An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 by Etty Hillesum, with a preface by Eva Hoffman and introduction by Jan G. Gaarlandt; translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans. Persephone Book No. 5. Published by  Persephone Books, London, 1999;  430 pages; £10.00.

Persephone Books are beautiful objects, soft backs in dove grey without adornment save the lovely endpapers, which come with a matching bookmark. In this Diary they were ‘taken from “C.S.P., a Bauhaus fabric designed for the De Ploeg Company, The Netherlands, in 1932-35 by Otti Berger d. Auschwitz 1944”’. This endpaper - a print of fabric - is perhaps, Etty's bedspread’, so they say in the Persephone Catalogue No. 1. The Bauhaus designer's beautiful pink and blue drawn thread-work wore out long ago with time and use, perhaps, and more likely, the fabric had a longer, fuller, though inanimate life than those who constellated around it; for the designer, the weaver, and countless nameless others and Etty herself all perished.

For it is ‘Etty’ that she so quickly becomes, familiar and friendly, a confiding voice, beloved, full of hope and promise, and the reader, or at least this reader, develops an attachment to what is not just her life, as she describes it being lived, but the life force, the almost palpable instinctual drive to stay alive. We long for her to survive to continue the journey that is so full of promise, and almost suspend belief in the inevitable ending.

Whilst musing about life and its vicissitudes one has to encounter death, for this is what this life brings so poignantly and prematurely with it. Here I take issue with that lower case ‘d.’ which marks the premature end of Otti Berger's life on the frontispiece and the solemn reference on the end piece ‘Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz on 30^th November 1943’. Death comes naturally, linguistically, albeit more frequently than premature illness and accident take account of. But death did not come to Auschwitz and visit Etty Hillesum: she perished, was gassed or murdered but she did not die. Death is ‘the fact or act of dying, the end of life, the final cessation of the vital functions of an individual’ (OED). To use the word diminishes the trauma of a snatched ending, killing requires a battle, a murder r