“Etty”: Hagai Levi resurrects a little-known heroine of the Holocaust in a decidedly contemporary series

Available on arte.tv from May 13, 2026, and then broadcast on Arte on Thursdays, May 21 and 28, the series Etty is created by Hagai Levi, director of In Therapy, The Affair, and Scenes from a Marriage. It recounts the life of Esther Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish intellectual born in 1914, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. A law student with a passion for Russian literature and philosophy, Etty was living in Amsterdam when the Netherlands fell under Nazi occupation. It was her encounter with Julius Spier, a psychologist and palmist, that led her to keep a diary—the entries that fascinated Hagai Levi and inspired the series. Julia Windischbauer plays the title character opposite Sebastian Koch as Spier.

An "ultra-modern" newspaper, a deliberately contemporary staging

The director's aesthetic choice is immediately striking: Amsterdam is filmed as it is today, with sets, clothing, and a city that don't try to disguise themselves as the 1940s. "From the start, I didn't want a historical series. It was my way of remaining true to Etty Hillesum's writing, which I found incredibly modern," Levi explained to Les Inrockuptibles. "When you watch a historical film about this period, you feel distant from the characters. You get the impression that they are people from the past, and you don't really feel what they went through," he told Radio France. This visual approach shifts the perspective: fascism no longer appears as a distant archive, but as a mechanism of dispossession that can speak to the present. Etty Hillesum's diary, published after the war under the title An Interrupted Life, is described by Levi as "more complex" and "more controversial" than that of Anne Frank, which was poorly received by part of the Jewish community because of its Christian overtones and the lack of Jewish identity awareness of its author.

A woman who chooses to go to the camps to help, and dies there

The six-episode series depicts the gradual progression of anti-Jewish persecution in occupied Amsterdam, never showing the violence directly, but making it terribly present: a curfew, bicycles to be returned, summonses to the police. Etty initially works for the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, an organization created under Nazi control, before requesting to join the Westerbork transit camp to help the internees. "Etty didn't want to die; she didn't think she would be killed. She wanted to work in that camp to help others," Levi explained to Radio France. Deported to Auschwitz in September 1943 with her family, she died there a few weeks later. "I didn't set out to make a political series, one that would suggest this could happen again. Yet, when you watch it, you realize that this story feels much closer to home," he added.