Article June 5, 1989 Issue

Excerpt from a 1942 letter by a young Jewish woman...

Etty Hillesum

Letters from Westerbork

Excerpt from a 1942 letter by a young Jewish woman caught up in the Holocaust:

"It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. And I also believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter."

From Letters from Westerbork
by Etty Hillesum, page 36.
Reprinted by permission of
Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.