August 16th, 2026

Etty Hillesum 

A Saint Who Thrived 

In Darkness 

Auschwitz 

​"The one thing we can save from these times is a little piece of ourselves, something inside in us, and that is all that matters really... Alas, there isn't much we can save, anyway; just the one little piece of ourselves that we should probably be saving anyway. And that is all: that is all we can contribute to saving this world. We can work no other miracles outside, nor can we help anyone, but we can always save that little piece of ourselves... Ah, whatever happens, happens from within."

Etty Hillesum 

when i am looking for symbols of strength & resilience the true wonder of mankind i am always drawn to etty hillesum. her strength was not the strength of survival. survival was never the point. what happened inside her was closer to alchemy — the camp became her nigredo, the blackening, the raw prima materia she was given and did not choose. but she did not stop there. she kept returning to the deep well in herself, and that return was her solve et coagula, the dissolving and the reconstituting, done over and over in a place built to make dissolution final. she was not spared the nigredo. she went through it, awake, and something in her continued to coagulate into gold while the world around her turned to ash. this is the wonder i return to. not that she survived — she didn't — but that the vessel held. the work continued. the gold got made.

~

but individuation is not the same as self-assertion. jung was clear about this even when his readers were not — the more a person becomes truly themselves, the less that self is centered on itself. the i does not grow larger. it grows thinner, more porous, until it stops working as a wall. this is why every tradition that has actually produced this kind of strength converges on the same non-egoistic ground. eckhart's gelassenheit, a letting go so complete the self becomes a window instead of a wall. ibn arabi's fana, the self annihilated so that what remains can subsist in something larger. the gnostic spark finding its way back to the pleroma, which is not becoming at all but remembering. etty's own reposing in oneself, practiced not to arrive at her private interior but to arrive, through it, at what she called the broad eternal stream. the strength was never a fortress. it was a thinning. she became so porous to the cosmos that Auschwitz could not seal her off from what she was already part of.

~

this is what the alchemists never fully said, and what jung spent a lifetime circling. the gold was never hers to keep. it was never meant to stay locked inside the vessel. the whole purpose of the vas was that it would eventually break, and what had been made inside it would pass into the larger stream it was always in communication with. this is why her death is not the failure of her strength but its completion. the vessel held long enough. the work finished. and then the gold did what gold does when the vessel finally opens. it did not disappear. it returned to the cosmos it had never actually been separate from.