Love is the Only Solution Etty Hillesum

In this film we discover the extraordinary message of the life of Etty Hillesum, this young Dutch Jewess, who during those tragic years in Europe, 1940 – 1943, reveals her spiritual experience to us, a dazzling and profound experience.

While she knew that she was destined to suffer the fate of the Jewish victims of the Nazi persecution, which she herself describes as having “a totalitarian form, organised on a massive scale, encompassing the whole of Europe”, Etty testifies to an extraordinary discovery: that of the presence of God in her innermost self. This discovery is all the more amazing because nothing in Etty's past seems to have prepared her for this. Etty had not received any religious education; her message is delivered without any reference to any theological or institutional structure.

A genuinely and strikingly original writer, Etty wrote a diary describing her personal journey over two years from 8 March 1941. Large extracts of this together with a part of her correspondence have been published and translated into 14 languages, under the title, “An interrupted life”.

Her writings show us her evolution which led her progressively to abandon a rather chaotic life for one of union with God and of total self-giving. Having realised that love is the “only solution”, when the Nazi occupiers were rounding up the Dutch Jews and holding them in the Westerbork camp before deporting them to Auschwitz, she refused to go into hiding or to escape and chose instead to be sent to the death camps so that she could relieve the anguish of all these unfortunate people; she sees herself as “a balm on so many wounds” and as “accompanying God” into this darkness.

On 15 September 1943, together with all her family and hundreds of other Jews, she was selected for transportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is there that she died on 30 November 1943. She was 29 years of age.

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The message of Etty Hillesum can be related to many contexts and events. There are several striking points in this film:

- The action of the Spirit through a relationship with the psychic palm reader Julius Spier;
- All the grace she received through the action of the Holy Spirit within her;
- Her picture of a “disarmed” God whom she had to help: “I shall try to help you, my God, not to be extinguished in me”;
- Her total rejection of hatred;
- Her acceptance of the tragic realities she was confronted with and her confidence in God in the face of the inevitable;
- Her study of the scriptures which developed through her listening to what was “within” herself, without self-indulgence and through fidelity to the leading of the Spirit.

Ce film est réalisé par la Communauté du Chemin Neuf via le réseau international de prière « Net for God ».

Pour plus d'informations : www.netforgod.tv
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