Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“I want to get to know this century of ours inside and out. I feel it every day anew. I run my fingertips along the contours of our age. (…) I make myself confront everything that crosses my path, which sometimes leaves me feeling battered. It is just as if I let myself crash violently into myself, leaving dents and scratches. (…) I also have the feeling that all the problems of our age and of mankind in general have to be battled out inside my little head.”

4 September 1941

“I wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short. And that is why I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath: so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again, need not face the same difficulties. Isn’t that doing something for future generations?”

3 July 1942

“I shall try to convey to you how I feel (…). When a spider spins its web, does it not cast the main threads ahead of itself, and then follow along them from behind? The main path of my life stretches like a long journey before me and already reaches into another world. As if I (…) was now helping to build a new and different society.”

3 July 1943

The selected excerpts are a particularly vivid indication of how Etty saw herself as a contemporary witness and a transmitter of awareness to future generations. She considers the problems of her time to be phenomena which might also be of significance in other national, cultural or religious contexts. This explains why Etty not only dwells upon Shoah-specific topics but also on universal issues. She uses an image to try to shed light on her reasons for writing a diary. She compares the work with that of a spider spinning its web. In general, a spider and its web have rather a negative connotation, being associated with something predatory, a threat, a trap or the danger of becoming ensnared. Through Etty’s use of metaphors, these pictures undergo a new, contrasting interpretation. The spider takes on the role of a creative being, the architect of a web of ideas. Etty hopes that the perceptions recorded in her diary will reach out into another world, a future world. With her diary, she wants to cast out a thread which future generations can pick up, so that her spiritual legacy might contribute to building a new and better society after her death. Etty’s comparison between herself and a spider, and between her diary and a spider’s web, has become my central visual metaphor. It winds through this series of illustrations and you can find it in several of the pictures (“Fear”; “Flowers”; “Travel Eastward”; “Thinking Heart”; “Future”).

The faces found in the top right-hand corner of the picture were inspired by original sketches Etty drew in her diary. The writing swinging from her pen into the future was also based on the contents of the original diary.

You may have noticed the letter “S.” on the right-hand page of her diary – a reference to the significant impact of the Jewish psychochirologist Julius Spier on Etty’s spiritual development. Spier was her mentor, friend and lover. The decision to start writing a diary was probably taken at his prompting. In her writings, Etty refers to him as “S.”.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations by the artist about the concept of the illustration:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“And now Jews may no longer visit greengrocers’ shops, they will soon have to hand in their bicycles, they may no longer travel by tram, and they must be off the streets by eight o’clock at night.”

12 June 1942

 “We are not allowed to walk along the Promenade any longer, and every miserable little clump of two or three trees has been pronounced a wood with a board nailed up: No Admittance to Jews.”

22 March 1942

“But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact. They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. (…) We may of course be sad and depressed by what has been done to us; that is only human and understandable. However, (…) I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. (…) Life is hard, but that is no bad thing. If one starts by taking one’s own importance seriously, the rest follows. It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself.”

21 June 1942

The image of the sky is a recurring metaphor in Etty’s diary: the expanse of the sky as a symbol for freedom. Another central element in her use of metaphors as revealed in the diary excerpts is that of an inner and an outer world: the sky “within me”/”above my head” - two worlds which have many characteristics in common and interact strongly. I also deal with this understanding of hers in the illustration “God”. In that context, Etty compares people with buildings which you can enter; buildings with open doors, corridors and rooms.

Through the illustration “Sky”, I wanted to express this intertwining of the inner and outer worlds through Etty’s posture. Her outspread arms point towards the sky above her – whereas her closed eyes are oriented towards the sky within. On the one hand, the illustration depicts Etty in the centre of the scene and, therefore, as a part of a world in which Jews are subject to more and more discrimination. On the other hand, Etty’s body is only partially included in the picture – with this I express a certain independence from the outside world which Etty had been developing during the course of her process of maturation. A source of inspiration for this illustration was another passage from the diary in which Etty compares herself with a wandering Jew, wrapped up in cloud. A cloud of her own thoughts and feelings that envelope and accompany her, in which she feels warm, protected and safe (Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, p. 43).

