An Interrupted Life (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Etty Hillesum
- First Published: 1981
- Type of Work: Diary/letters
- Time of Work: 1941-1943
- Setting: Amsterdam and Westerbork, the Netherlands
- Principal Characters: Etty Hillesum, Julius Spier, Hans Wegerif, Maria Tuinzing, Mischa Hillesum, Jaap Hillesum
- Genres: Nonfiction, Diary, Letters
- Subjects: Self-discovery, Memory, Courage, World War II, Jews or Jewish life, Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Jewish, Biography
Form and Content
On November 30, 1943, a twenty-nine-year-old Dutch-Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz. Hillesum had known that she would not survive and had asked her friend Maria Tuinzing to save her diaries and give them to Klaas Smelik, a writer and a member of the Dutch Resistance. The diaries were discovered almost forty years later. These diaries filled eight exercise books and came to more than four hundred pages. J.G. Gaarlandt edited the diaries for publication and wrote an informative introduction to them.
Etty Hillesum was born in 1914 into a...
[The entire page is 1916 words long]
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