Introduction: We are survivors seeking a life that is not “counterfeit”

American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has focused much of his life's work on the psychic lives of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. Yet he claims that all human beings living in the nuclear age are survivors:

Survivors, Lifton adds, often settle for “counterfeit nurturance […] divesting the survivor experience of some of its psychological horror.” To settle in this way is to trap ourselves in “patterns of distrust in human relationships and the sense that much of the world, even life itself, is counterfeit.” And religion, continues Lifton, is too often an accomplice to counterfeit survival: “We find little solace in the idea of a ‘divine spirit’ continuing on after the annihilation of humankind […]. We need to experience the nurturing affirmations of everyday human life.”

Struggling myself with a tendency toward counterfeit religious survival, I search here for a more authentic religious response to survivorship. In this study, I am led by contemporary American writer Carol Flinders's contention that Dutch Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) is a model for a more authentic religious life. Flinders reflects on what she calls Hillesum's terror of “splitting off” common in victims of trauma. Her trajectory argues that there is no situation within which it is impossible to have a spiritual practice, to come to life, to wake up.