At her request, Etty Hillesum spent months in a cramped Nazi transit camp so that she could offer fellow Dutch Jews kindness while they were suffering and scared. Then in September 1943, she and her family were herded onto a train.
Afterward, near the tracks, someone found a postcard she’d let fly from a window. It read: “We left the camp singing… Goodbye for now from the four of us.” This volume is a selection of Hillesum’s writing and is part of Orbis’ spiritual masters series.
Hillesum’s diaries, which chart her spiritual development, were first published in 1981 in Dutch, and have since been translated into more than a dozen languages. She’s now recognized as a hero of the Nazi era and an ecumenical mystic who affirmed goodness, even in the face of war. Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine.