Like a modern day apostle

in the midst of that dark night she wrote:

I will go to any place on this earth where God sends me, and I am ready in every situation  until I die to bear witness...that it is not God's fault that everything has turned out this way, but our fault ...

Etty Hillesum  – January 15, 1914–1943 – was a young Jewish woman from the Netherlands who voluntarily went to the concentration camp at Westernork to help the sick and dying. Her courage cost her life. In 1943, she was sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Etty Hillesum’s diary, which she kept between 1941 and 1943, is the only extant source about her. Hillesum’s diary reflects a mature, nonconformist Dutch woman attempting to grapple with the changing landscape of her internal world. In doing so she develops a mystical relationship with the God inside of her. When Hillesum is forced to wear the Yellow Star in April 1942, she realizes she cannot ignore the political realities of her external world any longer. Her diary is explicit in its expression of sexuality; Hillesum simultaneously took Han Wegerif and the “psychochirologist” Julius Spier as her lovers. After Spier’s sudden death in September 1942, her diary reads like a long prayer to her personal God. Hillesum was murdered at Auschwitz in December 1943.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hillesum-etty

Flower seller outside Belsize Park, London, 1931. Photographer Bill Brandt.

“We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”- Etty Hillesum