This edition continues the section Poetry, Diaries, Novels. Home Movies and Literature, which each year hosts a meeting with a writer who has explored the theme of words as a means of investigating personal stories interwoven with collective history. Fragments of life thus compose the mosaic of history: past, present, and future. In this exploration, the media that record reality—photography, cinema—often flow beneath the surface: evoked, examined, questioned. This year’s guest is Judith Koelemeijer, Dutch journalist and writer, with her work Etty Hillesum. The Story of Her Life (Adelphi, 2025).
Etty believed in life with all her heart. She did not fear death, because she knew that life would go on without her and that, one day, better times would come. What mattered was not herself, but the fact that we, as a collective, would rise again from the mud as a kinder and more loving human species.
On March 9, 1941, on the advice of her therapist Julius Spier, Esther Hillesum began entrusting to a notebook the painful tumult of her thoughts—her “spiritual constipation,” as she described it with biting humor. No earlier writings of hers are known, except for a letter written in 1936 to her friend Pim. On September 7, 1943, Etty boarded a train with her parents and her brother Mischa, bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau, that immense city of slaves, and from that moment on, all trace of her was lost. The dazzling diary of those two years, 1941–1942, thus seems to encompass her entire existence, as if it were the residue of a fire, or a sacrifice. There is no before and no after. And yet, in 1941, Etty was only twenty-seven years old. Who was she really? Or, rather, who had she been before her encounter with Spier gave her new life?
By tirelessly investigating countless documents, testimonies, correspondences, family trees, and photo albums, Judith Koelemeijer has succeeded in filling the void surrounding the Diary, giving it a background: shedding light on Etty’s family – “a stunning mixture of barbarism and high culture,” and the epicenter of a psychic earthquake that would overwhelm, besides her, her brothers Jaap and Mischa – on her university studies in law and her passion for Russian literature, on her vast circle of friends, on her multiple, unreserved love affairs (“I broke my body as if it were bread and distributed it to men”), on her painful decision to work for the Jewish Council at the Westerbork camp, where Jews destined for deportation were gathered, and where she could feel herself part of a collective fate that had to be embraced: “to be present with all one’s heart”, that alone mattered.
Journalist and writer, Judith Koelemeijer lives and works in Amsterdam. Etty Hillesum was first published in 2022.
With the supporto of Settore Biblioteche e Welfare culturale del Comune di Bologna nell’ambito del Patto per la Lettura di Bologna, Ambasciata e Consolato Generale del Regno dei Paesi Bassi and ‘La Scoperta dell’Olanda’.
In collaboration with Adelphi and Libreria Trame.
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Image: Etty Hillesum on a sailing trip (1937). Photo by Bernard Meijlink | color editing cover photo © Erwin Zeemering