We left the camp singing.
Esther “Etty” Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish author of confessional letters and diaries.
In 1943, she was deported and murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“Etty was a young Dutch Jewish scholar of Russian origin. When she got to Westerbork, a staging camp for the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, she noticed that there were young children whose parents were preoccupied facing their death or trying to put their businesses in order. These young girls were scared, and so she gathered them into a community group, and there they sang together. She boarded the train her parents were on and she wrote a postcard that she slipped out of a crack of the train door, hoping that someone would find it and mail it. A farmer did. She wrote, “We left the camp singing.” There’s no better embodiment we can choose in the worst circumstances, facing our death, willingly facing our death and still to sing.”
Margaret J Wheatley, Ph.D. is the author of Restoring Sanity:
Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity & Kindness
