When fear crawls out in the evenings
from all four corners,
when the winter storm raging outside
tells you it is winter,
when my soul trembles at the sight
of distant fantasies,

I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat,
every pulse, every piece of my soul.

Time, go ahead.
Time, which carries liberation
and its unknown tomorrow.

The result is certain.
Everything comes to an end.
Spring will come.

From the diary of Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself
all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

At night the barracks sometimes lay in the moonlight
made out of silver and eternity: like a plaything 
slipped from God’s preoccupied hand.

From Etty Hillesum’s diary, 23 September 1942.

it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells

the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home

and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow

i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off

From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.

She is 
with us, 
she is 
of us—
the eternal 
stillness 
is 
but a form 
of her love.

(Henry James writing about his mother, 1882)