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations by the artist about the concept of the illustration:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“Very early on Wednesday morning a large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each one of us was only our inner attitudes. I noticed a young man with a sullen expression, who paced up and down looking driven and harassed (…) He kept looking for pretexts to shout at the helpless Jews: “Take your hands out of your pockets …” and so on. I thought him more pitiable than those he shouted at, and those he shouted at I thought pitiable for being afraid of him. When it was my turn to stand in front of his desk, he bawled at me, “What the hell’s so funny?” I wanted to say, “Nothing’s funny here except you,” but refrained. “You’re still smirking,” he bawled again. And I, in all innocence, “I didn’t mean to, it’s my usual expression.” And he, “Don’t give me that, get the hell out of here,” his face saying, “I’ll deal with you later.” (…) I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to asked, “Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?” (…) I should have liked to start treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be put on the system that uses such people. What needs eradicating is the evil in man, not man himself.”

 27 February 1942

Through Etty’s regular practice of writing, her spirituality developed continuously. In the course of time, she built up an inner world, a freedom, which was, to a certain extent, untouchable and independent from the repressions of the outside world (cf. also the annotations to the illustration “Sky” regarding the sky metaphor).

One of Etty’s remarkable strengths was her intellectual engagement with her persecutors, their deeds and their motives. Only through proximity and direct encounter was she able to observe and dissect them intellectually in order to then record her reflections in her diary.

“Humiliation always involves two. The one who does the humiliating, and the one who allows himself to be humiliated. If the second is missing, that is, if the passive party is immune to humiliation, then the humiliation vanishes into thin air” (Hillesum, p. 144).

I created this illustration based on the German publication of Hillesum’s writings. The German translation implies that Etty steps forward to the Gestapo officers by herself – the same impression is conveyed in the English translation (p. 85 in Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork. New York: Henry Holt, 1996). Through the French translation I later discovered that Etty actually handled this situation with her mentor Julius Spier at her side (p. 368 in Les Écrits d’Etty Hillesum: Journaux et Lettres 1941-1943, Édition intégrale, Éditions du Seuil, novembre 2008). Etty’s behaviour remains, nevertheless, remarkable, but this passage illustrates how, through a loose translation, certain situations may appear in a different light.

I depicted the uncertainty of the Gestapo officers in the face of this unusual aplomb through the beads of sweat and the nervous fiddling with the ballpoint pen.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“Many say, “How can you still think of flowers!” Last night, walking that long way home through the rain with blisters on my feet, I still made a short detour to seek out a flower stall, and went home with a large bunch of roses. They are just as real as all the misery I witness each day.”

 23 July 1943

 “What is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation, we can have no more illusions about that.”

 3 July 1942

For Etty, the flowers bring some colour (= joy) into her life. I carried this idea over to the illustration. The RED brings colour into the black and white picture.

The clock metaphor: due to its location in the picture, the clock seems almost to be sitting facing the table like another person. I imagined the atmosphere in the room: the other people’s incomprehension regarding Etty’s love for flowers despite the hostile circumstances at that time – oppressive silence at the table – time elapsing, interrupted only by the ticking of the clock. In this silence, the clock with its mechanical sounds has a brutal presence, just like another human being sitting at the table. The clock reads twenty-four minutes to twelve. The German saying “It is five minutes to twelve” expresses that something menacing is going to happen soon – at 12 o’clock. At the time depicted in the illustration (23 July 1942), the situation of Etty and her family has not reached this fatal point – not yet. This is why the clock still reads twenty-four minutes to twelve. But time will move on. About one year later, on 7 September 1943, Etty and her family will be deported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to a Red Cross report, Etty dies three months later (30 November 1943).

