“The Thinking Heart: The Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum”

“The Thinking Heart” Performance April 27

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Camden Public Library will host a free performance of “The Thinking Heart: The Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum” on Sunday, April 27, at 2:00 pm. “The Thinking Heart” is based on the life and writings of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943, at the age of 29. She left behind a luminous diary and some eighty letters.

Poet Martin Steingesser has arranged versions of Hillesum’s work and created, with Judy Tierney and musician Robin Jellis, a program for performance called “The Thinking Heart,” with cello and two voices. “But the ensemble considers ‘The Thinking Heart’ as a work in four voices,” says Steingesser, “Etty Hillesum’s, the two vocalists’, and the cello’s.” There will be time for discussion and questions following the performance; the performance is free, donations will be accepted.

Etty Hillesum aspired to be, as she said, “the thinking heart for a whole concentration camp.” The program is a collage of “moments, constellated as poems,” says Steingesser, most taken from letters written at Westerbork, which was a way station on the Netherlands’ border with Germany where Dutch Jews were held for transport to Auschwitz.

“My goal has been to select, simplify, and condense while not losing anything, retaining the integrity and power of the original and thereby amplifying Etty’s voice. In her own poetic words, ‘to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain.’ I am also indebted to the translation from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans in the editions of her journal and letters published by Henry Holt and Company and the complete and unabridged Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, in 2002.”

The ensemble recently returned from a European tour, “in which we returned Etty Hillesum’s words where they were taken from her at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” said Steingesser. The troupe performed “The Thinking Heart” at the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer, in Oswiecim, Poland, and the International Etty Hillesum Congress, in Ghent, Belgium.

Martin Steingesser has been presenting programs of his poems and teaching poetry workshops throughout Maine for over 25 years. He is Portland, Maine’s first Poet Laureate. Judy Tierney, the other speaker in the performance, has been presenting poems in Maine for several years, often with Martin, and has been nourished in the garden of poetry over many life seasons. She was the creator and host of a weekly radio program, “Walking in the Air,” celebrating poetry and its voices, on WRFR, Rockland’s community radio station. Robin Jellis is the cellist for the performance; Jellis has performed in Maine for more than 10 years. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Maine, where she studied jazz improvisation and cello performance. She has performed with the Bangor Symphony. Currently, she plays with the Maine State Ballet Orchestra and is on the faculty at the Portland Conservatory of Music.

“Etty inspires wonder and deepens appreciation for the kind of courage that stays a hostile course without recourse to violence, passionately committed to knowing and choosing a path of light, in service of life and spirit,” says Steingesser. “Here is the story of a woman fully meeting the darkest of fates, heightened to the finest moral and aesthetic pitch by her determination, courage, and ability to transform the experience through writing. Witnessing the conscious choices Etty makes, including refusing to escape, as she confronts the Nazis and her fears, one of the things I see would have been lost in violent response to the oppression, either for defense or retribution, would have been the ability to continue, with the opportunities for lightening suffering and for healing, her own as well that of others, in the dark journey she chose. Light, where does it come from? Stars?—Ourselves? ‘I cannot find the right words . . . for that radiant feeling inside me,’ Etty says, ‘which encompasses but is untouched by all the suffering and all the violence.’ Somewhere in her long journey into the Holocaust night she discovers light in herself that became visible to others, an incandescence, still glowing. To open her journal, or read these poems, is to see this light, feel its heat.”