Past Voice, Present Lesson

Amsterdam, 1940s. Under the shadow of Nazi occupation, a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum began filling her diary with reflections on faith, suffering, and humanity. Eight decades later, her words found new life at St. Edward, where sophomores experienced Etty, a one-woman traveling performance by actor and playwright Susan Stein.

In St. Edward's Holy Family Chapel, Stein stepped into Hillesum’s voice. Through diary entries and letters penned from Westerbork transit camp, she traced Etty’s search for freedom and her restless dialogue with God. “Performing in this chapel was different,” Stein admitted. “Etty questions whether to get down on her knees to pray. For the first time while performing, I turned toward Jesus in prayer. It was profound.”

The play ends as Etty boards a train to Auschwitz at age 29—an ending that left students stunned. “They were invested in Etty and her story, and the reality hit them all at once,” English Teacher Garrett McPartland noted.

Breaking Down the Walls

What happened in the chapel wasn’t an isolated enrichment activity—it was the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (MYP) in action, the instructional approach that shapes every ninth- and tenth-grade course at St. Edward.

A central tenet of the MYP is interdisciplinary learning. The idea is deceptively simple: the world’s most urgent problems are solved when knowledge from multiple fields collide. Doctors rely on researchers to advance medicine; architects depend on engineers to bring designs to life. In the same way, education must prepare students to think across disciplines, drawing connections that expand understanding and spark solutions.

That’s why, at St. Edward, freshmen and sophomores might write research papers in math class or analyze world literature through the lens of Theology. It’s also why the performance resonated so deeply. “We’re not looking for departments to be siloed. This is IB learning. We’re breaking down walls and approaching material through shared themes,” explains McPartland.

The project united the English and Theology departments around four guiding themes: transcendence, relationships, identity, and physicality.

In preparation for Stein’s performance, Theology classes studied Hillesum’s life and journals, which grapple with faith, spirituality, and resilience. Students also read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and compared his reflections as a Holocaust survivor with Etty’s. Though their fates diverged—Frankl lived to share his testimony, while Etty perished at Auschwitz—both writings explore how love, hope, and beauty can exist even in persecution. Taken together, the readings and performance showed students how God’s presence can be discovered in the midst of hardship and devastation.

Honors English II classes, meanwhile, studied excerpts from Etty and Man’s Search for Meaning, and read Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor Was Divine, a story of a Japanese American family forced into an internment camp in the Utah desert during World War II. Students wove together language from all three works and created a poem around a single theme that most resonated with each individual.

Dialogue Beyond the Performance

Etty does not end with a curtain call. Its second act is dialogue—an open invitation for the audience to wrestle with human rights, resistance, and personal responsibility. At St. Edward, Stein extended that dialogue by joining students for in-class workshops.

“She came in and, right away, had the students read words and phrases from one of Etty’s letters that spoke to them,” McPartland said. “She put them in an awareness circle, and whenever they felt moved, they stepped in and read their line. It started out structured, but then it grew more natural—sometimes voices overlapped—and it ended up feeling really theatrical and moving.”

Students described the experience in anonymous surveys. “I was able to almost feel what Etty was feeling, which helped me to understand her writing on a higher level,” one wrote. Another reflected: “She made a person that we only read about come alive and allowed us to learn about such terrible events through the human perspective, which is very valuable.”

For Stein, the sophistication of their responses was startling. Students were drawing connections between Hillesum’s diary and the other texts. “The thoughtful conversation came from them,” she said. “That’s the stuff you dream of and hope for—your students making profound connections. It’s a culture there,” she said of St. Edward. “I was there to teach, but I left having learned.”

The Etty Project was brought to campus through the generous support of Lakewood Public Library and the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland.