Becoming Etty: The Brief, Incandescent Life of Etty Hillesum

by Carol Lee Flinders

"Becoming Etty" tells the riveting story of Etty Hillesum, a young, Dutch Jewish intellectual who underwent a profound spiritual transformation while interned in Auschwitz. Her wartime diaries document an abiding vision for the eventual triumph of human good over evil, even as she personally confronted the horror of the Nazi genocide.

The only biography to be published on this remarkable yet relatively unhearalded young philospher-mystic, "Becoming Etty" focuses on the spiritual dimensions of her transformation from cosmopolitan intellectual to the mystically inspired "thinking heart" of the concentration camp she hoped to become.

"Becoming Etty" was originally published as "Etty Hillesum: The Thinking Heart of the Barracks," in Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women of Faith in Action,Penguin/Tarcher, 2006.

61 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 26, 2011

About the author

Dr. Carol Lee Flinders is an author and former vegetarian food writer/syndicated columnist. She is best known as one of the three authors of the vegetarian cookbook
Laurel's Kitchen along with Laurel Robertson and Bronwen Godfrey. She also wrote the syndicated news column "Laurel's Kitchen" based on the cookbook. She wrote a weekly syndicated column called “Laurel’s Kitchen” for a number of years.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Flinders began writing about spirituality. She was a lecturer in spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California.