Getting to know Etty Hillesum, the Holocaust diarist starring at the Israel Festival

ByBARRY DAVISJULY 25, 2026 22:24How many of you out there have heard of Anne Frank? Silly question, right? Okay, on the same subject matter, how many of you have heard of Etty Hillesum?I’d be willing to wager a month’s (albeit not particularly impressive) income that the show of hands for the second query would be far more modest. Yes, there is Hagai Levy’s miniseries, Etty, which was screened at Lev cinemas around the country, in two parts, but that still leaves Hillesum trailing in her fellow Dutch-Jewish Holocaust-era diarist’s posthumous superstardom wake.Perhaps that public profile imbalance will be tipped a smidgen toward parity following performances of The Thinking Heart at the Jerusalem Theatre on August 6 and 7 (7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., and noon, respectively), as part of this year’s Israel Festival. Indeed, we are hardly talking about mass audience gatherings at the Henry Crown Auditorium, but those who do fork out on tickets will undoubtedly return home with plenty to mull over, as per the show title, in both a cerebral and emotional sense.The festival kicks off on July 28 and runs through to August 20, with shows, concerts and cultural events set for various venues around Jerusalem, as well as spots in the Western Negev and in the North. As the festival blurb has it, there will be “hundreds of artists, partners, and cultural figures in an open space of creation, curiosity, and dialogue.”The latter triad of elements is core to The Thinking Heart, which was crafted by Neta Shpigelman and will be performed, across a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, by Shpigelman and five other female artists. The production subheading - Six Diary Performances, in the Style of Etty Hillesum - spells out the director’s expansive line of thought.Etty Hillesum was an extraordinary character who maintained her quest for truth throughout her whole life. (credit: Portretfoto)Nothing short of breathtaking, eminently inspiringIt must be said that she and the rest of the performer crew - Meital Raz, Sara Siegel, Netta Spiegel, Talya Danzig, and Idit Kishi - had an abundance of juicy raw material to work from. Each of the artists familiarized themselves with Hillesum and her astounding and all-too-brief life by reading her diaries.They were eventually published in Dutch in the 1980s as Het verstoorde leven (An Interrupted Life), and later in English, as An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. The Hebrew version goes by the name of Hashamayim Shebetochi (“The Heaven within Me”).The book is nothing short of breathtaking and eminently inspiring. The journal is as intimate an account as one could encounter of a young Jewish woman living under Nazi occupation. One of the most impressive aspects of the chronicle is the writer’s zest for life, which never dims, even under the most desperate of emotionally and physically challenging existential circumstances. These are the musings and recording of day-to-day life - very much inner as well as outer - of a young woman searching for the meaning of life and grappling with her inner turmoil, her own worth and identity, and her place in the world.Had the increasingly invasive, and ultimately lethal, ravages of the Holocaust not been raging around her, the diaries may have been just that, a record of the thoughts and feelings of an evolving character going through universal pangs of maturation. This is the epitome of coming-of-age chronicling by a highly intelligent, relentlessly inquisitive person willing to risk everything to get to the truth, her own truth and to the very essence of life.Hillesum was 27 when she started putting pen to paper, much older than Frank and, hence, her writing relates to a more advanced stage of life and state of consciousness and awareness.The diaries take us along her odyssey through stratified philosophical, erotic, and practical personal climes, enabling us to follow her gradual growth and epiphanies. She was a truly remarkable character who lived life to the utmost, in seemingly impossible circumstances in Auschwitz, right until the bitter end.She was murdered there, along with the other members of her family, in 1943, despite having the opportunity to save herself. True to her unflinching efforts to maintain her principles, she preferred to go to her death, at the age of just 29, rather than run the risk of someone else being forced to take her place.Shpigelman was taken with Hillesum, her courage and integrity, from the off, even if it did take her a while to get around to it. The diaries also caught her at a serendipitous vantage point of her own life.“It happened 13 years ago, when I was 30,” she recalls. “I’d just gotten divorced and was going through a tough time. Back then I wasn’t really interested in spirituality, working on my inner self, meditation, and that sort of thing. I was into the romanticism of suffering, and being a theater actress and losing myself completely in the parts I took on.”Then a theater director told her he wanted to produce a show based on Hillesum’s life. “I had no idea who she was,” says Shpigelman. Everything changed when she settled down to read the journal, and a familiar imprint emerged. “I was immediately taken - this may sound silly - with her modern personality.”The chemistry was thereThe chemistry was there. “I was surprised by how much Etty was like me. She was busy with her love life, philosophy, literature, and art. And she talked about chastising herself for not writing enough, and she wanted to be Dostoyevsky. I knew that tortured and dramatic soul so well. There was something so free and daring in her.”That partly comes through as Hillesum talks about her passion for life, her quandaries about how to make her way through that, and her tempestuous feelings for her psychologist, a German Jew called Julius Spier who helped her make sense of her emotional morass and was twice her age.Everything about Hillesum seems to tend toward the stratospheric. She never did anything by halves, always driven to see whatever notion or feeling that cropped up through to the end.