Letters from Westerbork /

Etty Hillesum was 27 when she wrote these letters from a bleak and crowded Dutch concentration camp that served as a temporary stop for thousands of Jews on the way to extermination in Poland. (Hillesum died shortly after her arrival at Auschwitz.) Her descriptions of the horrible conditions at the camp the nightmarish juxtaposition of maternal tenderness and oafish cruelty, of comic songs performed for the commandant by actors sick with dread because they were slated for departure to Poland that very night make a portrait of the times that rivals a canvas by Goya or a fevered chapter by Dostoyevski. As a ``social worker'' for the Jewish Council, Etty had opportunities to leave the camp, but she refused to flee. She had to be there, not because the Nazis said so, but because of an almost mystical vision of her usefulness. Her moving and unforgettable letters show that in the midst of severe privations and the threat of death, people are capable of displaying their skills, idiosyncrasies, and genius for life ever more clearly and unquenchably. PM. 940.53'15 Hillesum, Etty Correspondence / Jews Netherlands Correspondence / Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Netherlands Personal narratives / Westerbork (Netherlands: Concentration camp) (CIP) 86-42625

After the publication of Hillesum's diaries, An Interrupted Life (in 1981, almost 40 years after her death in 1943 at the age of 29), a number of letters written to friends during her last year came to light. This life-affirming correspondence concerns her internment at Westerbork, a transit camp that the Hillesum family and more than 100,000 other Dutch Jews passed through en route to Auschwitz. Hillesum keenly details the diversity of the inmates, the camp's squalor, the hellish transports and the incomprehensibility of their situation: ``The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down for a chat, the sun is shining on my face, and right before our eyes, mass murder.'' Readers won't fail to marvel at her fortitude, her refusal to bow to hatred or despair and her capacity for selfless humaneness: ``Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness,'' and, written on a postcard she threw from the train that took her to Auschwitz, ``We left the camp singing.'' Photos not seen by PW. (November 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The publication of Hillesum's diary, An Interrupted Life ( LJ 12/15/83), restored to the world a luminous personality whose life was extinguished at 29 in the Holocaust. Now with the publication of her Letters , Hillesum's last desperate year is chronicled. As a member of the Dutch Jewish Council, she spent her time in Westerbork, a transit camp, trying to make its bewildered occupants comfortable and maintain an optimistic outlook and faith in God despite the fact that mysterious transports left each week for somewhere in Polandfrom whenceno one ever returned. In her last letter, thrown from a train, she says, ``We left the camp singing.'' These letters, which make human the tragedy of the Holocaust, belong in libraries everywhere. Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.