Look at these excepts from the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943.
Here she's speaking to God:
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.
Here is the living incarnation of Faith, Hope and Love:
[In] spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: life is good after all, it’s not God’s fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland with my whole family.
And then:
Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learnt to love Westerbork [transit camp].
******
We have no right to ask others, or even ourselves, to rise to this level of transcendant human consciousness but it is the goal.
Here she's speaking to God:
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.
Here is the living incarnation of Faith, Hope and Love:
[In] spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: life is good after all, it’s not God’s fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland with my whole family.
And then:
Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learnt to love Westerbork [transit camp].
******
We have no right to ask others, or even ourselves, to rise to this level of transcendant human consciousness but it is the goal.