We Left the Camp Singing: The Etty Hillesum Poems and Drawings

2018 marked the tenth anniversary of an international congress that gathered in Ghent to celebrate and discuss the work of Etty Hillesum, a woman who died in Auschwitz, whose diaries and letters have been translated into 67 languages.

In her home country, Holland, there is a major research centre and a museum devoted to her work, there is a monument to her, and secondary schools are name after her. She is unquestionably one of the most singular voices from the Shoah (the Holocaust). But most in our country have never heard of her. So, who was Etty Hillesum?

She was a Dutch Jew who died at the age of 29, leaving behind deeply moving, intellectually profound diaries and letters written during the last two years of her life under Nazi occupation. We only have these works because she threw them from a train on her way to the death camp, along with a postcard on which she had written: “The Lord is my high tower. In the end, the departure came without warning… We left the camp singing… Thank you for all your kindness and care.”

The Hillesum writings have deeply affected readers around the world, especially women. Two are Canadians: one the remarkable poet Janice Kulyk Keefer, the other a singular artist Claire Wilks. This volume, We Left the Camp Singing, is their visionary responses to Etty Hillesum.

Janice Kulyk Keefer is the award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including The Paris-Napoli Express, Transfigurations, Travelling Ladies, Rest Harrow, White of the Lesser Angels, Marrying the Sea, Thieves, and a memoir, Honey and Ashes. She currently teaches literature and theatre in the graduate studies department at the University of Guelph.

Claire Wilks was a Canadian artist who worked in drawing, brush drawing, lithography, monoprinting, and sculpture in bronze and clay. Her works are in numerous private collections in Canada and abroad, and have been exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada, and in Toronto, Calgary, Stockholm, New York, Jerusalem, Venice, Rome, Zagreb, Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico. She died in 2017.