“After this war, two torrents will be unleashed on the world: a torrent of loving-kindness and a torrent of hatred.” And then I knew: I should take the field against hatred.

Etty Hillesum refers to the words of Julius Spier. On 23 September 1942, she writes: “Klaas, all I really wanted to say is this: we have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn't even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies. We are hurtful enough to one another as it is.”

In the opinion of the French moral philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch, who during the Second World War was member of the Resistance against the Germans and who after the war was an unbending advocate of the “imprescriptibility” of the crimes of the Nazi's and their collaborators, forgiveness wasn't at stake in our judgement of the deportations and the killings of Jews. The “suspension of pardon,” as I may call it, was essential to Jankélévitch for reasons of morality itself.

Morality itself? Is this what Etty Hillesum is referring to when she writes in her long letter on 18 December 1942: “And the absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation.”

Would it be possible to have both? At one side: loving-kindness and the absence of hatred, and at the other: moral indignation? Such is the everlasting question with which I am confronted as a moral philosopher across the testimony of Etty Hillesum's life and work.