“Many of her texts, about love and desire - in Buddhism it is described as the desire to devour life rather than enjoying it. And there is the pain of things that are beyond your reach. She talks about how a beautiful landscape pains her, and how external beauty hurts her because she cannot merge with it.”Thirty-year-old fresh divorcée Shpigelman could identify with that. “I felt it was very relevant for me. From that moment on I was hers,” she states. She’d taken Hillesum on, lock, stock, and barrel. “It was as if I’d written her words myself. That led me into spiritual realms, and Etty was my teacher. I could listen to her. She wasn’t the banal spiritual teacher one imagines. She was just like me.”If getting into, and identifying with, a character before an actor portrays them on stage or on the screen, then Shpigelman had hit gold.The Shpigelman-Hillesum tango goes on. “She was caught up in the Holocaust, and my father contracted cancer. I turned my time with him, toward his death, into a spiritual lesson. I said, if Etty can do that, I can too.”That fits the bill to a T. Hillesum writes about helping others, which she carries out tirelessly as everything around her falls apart. And before she is incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp, Hillesum entrusts her diaries and letters to a non-Jewish friend with the request that they be published should she not survive. Hence, we are party to invaluable confidentialities spawned by the inner machinations of an extraordinary person who stuck to her hard-earned principles come what may.Shpigelman certainly benefited from the Dutch writer’s revelations during a trying passage of her own life, and believes we all stand to gain from Hillesum’s pearls of wisdom and insight. “It is not just about learning how to perceive our trials without falling into the trap of seeing ourselves as victims. She shows us how to view life, and the things that happen to us, in a non-victim way.”Identifying so closely with the heroine led Shpigelman to spread Hillesum’s word as far and wide as she possibly could. “I began to buy copies of the book and give them to family and friends,” she notes.But she made sure she kept a special version for herself. “I have one which has a dedication to the buyer’s grandmother. She asks her grandmother to read the book patiently, even if there are things there she finds hard to deal with.She writes that the grandmother will find her, and the issues she has to deal with, between the words, and that the grandmother’s own issues will look different after she reads the book. It is an attempt by the granddaughter to offer a helping hand and strengthen the bond between them.” That is quite a dedication, which made the copy all the more precious for Shpigelman. “You realize the grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.”There is another antecedent at play behind the scenes of the Israel Festival production - Siegel’s own grandmother, whom she called Nona. The eponymous show Siegel created featured in the 2022 Israel Festival, and was subsequently performed at Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv.That gave Siegel emotional firsthand insight into Hillesum’s credo and experiences, and how to go about crafting her slot in The Thinking Heart.“I grew up with my grandmother. She was a partisan in Italy during the war. She was tough. Somehow all her close family members survived,” she explains.That makes the forthcoming Israel Festival work all the more personal and pertinent for Siegel. “I think we need to look at the Holocaust with fresh eyes,” she posits. “So many people use that word for political or national ends, and they make comparisons. It has become a clichéd tool, and most people no longer connect with the real meaning.”There is a lot to say for Siegel’s perspective. Even if there is nothing nefarious or self-seeking behind an unfeeling approach to the most catastrophic passage in Jewish history, it is hard to relate to such an enormous figure - that most frequently trotted out of statistics, of six million - as anything but that, just a number, even with its cataclysmic human backdrop.By shining a deftly professionally created spotlight on the life and end of Etty Hillesum, Shpigelman, Siegel et al offer us the opportunity to ponder the ostensibly self-understood fact that we are talking about six million individuals whose lives were summarily and bestially decimated and then cut short by the Nazi killing machine.And that is even without considering the emotional fallout that affected the victims’ relatives across the ensuing generations.As a senior member of our cultural domain recently noted to me, why do we take visiting heads of state and politicians to Yad Vashem to show them how much the Jews have suffered over the years? Why not balance that out, for example, by dropping by, say, the ANU Museum in Ramat Aviv where they can also get some idea of Jewish achievements and successes? Hillesum would, presumably, have gone for that.Like the director Siegel says, the diary raises elements of life that are just as pertinent today. “She talks about issues that engage me, and all of us. These are things we can all identify with, on a mundane level too - depression, love, and sex. That is what makes the diary so powerful. Through her we can address that era in a special way, not the way we generally imagine it was. In a non-trivial way.”Siegel says Hillesum’s writings have changed her, and served as a catalyst for a new way of thinking for her. “I feel I am at the start of a process. I am pre-Etty.”That applies to the vast majority of the rest of us too. It is hard to comprehend how Hillesum maintained an unyielding grasp on life, and every life-affirming element she could possibly glean, as her world was collapsing around her. That, in post-October 7 Israel, is something to marvel at and, hopefully, put at least some of Hillesum’s insight into practice ourselves.From her diaries we learn that she frequently engaged with God, although not in a strictly religious context. And rather than blame the calamity of the mass murder of the Jews on divine intervention, or the lack thereof, she says she needs to make room for God in her own heart and soul and help Him. That is some concept to adopt and try to put into practice.Hillesum also declares that she refuses to hate anyone. She hardly mentions the Nazi brutality that engulfs her. “The digital format of the book has a word search feature, and if you look for Hitler you find the name appears just once, in the entire diary,” Shpigelman notes. “She says, sometimes it’s Hitler, or Ivan the Terrible, or a plague. She says a person has to bear suffering. The question is how they do that.”That suggests we are capable of mitigating our trying circumstances by exercising our own subjectivity instead of constantly bemoaning our fate. The Thinking Heart should help channel the Jerusalem Theatre audience in that positive direction as they take their place - on the stage together with the performers - for the six 10-minute slots that run the gamut of artistic disciplines and the full breadth of human emotion.For tickets and more information: www.israel-festival.orgFollow us on Google