Holocaust

Instructor Reading Guide

When we left Etty, she was saying mysticism must include “crystal-clear honesty” and things “stripped down to their naked reality.” You may recall Jack Nicholson’s character (Col. Nathan Jessup, commander of Guantanamo) in the film “A Few Good Men” (1992) saying to the Tom Cruise character (Lt. Kaffee), “You can’t handle the truth.”

What’s the truth? 700,000 Jews dead already (150)? “And yet I don’t think life is meaningless. And God is not accountable to us…. We are accountable to Him” (150). Is she just being brave? What do you think?

More “truth” by July 1, 1942. She often sees visions of “poisonous green smoke.” She’s not lost hope, she says. “It’s a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain” (152).

July 3, 1942: “What they are after is out total destruction” (154).

And so …? “It is all one in me, and I accept it as one mighty whole …. We carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all of history” (154).

There’s more: “I have looked our destruction … straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished…. I continue to grow day by day” (155).

Is she nuts? What do you think? I (the writer) might remind you that the Buddha’s First Noble Truth is that all life involves suffering, and Jesus was around 33 when he was tried, tortured, and executed. But a beautiful young Jew in Holland couldn’t have similarly deep religious insight … or could she?

The rest of the story has many moments and items that might catch your attention. Here are some ….

“Intellectual powers” aren’t enough; spiritual perception, feeling is needed (157). It’s not to “think” in the usual sense but to “plumb” (187). She’s developed a “stillness” (161), a “silent space”; she’s “squatting like a Buddha” (162).

The Psalms have become a part of her daily life (162). (Recall that reciting the Psalms is the practice of Benedictine monks and sisters, like those at Saint Leo Abbey and Holy Name.Monastery.) She values the “elemental” quality of the Old Testament and the “wonderful characters” there (162, 163). There are moments when she “can see right through life” and she’s “filled with a faith in God that has grown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first but has now become inseparable from me…. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be” (171).

Strange, isn’t it? How many of us can see that “frightening” spiritual growth has become a part of us? Or “just be” – when the world is falling apart? Is she out of touch with reality or actually seeing more clearly? What do you think?

She weaves together such spiritual practices as: silent sitting in awareness, contemplating Biblical texts, and growing a “new sense” with which she can see the deeper meaning of things. Notice that she herself – having gotten immensely important guidance from Julius Spier – is her own person here: she is creating her own mix of spiritual practices as an artist might combine different paints.

On July 25, 1942 she tells us, “There is a vast silence in me that continues to grow” (192). The silence in her “grows” -- on its own. For most of us, like Etty, this growth takes regular and steady spiritual practice, and still we don’t “make” it happen: it happens spontaneously. And in some cases, like Etty’s, the growth is exceptional.

Do you know any people who are intellectually gifted and have a “vast silence” within? This is a highly unusual occurrence. I’ve only known a couple, myself.

Spier dies (197-204). You know this has to have been immensely traumatic for Etty.

She wants to be “the thinking heart of the barracks” (199). She puts the heart first, and thinking second as qualifying heart. What do you think of this formula?

“The most essential and deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other, God to God” (204). This is a deeply mystical sentiment, much like her favorite, Meister Eckhart, and to Quakers like the colonial American, John Woolman, who believe that everyone has the Inner Light within.

She is reading the Gospels, especially Matthew, and is concerned with loving her enemies – of which she has plenty! Klass, a communist friend, accuses her of simply practicing Christianity. Etty replies: “Yes, Christianity, and why ever not?” (212).

Is she a Christian? Was Jesus? (No.) Was Paul? (Always thought of himself as a leader in a Jewish movement.) Can someone be a Christian without being a member of a Christian church? Etty was a member of no church.

She wants to be sent to “every one of the camps” scattered over Europe (223), for her life to be “one great prayer” (224), and to be in the thick of what people call horror and “still say: life is beautiful” (226).

“I have broken my body like bread and shared it out among men [human beings]. And why not, they were hungry and had gone without for so long” (230). Do you notice the eucharistic (Lord’s Supper, holy communion) implications of this language? Is this odd, or is she right on target? “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds” (231). This is very Christ-like imagery here. Is it too much or is it perhaps appropriate for a great-souled person in dire circumstances?

In the Letters from Westerbork (the transit camp) she writes, “Everything is fine, just as it is” (328), and not only are things not fine, but they’re going to get much worse.

Again, is she losing her mind, or seeing more clearly?

She certainly doesn’t understand everything. “What mysteries are these?” (343). She sees that it’s as if humans – in their atrocities – were worshipping gods of destruction. What do you think?

Finally, Jopie tells us, at the time of departure for Auschwitz, Etty was “talking gaily and smiling, with a kind word for everyone” (363).

On a note that Etty flung out of the train, she’d written: “We left the camp singing” (360).

Is she a goofy cheerleader, a saint, something else?