11/17/2025
Peace begins in the smallest corners of the soul. Etty Hillesum understood that better than most. Living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during one of the darkest chapters in human history, she turned inward and found something extraordinary. While the world around her was unravelling, she refused to let hatred consume her. Instead, she wrote. Her diaries, later published as ‘An Interrupted Life’, reveal a woman who believed that even in the midst of cruelty, the human heart could remain open, tender, and alive.
What makes Etty’s words so powerful isn’t just their beauty but their defiance. She didn’t write from a place of comfort or safety. She wrote from a world collapsing under violence and fear. Yet she insisted that peace wasn’t something we waited for others to create. It was something we cultivated within ourselves. She believed that the way we meet the world, even when it’s brutal, matters deeply. When we nurture calm, compassion, and understanding inside, we ripple those qualities outward.
Reading her diaries feels like sitting beside someone who’s painfully aware of how fragile life is but refuses to let despair win. She doesn’t hide her fear or exhaustion. She confesses her doubts, her loneliness, her longing for meaning. But again and again, she returns to a quiet strength. She writes about finding beauty in small things, about choosing to see goodness even when surrounded by evil. Her spirituality isn’t about escape. It’s about presence. It’s about being fully alive in a world that’s trying to crush that very aliveness.
Etty’s insight feels timeless because it speaks to something universal. We all struggle with chaos in different forms. Maybe it’s not war but the noise of modern life, the endless demands, the constant pressure to do and be more. Her words remind us that peace isn’t a luxury. It’s a responsibility. It’s something we owe to ourselves and to others. When we quiet the turmoil inside, we stop adding to the turmoil outside.
What’s most moving about Etty Hillesum’s life is that she didn’t just write about peace. She lived it. Even when she was sent to the Westerbork transit camp, she continued to care for others, to write, to love, to believe. She refused to see herself as a victim. She once wrote that she couldn’t bring herself to hate anyone, not even her oppressors. That kind of clarity and compassion feels almost impossible, yet she reached it through honest reflection and a fierce commitment to the human spirit.
In September 1943, Etty was deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz. She was twenty-nine years old. A few months later, she was killed there, along with her parents and brother. Yet even on the train to Auschwitz, she managed to send a postcard that radiated calm and acceptance, ending with the words that she was at peace. It’s haunting and humbling to think that someone facing such horror could still find serenity within herself.
Her story challenges us to ask what kind of peace we’re building inside ourselves. Are we feeding resentment, fear, and division, or are we tending to understanding and empathy? Etty’s life shows that peace isn’t passive. It’s active. It’s something we choose again and again, especially when it’s hardest.
In the end, Etty Hillesum didn’t survive the war, but her words did. They carry the quiet power of someone who faced unimaginable darkness and still believed in light. She reminds us that peace is not a faraway dream but a daily practice. It starts within and moves outward, one heart at a time.
