before my birth in June 1943. But I did not learn about Etty until after three years of living in West Germany, a divided nation then, with its Berlin wall.

I stopped just now and put on “Ode to Freedom,” Bernstein in Berlin, conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. 

Beethoven, who chose art instead of death and darkness. So did Etty, so did Tolstoy, and so must I.  To be continued…