Etty is a Dutch diminutive of Esther — from the Hebrew *Ester* ("star"), or alternately a short form of Henrietta. **Etty Hillesum (1914-1943)** — **Dutch Jewish writer whose diary, kept from 1941 until her deportation to Auschwitz in September 1943, was published as *An Interrupted Life* (1981) and stands alongside Anne Frank's *Diary* as the great spiritual document of the Holocaust**. **Unlike Anne, she was an adult Amsterdam intellectual** (28-29 during the diary years); a Russian-language graduate student undergoing intense psychological analysis. **Her decision to share the fate of her people rather than escape — "I have looked our destruction, our miserable end... straight in the eye and accepted it into my life" — has been called one of the great spiritual statements of the 20th century**.
Subject of Patrick Woodhouse's *Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed* (2009).
Etty reduces to nine — the number of Auschwitz diarist.