With the second excerpt, I want to point out that, despite her unbroken passion for flowers, Etty was in no way a dreamer who tried to flee from reality into a make-believe world. The excerpt, chronologically located before the previous one, shows that she was entirely aware of the brutality of their imminent fate. Etty’s efforts to preserve her sensibility for small pleasures seems to me to have been something from which she could draw strength and maintain her love for life.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“Sometimes, when I least expect it, someone suddenly kneels down in some corner of my being. When I’m out walking or just talking to people. And that someone, the one who kneels down, is myself.”

16 September 1942

“And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call “God.” (…) Hineinhorchen – I so wish I could find a Dutch equivalent for that German word. Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others, unto God. And if I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God. (…) Sometimes they [people] seem to me like houses with open doors. I walk in and roam through passages and rooms, and every house is furnished a little differently, and yet they are all of them the same, and every one must be turned into a dwelling dedicated to You, oh God.”

17 September 1942

This illustration is devoted to Etty’s conception of “God” – which is a very personal one. In this context, we encounter again her idea about an outer and an inner world (cf. my annotation to the illustration “Sky”). On the left of the illustration, we see a situation which takes place in the outer world. I imagined a setting which is a continuation of that depicted in the preceding illustration, “Flowers”: Etty in the middle of a conversation with friends, with the bouquet of roses on the table. In contrast to this, the right of the illustration visualizes Etty’s inner world, which stands for her understanding of God as described in the excerpts.

Whereas the roses of the outer world (left) are depicted in shades of grey, there are red petals blowing through Etty’s inner world (right). In view of the day-to-day misery, many of Etty’s acquaintances cannot understand how she is still able to enjoy flowers. In these people’s eyes, even colourful flowers “appear” grey. In contrast to them, Etty draws inner strength from the splashes of colour.

Etty’s inner voice (= the voice of God) is depicted as writing floating through her inner world. I based the form of the writing on Etty’s handwriting as it appears in her original diary – the inner voice being a precursor to that which she later wrote down. The same applies to the white masks floating through the hallways of her inner world – they were inspired by original sketches which Etty drew in her diary.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“Did I really send a letter that made it look as if all my courage had gone? I can hardly believe it. There are moments, it’s true, when I feel things can’t go on. But they do go on, you gradually learn that as well. Though the landscape around you may appear different: there is a lowering black sky overhead and a great shift in your outlook on life, and your heart feels grey and a thousand years old. But it is not always like that. A human being is a remarkable thing. The misery here is really indescribable. People live in those big barracks like so many rats in a sewer. (..) And then three days’ travel eastward. Paper “mattresses” on the floor for the sick. For the rest, bare boards with a bucket in the middle and roughly seventy people to a sealed car. A rucksack each was all they were allowed to take. How many, I wondered, would reach their destination alive?“

 3 July 1943

The train in which Etty was deported from Westerbork Transit Camp to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 7 September 1943 contained 987 people in total, including 170 children. In the excerpt, Etty talks about “roughly seventy people to a sealed car”. You might observe a certain discrepancy between this number and the number of people depicted in the illustration. My decision to integrate far less people is based on the following idea. The planks breaking under the people’s feet symbolise their powerlessness against their approaching death. The bottomless blackness under the planks and in the front of the illustration represents the “realm of the dead”. The two men in the foreground are on their way into this world, while many others have already perished and vanished into the blackness before them.

The idea for the illustration of the man tightly clutching his suitcase has its origin in a historical photo depicting a Jewish prisoner in the transit camp at Westerbork. I found this gesture to be a strong symbol for the people’s desperate longing for a secure footing – in a time in which orientation, security and the former circumstances of their lives are radically broken apart.

