My Dog, David Grossman, and Etty Hillesum: Thinking Hearts in Dark Times

I have shivers writing this. It is a true story, and it happened just today.

This morning, Yom HaShoah, Israeli Holocaust Memorial Day, when I took my dog Munchkin for a walk in the forest, we came to a fork in the path. Munchkin does not speak with words, but she barks and uses her head to signal.

Usually, I either go right, to the more shaded path further into the forest when it is hotter, or I go left, to the more open path that goes towards the fields and the valley when it is cooler.

But this morning, Munchkin did not want to go either way. She barked and kept signaling me with her head to go straight ahead, to the cemetery.

Truth is, I like to walk in the cemetery, and had even told myself I wanted to go there more since taking a course in Thanatology called The Art of Dying and trying to live my life with more death awareness. But I have rarely been these past few months. So I decided to follow Munchkin and see where she led me.

photo credit; Haviva Ner-David

It was wild. Munchkin literally took me to the gate of the cemetery and signaled with her head for me to open it. Which I did. She then went straight to the graves of two fallen soldiers, Rotem and Amir, both who fell in this war.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, not Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers and victims of terror), which will be next week. But I stood there, full of gratitude to all those who have risked (and given) their lives so I can live in relative safety. The connection between these two national memorial days did not escape me.

Photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

I may be a peace and Jewish-Palestinian partnership activist, but I am not naive. I know there are people who would kill me just because I am Jewish or Israeli if given the chance. And many others who wish me dead because of these identities even if they would not themselves pull the trigger. I wish Israel did not need an army, but we do.

Honestly, I wish we did not even NEED Israel. I am actually not a nationalist at heart. But I do think Jews need a safe haven. As do Palestinians. What a tragedy that we have not yet figured out a way for this land to be that for both nations.

Munchkin then was ready to move on. She started barking and signaling with her head until I followed her to the grave of a friend, Yonatan, who died seven years ago. I have been to his grave many times, but this was the first time I focused on the quote his family chose for his gravestone: “I gave you a wise and understanding heart” (Kings I 3:12).

Photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

I was stunned. One of my favorite quotes from the Diary of Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz at age 29 and left an enlightened diary that is inspiration to so many, especially in these dark times, is this:

“At night, as I lay in the camp on my plank bed, surrounded by women and girls gently snoring, dreaming aloud, quietly sobbing and tossing and turning, women and girls who often told me during the day, ‘We don’t want to think, we don’t want to feel, otherwise we are sure to go out of our minds,’ I was sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness… and I prayed: Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks… the thinking heart of a whole concentration camp.”

I had just finished reading David Grossman’s new book of essays in English, The Thinking Heart: Essays on Israel and Palestine. I love Grossman’s writing but was especially drawn to this book because of its title. I wanted to see if he was referencing Etty Hillesum. And, indeed, he was.

Photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

One of the essays is a speech he gave in Amsterdam in November 2022, just after the last elections in Israel but before the current extremist right wing coalition was formed and this horrific nightmare of a government took power, which was followed by the October 7th massacre and this bloody war.

He tells the story of the man who sat in front of the White House every Friday during the Vietnam War and said: “I have no intention of changing the world. I’m just making sure the world doesn’t change me.”

And then Grossman writes:

“As someone who has spent his entire life in a disaster zone — again, the Middle East — I know how easy it is to give in to ‘the world’: to cynicism, apathy, despair. And from there, it is a short path to religious fanaticism, nationalism, fascism.

“When I search for a mind that is truly free, a person who might serve as a role model for my struggle against despair, I think of the courageous, soul-baring Jewish Dutchwoman who lived here in Amsterdam during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Etty Hillesum willingly entered the Westerbork concentration camp, and was eventually murdered at Auschwitz. Hillesum, as you know, managed to remain a free woman even under the harshest enslavement, and her entire being was a movement of the soul against the gravitational pull of despair…

“We all know that at any moment we may find that our freedom is taken away and we are surrounded by arbitrariness and tyranny, by the ills of racism, nationalism, fanaticism, by barbaric thuggish behaviour, like the conduct of Russia towards Ukraine — a belligerence that is currently jeopardising the world’s security.

“If such a moment arrives if — under circumstances we may have trouble imagining now — the world ever turns upside down on us, as it has for millions of Ukrainians not too far from here, will we remember, will we persist in this private, heroic rebellion — to not stop being the feeling heart, the open, bared heart? And to not stop thinking?

“To be the thinking heart. Again and again, the thinking heart.”

photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

Well, the world has, as Grossman predicted, turned upside down. Not just here in Israel-Palestine, but also in my previous home, the United States of America.

I have tried to internalize this aspiration for myself, too — to balance heart with mind in these confusing times and be here, in this reality, where “I happen to find myself, with my whole heart” (another of my favorite quotes from Etty’s diary) instead of trying to escape physically or mentally, or even wish I were somewhere else.

I am trying each day anew to understand what is happening, do small acts of resistance, be true to myself and my conscience, and not lose my humanity or compassion while also not losing my self respect and self worth.

I have quoted this line of Etty’s often. In fact, I wrote a blog here with the title, A Thinking Heart in this Waking Nightmare, back in November 2023 when Vivian Silver’s body was identified. (Vivian was murdered, burned to death, in her home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.) I end the blog post with the following poem:

“That is what I want to be… the thinking heart of an entire concentration camp.”

-Etty Hillesum, October 3 ,1942, Westerbork concentration camp

I am Anne Frank,

Believer in the good heart

of every human,

that faith and courage can prevent

a miserable death,

that sitting in nature with God alone

can bring comfort and hope.

I am Etty Hillesum,

Believer in God and in man,

In the ability of inner peace to bring peace,

Of the surrender to death to ease all death,

of the wide horizon and the rose-red cyclamen

to nurture hope.

I am Vivian Silver,

Believer in people,

in peace alone as the path to peace,

That extending a hand will receive a hand,

That women’s voices can end this hell,

That having friends on the other side of the fence,

Can make a difference.

I am me, sitting in despair

when the body of the last of these women

has been found cremated,

yet this time without the mercy of gassing her first.

And I wonder what Anne and Etty were thinking

when they marched into Auschwitz.

What Vivian was thinking

as Hamas terrorists opened the door to the closet

where she was hiding.

Or did they not find her and simply burn her house

with her in it,

hoping she was in there somewhere

so they could slaughter

another Jew?

With all the words my soul sisters left me,

I will never know their thoughts at that moment in time,

their feelings as the worst was happening to them.

I can never know what they believed as they faced

pure evil.

I am left with only my own thinking heart

in this nightmare humanity has dreamt

for itself.