A woman's words, another's voice light the darkness

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

She was drawn into it. She was the moth, and it was the flame. It warmed and burned and consumed and ignited her.

It became her passion and her cross.

Another woman's words. Another woman's life. Lived 50 years ago, half a world away. A stranger, yet kin.

As we all are.

But how to reinvent that life? How to present on stage, in few words, a soul, a heart, courage, faith? How to make people see spirit through flesh?

Jane Smith Bernhardt has done this.

The Beverly wife, mother, artist and actress read "An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum," because a friend sent the book to her. She wasn't seeking a mission. Yet the words of a 27-year-old woman living in Amsterdam during what history would later call the Holocaust consumed Bernhardt.

She crawled into Etty's skin and became her - for a while.

That's what literature does. It connects us, takes us to other places and other times. But the connection is tenuous. When the book is finished, the door to whatever we've experienced, creaks closed.

But the door into Etty Hillesum's life didn't shut when Bernhardt finished the book. It remained open. And every day Etty called from that room.

"At first I was afraid," Bernhardt says. "The idea kept coming back that I should act out her words. But how could anyone presume to act out such courage? It was much too difficult. I didn't want to enter the darkness of it. I didn't know if my soul could withstand taking a journey back there."

But she did take that journey back - back to the years when Hitler was exterminating Jews. Back to the days when liberties were taken away one by one. Jews must wear yellow stars. Jews may not ride on public transportation. Jews may not walk in parks, ride bicycles, play the piano, visit in one another's homes.

She journeyed back to the years and events that, according to a recent poll, one in five Americans aren't certain happened at all.

In her diary Etty wrote about the persecution and subjugation. But she also wrote about love and friendship and spring air and summer skies and about the human spirit and man's indefatigable soul.

"One moment it is Hitler, the next it is Ivan the Terrible. One moment it is resignation and the next war, pestilence, earthquake or famine. Ultimately what matters most is to bear the pain, to cope with it and to keep a small corner of one's soul unsullied, come what may."

Etty managed to keep her soul unsullied. That's what you learn when you read her diary. You see the world falling apart. People shunned and shackled and shipped to extermination camps. Families slaughtered.

And still the soul survives.

It took Jane Bernhardt a year-and-a-half to craft from Etty's hundreds of pages and millions of words, a simple, seamless one-woman play, and another year-and-a-half to bring it to a stage.

"The writing was the hardest," she said. "I didn't know where to start. There were so many facets of Etty I didn't want to leave out. How do you say out loud what is essentially a silent process?"

One night when the task seemed too big, Bernhardt dreamed she was standing at the edge of a great body of water, which she had to cross.

"In my dream, a sea turtle appeared, and I got on his back and rode to the other shore."

The dream seemed a sign. It sustained her. A few weeks later, a cousin phoned, a priest from California, whom she had never met. He was flying to the East Coast. Could he come by and introduce himself to her family, he asked?

He did, bringing gifts for the children and coincidentally - or was it more? - a brightly painted, hand carved sea turtle for her.

"Something bigger than I am carried me through this," she said. "I feel as if I had company on the journey."

Something bigger than she is shares the stage with Bernhardt too, because for an hour and a half, wherever she performs, she Etty, speaking Etty's words, living Etty's life, feeling Etty's hope and wonder and pain.

And the audience feels it, too.

"We have left the camp singing," Etty wrote on a postcard, which she threw from a transport train, two months before she was killed at Auschwitz at the age of 29.

It is singing you hear in Etty's words, through Bernhardt's voice, the triumph of spirit over flesh.

Jane Smith Bernhardt will perform "Love, Etty" tonight at 8 p.m. at Temple Tifereth Israel in Malden, following a Holocaust Remembrance Service, which begins at 7:15 p.m.