The Girl Who Learned How to Kneel

The Girl Who Learned How to KneelIn one of his last public audiences as Pope, Benedict XVI in the course of his discourse said, "I think of the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she found Him looking deep inside herself and wrote: 'There is a well very deep inside of me. And God is in the well. Sometimes I can reach Him; more often He is covered by stone and sand: then God is buried. We must dig Him up again.'

In one of his last public audiences as Pope, Benedict XVI in the course of his discourse said, "I think of the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she found Him looking deep inside herself and wrote: 'There is a well very deep inside of me. And God is in the well. Sometimes I can reach Him; more often He is covered by stone and sand: then God is buried. We must dig Him up again.' In her scattered and restless life, she finds God in the middle of the great tragedy of the twentieth century, the Shoah. This young fragile and dissatisfied woman, transfigured by faith, becomes a woman full of love and inner peace, able to say: 'I live in constant intimacy with God'." This book recounts the moving story of the conversion, faith, and ultimate martyrdom of Etty Hillesum.