The thoughts I would like to share in this article, range from the philosophical to the pedagogical. All are based on considerations that arose in the aftermath of the Shoah. The turn towards mass extermination became possible when the general trend of events shifted to “making man no longer human.” So our question becomes: is it possible to experience the opposite– a “path towards humanization?” How can we embark on a journey towards the full realization of our human nature?

During the years of the Shoah, Etty Hillesum set forth on just such a journey. She created and engaged a pedagogical and spiritual path intended to remove the causes of dehumanization and promote a process of human edification. As a young woman of twenty-seven in Holland in the nineteenforties, she realized it was her existential priority to work on herself and discover what it would take to attain completeness as a human being. She began on 8 March 1941, when she wrote on the first page of her diary, “but I know again now that […] I simply need to do a lot of work on myself before I develop into an adult and a complete human being.”