ETTY

At the computer, I cut video threads of wind storms and quaking trees. I create a companion piece for Florence called Etty using the words of a young woman from completely different circumstances who transcends fear and resists terror in the midst of extreme circumstances. Etty Hillesum was a 29 year old Dutch writer we know only from her diaries first published in the early 1980s. We collaborate so to speak, and I create a soliloquy excerpted from hundreds of pages of text. Her words travel across the screen to create a kind of slow motion reading, each word with its own position, transparency and speed.

Etty’s words are her remarkable resistance to the absolute evil surrounding her before she is shipped out to Auschwitz to die: “you, G-d cannot help us but we must defend your place inside us, and that I can do, even in the smallest space”……At the end, from the cattle car that transports her, she throws a postcard which is found by a farmer and posted to Amsterdam: “we left the camp singing.”