As outlined in the comments on the illustration “The Spider and its Web”, Etty’s comparison between herself and a spider as well as between her diary and a spider’s web has become the central metaphor of this series of illustrations. In contrast to the prevailing negative associations of spiders, Etty’s use of metaphor presents a creative animal, the architect of a web of ideas (cf. my annotation to the illustration “The Spider and its Web”). In the illustration “Travel Eastward”, I depicted the spider, for once, in accordance with its more customary association – as a predator. Through this shift in meaning, the observer is challenged to reflect consciously upon the atypical use of this metaphor in Etty’s writings.

Etty repeatedly compares the circumstances they are living in with those of rats. I also integrated the symbol of the rat into the illustrations “Freedom” and “Thinking Heart”.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“If you have a rich inner life, I would have said, there probably isn’t all that much difference between the inside and outside of a camp. Would I myself be able to live up to such sentiments? There are few illusions left to us. Life is going to be very hard. We shall be torn apart, all who are dear to one another. I don’t think the time is very far off now. We shall have to steel ourselves inwardly more and more.“

12 March 1942

“Many who are indignant about injustices are indignant only because the injustices are being inflicted on them. Their indignation is skin-deep. In a labour camp I should die within three days. I should lie down and die and still not find life unfair.”

 4 July 1942

The illustration shows the arrival of the deportation train in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. You can still find the wrought iron writing “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (= “working makes (you) free”) over the entrance to the camp. A closer observation of the letters reveals that the “B” in “ARBEIT” (= “work”) is upside down – the big bulge of the letter is at the top, the little one at the bottom. According to the information provided by the Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau the letters were manufactured by political detainees in the camp who expressed a camouflaged act of resistance. With the inverted “B”, they intended to  display the absurdity and the lie behind the message. The “B” remained unchanged! A tiny space left for his personal protest against the inhumanity of the system.

The railway line that leads into nothingness and blackness stands, once again, for the way leading to death. It continues the symbolism already introduced in the illustration “Travel Eastward”.

Etty repeatedly compares the circumstances they are living in with those of rats. I also integrated the symbol of the rat into the illustrations “Travel Eastward” and “Thinking Heart”.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“Of course, it is our complete destruction they want! But let us bear it with grace. (…) [A] camp needs a poet, one who experiences life there, even there, as a bard and is able to sing about it. At night, as I lay in the camp on my plank bed, surrounded by women and girls gently snoring, dreaming aloud, quietly sobbing and tossing and turning, women and girls who often told me during the day, “We don’t want to think, we don’t want to feel, otherwise we are sure to go out of our minds,” I was sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, and lay awake for hours letting all the many, too many impressions of a much-too-long day wash over me (…)

And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp.”

3 October 1942

When describing herself and her role in the camp, Etty uses the term “thinking heart”. For me, this expression illustrates very well Etty’s efforts to provide support for her fellow prisoners – on both an intellectual (“thinking”) and an emotional level (“heart”). It highlights her strong feelings of responsibility. Repeatedly, Etty had refused offers of going into hiding – by which means she could very well have saved her own life. She also resigned her job in the administration of the Amsterdam Jewish Council after only two weeks. She called that place “hell”. “Nothing can ever atone for the fact, of course, that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgment in due course” (Hillesum, p. 196). At her own request, she was transferred by the Jewish Council to the transit camp at Westerbork to devote herself, as a social worker, to the needs of the people in transit. Jews who had been interned with Etty at Westerbork and survived report that, for many, she had been a light of hope in the midst of the unimaginable.

The lines “…that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp” were written by Etty during her time in the transit camp at Westerbork, therefore before her deportation on 7 September 1943. In the illustration, I projected this wish into her future. In the centre of the illustration, Etty can be seen together with other women, detained in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. With her finger, which had once held the pen when writing the diary, Etty draws a spider’s thread – referring once again to the central spider metaphor.

During my photo research, I was struck by the arbitrary way in which the heads of the internees had been shaved. Tufts of hair had remained here and there on their close-cropped heads. For me, this detail is a telling reflection of the disrespect and humiliation associated with this act of mass-processing.

