Around ten years ago, during a spell of confusion and helplessness, I came across a small book in Hebrew called The Sky within Me – The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. After breathless reading, I felt I had found something I could talk about for the rest of my life.
I grew up a pious Orthodox Jew. At twenty, I left that world forcefully, violently, abandoning questions of God, faith and meaning. I tried to fill the resulting void — and depression that came with it — with work, ambition, success; mostly in vain. Hillesum offered another option: a different religiosity, a new sense of faith, beyond institutional religion.
Hillesum’s diary, written with rare talent over eighteen months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, reads as the selfjourney of a modern, free-spirited, humorous, sexual young woman. At its heart is a leap: from a neurotic, self-absorbed woman to someone with deep autonomy. That process is accelerated by the threat she faces as a Jewish woman, and shaped by her lover and mentor, psycho-chirologist Julius Spier — yet it transcends both. At some point, she knows that even when everything is taken from her — her home, her freedom, even her life — she still has an inner core that can’t be lost.
I believe one cannot tell another Holocaust story, nowadays, without charging it with universal, contemporary relevance — and telling it in a new language. Hillesum’s ideas are too urgent for today’s world to stay bound to history, they must break into our lived reality, especially after the horrors that shake the world of so many, over the past two years. Her rejection of hatred, solidarity with the unprivileged, and inner freedom have brought solace and meaning to countless readers over the forty-four years since her diaries were published. I’m one of them. I hope this series helps them reach many more.
Above all, this is a love story: the love of a young woman for the man who awakened her soul, and out of that awakening — a love for life, God, and all humankind.
