This week I learned the story of the Dutch diarist, thinker and peace worker Etty Hillesum. Born in 1916 in Middelburg, Netherlands Esther (Etty) Hillesum was a learned, bright, dynamic young person educated in law and slavic studies and fluent in five languages. Her story is known to us through the diaries she wrote during the German occupation of her country and for extraordinary, almost superhuman selflessness during the events that ultimately led to her murder in Auschwitz in 1943.

In 1942 as the pace and brutality of German deportations in the Netherlands accelerated, Etty dedicated her life to supporting tens of thousands of displaced people in the Westerbork transit camp as part of the Dutch Jewish Council. In July of that year, she voluntarily entered the camp for a time to continue her work, supporting those who were imprisoned there. By the summer of 1943, Jews across the Netherlands were in hiding in the face of increased deportations and widespread killings. And yet Etty returned once more to Westerbork to support the needs of her community. She would never return to her former life.

The diary she kept to document her actions, her community’s ordeal and her own spiritual transformation directs its gaze only secondarily toward the changing and increasingly brutal genocide swirling about her. Rather, its primary focus is inward. Though I’ve so far read her diaries only in part, my own opinion is that the most stunning characteristic of Etty Hillesum is her ability to not only maintain her basic inner humanity but to grow it, to interrogate its workings, its machinery and its dynamics until the shape of something of the divine begins to emerge.

When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn’t matter what side of the prison fence you’re on. . . I’ve already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, I already know everything. And yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment

– An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

For a person to know full well the nature of the horror towards which they walk, and to yet keep the flame of gratitude for life buring inside without interruption seems to me to be miraculous. In Hebrew the word for “miracle” is נס “nes”, which can also denote “banner” or “standard” or “sail”, as in the sail of a boat. In life and in death, Etty Hillesum’s standard, banner and sail was her writing. It is sometimes raw, often deeply introspective, frequently dark, occasionally feminist and now these many years later entirely Holy. Her diaries are a sacrifice of gratitude and survival. They are נס because there is no earthly reason that they should have been written in the first place and even less a reason that they should have survived.

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In a commentary on Parashat Tzav (specifically Leviticus 7:12), we read in the Talmud:

Rabbi Pinḥas, Rabbi Levi, and Rabbi Yoḥanan in the name of Rabbi Menaḥem of Galya: In the future, all the offerings will be abolished but the thanksgiving offering will not be abolished. All the prayers will be abolished, but the thanksgiving [prayer] will not be abolished.

Vayikra Rabbah 9:7

In other words, gratitude is forever. Even in the world to come, in the mythical perfected age when injustice and sin are utterly extinguished, we will continue to be required to express gratitude. The reason for this is simple: survival. We thank the universe because we’ve made it this far without being murdered, forgotten or otherwise extinguished. Whatever it was (and the Rabbis like to make lists) … a sea voyage, a disease, an attempt on one’s life, a progrom, a mass shooting, a murderous rampage, a fentanyl overdose, bullying, any kind of abuse or indeed an illegally and brutally conducted war on one’s home territory or nation (be that in 1943 or in 2024) — should we live to see the other side, we are required to give thanks.

But what if we know, like Etty, that we will not survive? What then?

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Three months before her murder, Etty Hillesum was transported from Westerbork to Auschwitz in a packed cattle car with a large number of Dutch Jews including her own parents and brother. She was one of over 60,000 Dutch Jews to travel this specific route in 1943 by way of one of over 65 transports. She knew full well that this would be her final journey, for she had watched so many of her countrymen step into these same transports over many months. None ever returned. It was during this final voyage that she wrote her last diary entry on this postcard:

Here is what she wrote:

Christine,

Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower’. I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be travelling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care. Friends left behind will still be writing to Amsterdam; perhaps you will hear something from them. Or from my last letter from camp.

Goodbye for now from the four of us.

Etty

We left the camp singing.

I want to repeat these words until they catch fire and burn away all of the suffering in the world. What was this “firm and clear” song? What a bafflement, what a miracle that it should have ever existed. The magical, sacrificial procedures described in Tzav are mysterious enough to anyone who struggles to understand their meaning. But this song is pure נס. And yet it is our duty as Jews and as people to try to understand both of these things, and in doing so, discover that they spring from a common root. Why do some of us sing, why do we find a thread of gratitude, even in the face of imminent death? Why do we offer our words to the universe when there seems almost no point in doing so, and why are some few of our ordinary words destined to become sacrosanct? This question is analogous to wondering at the strange process that enabled everyday foods and animals to acquire Holiness in ancient times. All that we have to give in gratitude for life are the everyday building blocks of that very life. The foods we eat. The animals that sustain us. The words that we form with our lips.

When Etty Hillesum finished her hastily-composed postcard with its final thank-you, she tossed it from the moving boxcar as it rattled through the countryside. The little card fluttered to the ground, buffeted by the winds of the receding train. Some time later a farmer picked it up and ensured that it was delivered. This is the physical reality of what happened. But in the world of the soul, the postcard never touched the ground. It ascended. And it is still ascending, eternally, and will continue to even in that time when there is no murder, no brutality, no war, no starvation, no occupation and no injustice.