“Etty” Performance at Camden Public Library

“Etty” Performance at Camden Public Library September 27

Etty is a 60-minute, one-woman show written and adapted by Susan Stein, based on the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum. Hillesum chronicled life in occupied Amsterdam and the Westerbork concentration camp. and was killed in Auschwitz. The performance at Camden Public Library is on Thursday evening, September 27, at 7:00 pm. The performance is free.

Joined only by her suitcase, Etty sits alone on a bare stage. In a conversation with the audience as she is about to be deported to Auschwitz, Etty offers a new form of resistance, with wry humor, deep sensuality and unflinching honesty. In her own words, Etty states, “If I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.” Although paradoxically she loves much of her life in occupied Amsterdam and even, later, in the Westerbork concentration camp, she also finds it horrible. She is, for instance, agonized by her position on the Jewish Council, which she feels makes her complicit in the Nazi deportations, but also allows her, for a time, to protect her family.

“Etty’s struggles are contemporary, mirroring many of our own at a time when it remains easier for many to ignore news of human rights violations,” says Susan Stein. “Moving beyond its historical context, Etty ultimately addresses issues of human nature and its complexity with regards to issues of human rights and genocide. She asks us to consider our own responsibility today, in a world where the promise of ‘never again’ has not yet been realized.”

Using only Etty Hillesum’s words, Susan Stein’s adaptation brings us to 1943 when Etty, a young Jewish woman, is about to be deported out of Holland.  “Nothing is maudlin or tear-jerking about Etty, the hour-long one-woman piece that Susan Stein performs,” says Howard Shapiro of the Philadelphia Inquirer- Daily Magazine; “indeed, the entire smart script, full of insight, is from Hillesum’s own words, in letters she wrote and a diary she kept, Anne Frank-style. Unlike Frank, Hillesum did not hide. She was able to protect herself and her family, for some time, by working for the Jewish Council — the Nazi-run bureaucracy that registered Jews for deportation and, ultimately, death. This horrible irony was hardly lost on Hillesum, who tells us she is on a shipwreck, saving one’s self by pushing others into the water . . . her story of the years between the Netherlands’ takeover by the Nazis and her own climb aboard the train to her death is by turns chilling and enthralling. Stein’s spot-on performance clearly honors both her subject and anyone who has died at hatred’s hellish hands.”

Susan Stein adapted Etty from Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters. Susan picked up the diaries in 1994 for fifty cents at a yard sale after a friend recommended it. After reading the diaries, Susan wanted to give something back to Etty and keep her alive.