Life Transformed

                                                                              

On  the 9^th March 1941, a 27 year old Dutch Jewish student living in enemy-occupied Amsterdam made the 1^st entry in a diary that was to become one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. Over the course of the next two and a half years, an insecure, chaotic and troubled young woman was transformed into someone who inspired those with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp at Westerbork and with whom she eventually perished at Auschwitz.

Etty’s story challenges the profound mood of scepticism which prevails in much of Western Europe about whether faith in God can any longer be credible in the modern world. She invites us to believe again.

Her diary and letters tell the story of an adventure of discovery. There is an entry in her diary when, impatient with the ‘primitive’ word ‘God”, she gives it a new definition and describes God as ‘our greatest and most continuous inner adventure’. The energy, dynamism and direction of this ‘inner adventure’ slowly but surely, like a great river, gathered up all that she was and transformed her. Out of the chaos there emerged emotional coherence, a passion to care; a commitment to truth became a driving force; beneath her intellectual and emotional vitality she found an undercurrent of wisdom.

In the secrecy of an untidy bathroom her heart’s deepest longing was met in the practice of adoration. Finally even in the face of barbaric evil, she showed that a life can find within itself deep reservoirs of a strange joy. Above all, she bore witness to the reality of a deep inner dimension to the human person. It was to the inner spaciousness of her soul that she constantly returned, and it was this quality of depth which enabled her to face up to and deal with the barbarism and hatred around her. Her life is a challenge to the radical doubt and scepticism of our time. Not the doubt of honest open-minded questioning which is an essential aspect of faith, but the kind of doubt which feeds cynical despair, because it blindly asserts that the adventure of faith is a delusion, and so doomed from the start.

This young woman took upon herself the extraordinary responsibility of making God credible, even in such a world as Westerbrook.” There must be someone to live through it all”, she wrote “and bear witness to the fact that God lived even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?”

 

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