![]() When people under threat saw their neighbors averting their eyes or crossing the street to avoid meeting, they felt more afraid. Because in all the places where tyranny has emerged, he notes, what the people who survived remember years later is how their neighbors treated them. For example, he urges us to make eye contact and small talk with the people we encounter in the course of our daily lives. Other practices of resistance are grounded in private life. Some of the practices Snyder recommends are grounded in the public sphere: defend institutions, be active in voluntary organizations, don’t obey in advance. We have to practice shaping the society we want and resisting the kind of society we do not. It’s not enough to believe that all will be well, he insists. The historian of authoritarian regimes, Timothy Snyder, worries that Americans have seen liberal democracy as our inevitable future for so long that we are unprepared to respond to the possibility of an authoritarian future. Would we have resisted the destruction of norms and the rising violence of fascism then? Are we resisting now? What is the distance between where they were and where we are, as violence against Jewish communities increases, and neo-Nazis march in our cities, and students with visas get turned away from our country at the airport and sent back where they came from with no explanation? One of the most haunting lines in Etty Hillesum’s postcard is this: “in the end, the departure came without warning.” The terrors of history often happen suddenly, or they seem to-but it’s probably more accurate to say that they happen out of public view for a while, affecting the most vulnerable, and then they escalate. I think we’ve all wondered at some point how we would have responded in times like Etty Hillesum’s. We are living in a time of rising violence against Jewish communities-the Tree of Life synagogue and the attack on the rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York being only the most well-known of a startling number of such acts over the last few years. Today is a day to remember the past and mourn the incalculable losses inflicted on our world by the Nazi regime-but also a day to take stock of the present. ![]() Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75 th anniversary of the liberation of the camp where Etty Hillesum was murdered, along with more than a million others. She died in Auschwitz on Novemat the age of 29. She was the kind of person the world needs in every age, in every time and place. Etty Hillesum was a person of tremendous energy and creativity, alive to the world around her and within her, to whom others were drawn in love and friendship, around whom community took shape. The card was found by some farmers and posted eight days after she wrote it. She wrote the letter I’ve just read on a postcard and threw it out the window of the freight train that took her and her family to Auschwitz. Or from my last letter from camp.Įtty Hillesum was the author of an extraordinary journal in which she recorded both the terrors of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and her own deepening spiritual life. Friends left behind will still be writing to Amsterdam perhaps you will hear something from them. Thank you for all your kindness and care. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa, too. In the end, the departure came without warning. Father, Mother, and Mischa are a few cars away. Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. A reading from the letters of Etty Hillesum, September 7, 1943.
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