Preliminary Remarks

Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz-Birkenau 75 years ago. Some 40 years later when her work was published, it was immediately perceived as a vivid and direct testimony to the tragedy that took place in Europe during World War II. She considered her own writing as preparatory notes for a later narrative. But we are left without the follow-up. Her notebooks represent one of the most illuminating testimonies and concrete complaints coming out of the tragedy. Fortunately, with new scholarship focusing on the literature of memory, the analysis of the Shoah and its radical evil shows us that human beings are able to perform unconscionable acts. This lesson stands as a warning: We are again in a dangerous moment of narcissistic retreat leading many countries including Europe and the US, and even India and Brazil, to the exclusion of the other, to the rejection of the different and the needy. Dangerous forms of the exaltation of violence, of the ideology of death, and of the denial of humanity have returned to the scene. It is no longer so clear what we can assume by the word “humanity” or what the expressions “human” life or “human” existence imply. What does “human being” mean?

These are the questions that inspired my initial approach to the work of Etty Hillesum. My investigation developed along two complementary lines; the first sees Hillesum as a witness to the Shoah, and the second views her life and work from a philosophical-anthropological perspective examining how she manifested the sense of the human. Her answers to my questions – revealed to us in her writings – are a promising legacy applicable to the present and to our future. She embodied a real philosophical anthropology in practice.