Rescheduled to April 1: Play embodies the writings of a young woman facing the brutality of the Nazis

UPDATE: The performance was cancelled due to inclement weather and has been rescheduled to Tuesday, April 1 at 7 p.m.

“If I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.”

Few artists experience the honour and privilege to embody a historical persona as intimately as Susan Stein in her one-woman, two-act play, ‘Etty,’ based on the diaries and writings of Etty Hillesum—a courageous Dutch Jewish student murdered in the Auschwitz Concentration camp in 1943 at the age of 29.

The play will be presented on April 1, 2025, at 7 p.m. at All Saints’ Anglican Church, located at 30 High Street, Huntsville. The suggested donation is $20.00.  

In a stunning portrayal of a young woman who defiantly cherishes her spiritual search for freedom from hatred and unconditional love over her own personal welfare, Stein brings this compelling story to life. In act one, Stein, through Hillesum’s own words, recounts the bravery and unrelenting inner transcendent clarity with which Etty faces the unapparelled cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1941 to 1943.

In act two, Stein invites the audience to investigate and discuss the themes that Etty encountered leading up to her murder: human rights, resistance, and personal responsibility.

At the recommendation of a friend, Susan Stein sought out and then inadvertently found Hillesum’s diaries at a yard sale. Initially, she was slightly disturbed by the tone of the writing, but then something significant changed. 

“Something shifted and she started feeling like she was sitting next to me, kind of right here, just whispering into my ear, inviting me into places that I had never been to before with anyone, or with myself, and I had never had quite that experience in a book before,” Stein explains. 

“When I finished that first time this very little book of hers, I had three ideas come at the same time, which were: Why isn’t she well known? Why isn’t she known? Her thinking and the experience of reading her, so remarkable, I was surprised by that, and I thought, ‘oh, I know, I’ll put her words in my body and make a play and bring them to as many people as possible,'” says Stein. “That was idea one. Idea two was I didn’t want to let go of her, and idea three was I wanted to give something back to her because it feels like she gives you a lot when you’re reading her. It feels like a great gift to be inside the diary.”

Thus began a remarkable, life-changing journey for Stein, first in writing and staging her initial version of the play, and then thousands of performances that, for the past eleven years, have taken her around the world.

“Over 65,000 people have attended an Etty performance; more than 5000 students have participated in Etty Project classes, and over 200 teachers have attended professional development workshops run by Etty Project teaching artists.”

In her first series of presentations in Canada, Stein is excited to bring the play and workshops to Huntsville. While the play provides deep insight into the work that Hillesum undertook to shape her own inner attitude toward the perils facing her, the audience discussion offers attendees a chance to discuss the profound discovery that Hillesum understood and attempted to inform and activate within her own life circumstance. https://ettyproject.org/

 “I really see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.” February 1942, Etty Hillesum’s diary. 

Stein, as part of the Etty Project’s Recovering Lost Voices, will also facilitate student/teacher workshops on March 31 and April 1, 2025, at Huntsville Highschool to encourage others to value and develop their own capacity for self-examination, introducing skills and tools that foster empathy, promote human rights and social justice.  

“What Etty shows us is an unbelievable act of resistance in her writing, in her spirit, in her faith, and in her humanity—in her commitment to be a human being in the face of this barbarity. She offers the greatest resistance, I can imagine, in compassion and kindness, which is hard to find,” Stein points out in her enduring devotion to Hillesum’s legacy and importance to human understanding.

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