Etty repeatedly compares the circumstances they are living in with those of rats. I also integrated the symbol of the rat into the illustrations “Travel Eastward” and “Freedom”.

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself; when we have all vanquished and transformed our hatred for our fellow human beings of whatever race – even into love one day, although perhaps that is asking too much. It is, however, the only solution.“

21 June 1942

“That broker turned up (…) and said: “We must pray for better things with all our hearts, as long as there still is hope. If we allow our hatred to turn us into savage beasts like them then there is no hope for anyone.””

7 July 1942

This illustration shows Etty in four entirely different moods, roles and situations. From left to right, (1.) relaxed and smiling, (2.) increasingly aggressive, (3.) in a Gestapo uniform and, finally, (4.) as an internee in an extermination camp.

With this illustration, I wanted to display one of Etty’s fundamental convictions, namely that a precondition for peace is the realization that, potentially, each one of us is just as capable of being the butcher as of being the victim. Only by admitting this, would we be able to counteract the process by which the “dark side” within us is fed by the very act of pointing the finger at the misdeeds of others. This is in keeping with Etty’s conviction that rigid categorisation of people into different groups leads to blurring this awareness. Labelling people as members or non-members of a group serves as an obstacle to understanding the universal potential of every human. Correspondingly, I make use of the Gestapo uniform, worn by Etty as a victim of the Holocaust, in order to indicate the possible coexistence of conflicting possibilities in one and the same person, which an overhasty categorisation according to role might render unthinkable. Etty applies herself to cultivating such unbiased judgments with the utmost vigilance. She describes a Jewish colleague in the transit camp at Westerbork as follows:

“He hates our persecutors with an undying hatred, presumably with good reason. But he himself is a bully. He would make a model concentration camp guard” (Hillesum, p. 210).

Illustration by Roman Kroke (2009)

Mesures: 40 cm x 30 cm

Customized title: language freely selectable – please specify the language of your choice during the order (in the preview: French)

Annotations to the illustration by Roman Kroke:

I created the illustration on the basis of the following citations from Etty’s diary:

“(…) we still have so much to experience together and so much work to do. And so I call upon you: stay at your inner post, and please do not feel sorry or sad for me, there is no reason to.”

 3 July 1943

The illustration stands for 30 November 1943, the day on which, according to a Red Cross report, Etty was murdered in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In writing her diary, Etty compared herself to a spider spinning its web (cf. annotation to the illustration “The Spider and its Web”). On the one hand, the illustration shows a spider‘s web – albeit without the spider, which symbolises Etty’s death. On the other hand, the spider’s web is complete. With this, I want to express that Etty‘s work, her diary (= the spider‘s web), had been completed on time before her death, so that the record of her perceptions might serve future generations as her spiritual legacy. You might also spot a particular connection between the spider’s web and the barbed wire fence. The barbed wire fence, a means of keeping the prisoners from escaping, did indeed dominate on the material level – Etty was murdered in Auschwitz. However, the spider’s web, a metaphor for Etty’s diary and insights, survived and prevailed on the spiritual level. The barbed wire fence even served the spider as a frame for its web. With this, I intend to highlight one of the basic principles of Etty’s philosophy: not trying to avoid the atrocities of her time but seeking a direct encounter in order to be able to dissect them intellectually. I also indicated this attitude in the illustration “Fear” by drawing the spider sitting directly on the officer’s shoulder. To summarize, the last illustration “Future” therefore stands for a certain dominance of the spiritual over the material.

Both the barbed wire fence and the threads of the spider’s web go beyond the borders of the page, thus displaying a certain independence from the rest of the illustration. The background could therefore be replaced by a different setting. This way, I want to emphasize a central concern of Etty’s. She realized that, for her own generation, the insights documented in her diary would come too late. For this reason, Etty dwelled not only upon Shoah-specific topics but also upon universal issues. She hoped that, by so doing, her thoughts could be of value for future generations, independent of the national, cultural, political or religious context.