Etty Hillesum

Many times I have experienced despair. Self-righteous indignation became an inculcation. I yelled at God. Lashed out at random. No one could be comfortable around me until they knew whether they were in the presence of jekyll or hyde.

Viktor Frankl is a hero of mine. Meaningfulness could not escape from him:

It was due to his and others' suffering in these camps that he came to his hallmark conclusion that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that therefore even suffering is meaningful. This conclusion served as a strong basis for Frankl's logotherapy. An example of Frankl's idea of finding meaning in the midst of extreme suffering is found in his account of an experience he had while working in the harsh conditions of the Auschwitz concentration camp:

... We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." [7]

Another important conclusion for Frankl was:

If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life– an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival. [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

I now have a heroine: Etty Hillesum. Both she and Frankl attained a level of spiritual maturity I never will, but can appreciate. Her story:

Spiritual Maturity: The Case of Etty Hillesum (1)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...tty-hillesum-1

Spiritual Maturity: The Case of Etty Hillesum Part 2
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...illesum-part-2

Spiritual Maturity: The Case of Etty Hillesum Part 3 - Final Days
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...art-3-final-da

Her work involved helping inmates in extreme conditions. Over 10,000 people were cramped into a few buildings. Etty did not complain. Even in the face of stark horror, she continued to observe and enjoy nature and beauty: "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... The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension."

She is fully open to the extremes of a simultaneously wonderful and terrible reality. That there is light in the darkness allows her to take an ironic tone, and this seems to express hope, not for deliverance from the ordeal she and others are facing, but from the risk of meaninglessness in their suffering.

When she cannot alter history, Etty still feels she has been chosen at least to record it with unflinching honesty: "I have told you often enough that no words and images are adequate to describe nights like these (during which the weekly ‘transport lists' of a thousand names are published). But still I must try to convey something of it to you." In a long letter dated 24th August, she continues: "If I were to say that I was in hell that night, what would I really be telling you? I caught myself saying it aloud to myself and quite soberly, ‘So that's what hell is like'... ‘God Almighty, what are you doing to us?' The words just escape me... We are being hunted to death all through Europe."

This is not so much a cry of despair as a chillingly accurate summary of the predicament of the Jewish people of the time, during which eighty-three trains carried over 90,000 Dutch people to Nazi death camps. Etty was still only twenty-eight years old when these terrible things really happened. She is not blinded by the madness and cruelty of it. She remains able always to write something positive or wise. People in the camp die of a broken spirit, she says, for example, "Because they can no longer find any meaning in life."

Her vision has become completely holistic, her words and ideas taking on a truly mystical quality: "Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the same time. The two are in balance, everywhere and always. I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is. Every situation, however miserable, is complete in itself and contains the good as well as the bad." Surely now she is as spiritually mature as a person can become in this life.

One day I hope to at least begin to understand " ... I do not have to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is."