Etty Hillesum on Edith Stein and her companions
There was a remarkable day when the Jewish Catholics or Catholic Jews – whichever you want to call them – arrived, nuns and priests wearing the yellow star on their habits. I remember two young novices, twins with identical beautiful, dark ghetto faces and serene, childish eyes peering out from under their skullcaps. They said with mild surprise that they had been fetched at half past four from morning mass, and that they had eaten red cabbage in Amersfoort.
There was a priest, still fairly young, who had not left his monastery for fifteen years. He was out in the ‘world’ for the first time, and I stood next to him for a while, following his eyes as they wandered peacefully around the barracks where the newcomers were being received. […]
I looked at the priest who was now back in the world again. ‘And what do you think of the world now?’ I asked. But his gaze remained unwavering and friendly above the brown habit, as if everything he saw was known, familiar from long ago. That same evening, a man later told me, he saw some priests walking one behind the other in the dusk between two dark barracks. They were saying their rosaries as imperturbably as if they had just finished vespers at the monastery. And isn’t it true that one can pray anywhere, in a wooden barracks just as well as in a stone monastery, or indeed, anywhere on this earth where God, in these troubled times, feels like casting his likeness?
Etty Hillesum describes the arrival at Westerbork camp of a group of Jewish Catholic religious, among them Edith Stein (St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). The group arrived at Westerbork on 2 August 1942
Letter of 18 December 1942, An Interrupted Life, pp.302ff.
