According to Rowan Williams, “It is characteristic of diabolical speech to move toward silence, not a listening silence but that of incommunicable, self-enclosedness, death. To speak as if the other's responses were already known and could be dealt with or circumvented in advance.” Such a characterization can be attributed to the rhetoric of Hitler and his Nazis. The disconnect between language and life that marked their representations of the Jews revealed a narrative void of any of the signifiers of encounter so frequently found in Hillesum's writing; whether it be Hitler's proclamation of genocidal vengeance upon the Jews who laughed at his prophecies, or the recycled fables of the dark-haired Jew preying on the virginal Aryan girl, Hitler's references to Jews belong firmly in the realm of the abstract – divorced, not only from the reality of their existence, but from reality according to every possible measure. This wilful deafness to the Other promotes rigid representations with no relation to time and space; the Other is removed from his/her embodied reality and transposed into a fictional chronotope, where they become a plaything for the oppressor.