We Left the Camp Singing

Amsterdam, 1942. Her pen scratched across the page as bombs fell in the distance. Etty Hillesum pressed her hand to the cold desk, steadying herself. Around her, friends whispered of hiding places and false papers. But she remained at her journal, writing by candlelight.

"There is a deep well inside me," her pen moved across the page. "And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too."

The twenty-eight-year-old Dutch woman had discovered that even as Nazi occupation tightened around her throat, even as Jewish families disappeared nightly from Amsterdam streets, she found herself growing lighter. Not naive. Not blind. But luminous.

Etty wrote everything down. The queues for rations. The yellow stars sewn to coats. The cattle cars loading passengers for unknown destinations. She witnessed it all without flinching, without hatred poisoning her pen.

"I am not bitter," she wrote as her world collapsed. "I find life beautiful and meaningful."