Letters from Westerbork - Softcover

Hillesum, Etty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586072446 ISBN 13: 9780586072448

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988

Synopsis

Collects the last letters written by the youth Dutch woman during her final months in the Nazi detention camp, Westerbork, where she died at age 29

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Dutch (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

After the publication of Hillesum's diaries, An Interrupted Life (in 1981, almost 40 years after her death in 1943 at the age of 29), a number of letters written to friends during her last year came to light. This life-affirming correspondence concerns her internment at Westerbork, a transit camp that the Hillesum family and more than 100,000 other Dutch Jews passed through en route to Auschwitz. Hillesum keenly details the diversity of the inmates, the camp's squalor, the hellish transports and the incomprehensibility of their situation: "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." Readers won't fail to marvel at her fortitude, her refusal to bow to hatred or despair and her capacity for selfless humaneness: "Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness," and, written on a postcard she threw from the train that took her to Auschwitz, "We left the camp singing." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0586072446
• ISBN 13: 9780586072448
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176