Etty

A six-part drama series titled Etty is scheduled to release on May 13, 2026, produced by Les Films du Poisson, ARTE, and Topkapi Films, with Germany and France listed as its countries of origin. Despite being shot in English, it draws its subject from one of the more quietly devastating personal documents to emerge from the Second World War: the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who lived and wrote in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the early 1940s.

Hillesum is not a household name in the way that Anne Frank is, though her diaries occupy a comparable place in the literature of Holocaust testimony. She was 27 when the period depicted in the series begins, and what distinguishes her writing from other wartime documents is its preoccupation with interior life at a moment when exterior circumstances were becoming catastrophic. Her diaries, published posthumously, trace a person in the midst of genuine philosophical and spiritual transformation — not despite the encroaching terror around her, but in some complicated relationship to it. The series takes that documented arc as its structural spine: Hillesum's evolving inner life, her relationship with the psycho-chirologist Julius Spier, and the growing mortal threat she faced as a Jewish woman under occupation.

The figure of Julius Spier sits at the center of what the series describes as a "turbulent love affair." Spier practiced a discipline — psycho-chirology, or character analysis through the study of hands — that occupies an unusual position somewhere between psychology and the esoteric. His relationship with Hillesum was, by the accounts embedded in her diaries, the catalyst for much of her inner transformation. That the series places this relationship prominently suggests the production is interested not merely in wartime biography but in the more difficult territory of how people change, and what forces — personal, intellectual, erotic — drive that change when history is simultaneously demanding everything of them.

The co-production structure here is worth noting. ARTE, the Franco-German public broadcaster, is among the most consistent European backers of literary and historical drama with ambitions beyond the commercial mainstream. Its involvement alongside Les Films du Poisson, a French production company, and Topkapi Films points toward a European art-television sensibility — one oriented toward restraint, period authenticity, and character interiority rather than action or melodrama. That the series is produced in English despite its Franco-German origins suggests a deliberate reach toward a wider international audience, though it also raises questions about casting and the particular texture such a choice imprints on material so rooted in a specific time and place.

Six episodes is a considered length for this kind of source material. Hillesum's diaries are substantial — she wrote prolifically over a relatively compressed period — and a miniseries format allows room to render her interior voice without compressing it into a feature film or diluting it across an open-ended run. Whether the series uses voiceover from the diaries themselves, or dramatizes their contents through scene and dialogue, is not yet clear from available information. That is one of the more consequential formal questions hanging over the project: diary-based narratives for television have been handled very differently by different productions, and the degree to which Hillesum's written voice is present on screen will shape the entire experience of watching.

There are other open questions. The series description refers to an "enormous act of solidarity" at the end of Hillesum's journey, language that gestures toward the historical record — Hillesum worked for the Jewish Council and later volunteered to accompany deportees to Westerbork transit camp — without stating it directly. How the production handles the endpoint of her story, which is known to anyone familiar with the historical record, is something the available materials leave unaddressed. Biographical drama about figures who died in the Holocaust carries particular narrative and ethical obligations, and the choices made around how explicitly or obliquely to depict or acknowledge what happened are rarely neutral.

The series also describes Hillesum's path as "unusual," a word the diary record supports. Her response to persecution was neither resistance in a conventional sense nor simple victimhood; she wrote with a kind of radical acceptance that has made her diaries both revered and, for some readers, uncomfortable. Whether the series engages with that discomfort or smooths it into something more conventionally redemptive will matter to viewers who come to it knowing her work.

The audience most likely to seek Etty out in May 2026 will include viewers already drawn to European historical drama in the ARTE tradition, readers familiar with Hillesum's diaries who are curious how the material translates to screen, and those with a broader interest in Second World War biography presented through a personal rather than military or political lens. Given the continued international appetite for intimate Holocaust-era narratives — particularly those centered on figures who left substantial written records of their own inner lives — the series arrives into a receptive if exacting context.