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By the time Susan Stein finished reading the diaries of Etty Hillesum in 1994, she knew she would write a play about this assimilated Dutch-Jewish intellectual who eventually died at Auschwitz. But, as with many big ideas, this one remained dormant for years as Stein juggled the daily demands of her work as a Princeton Day School English teacher and as a mother of two young sons.

It took a brush with death -- a car accident in 2006 that could easily have killed Stein and her sons -- for her to realize that writing this play was a personal necessity, not a choice.

"While there in the emergency room, I remember thinking, 'I haven't done that play about Etty Hillesum'," Stein said. "What am I waiting for?" A few days later, she got started.

Stein will perform "Etty" at The Jewish Center in Princeton, Sunday, Jan. 24, 4 p.m., and will answer questions after the performance. Suggested donation for non-members is $10. This summer Stein performed the finished play at 59E59 in New York and then daily for a month at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

For Stein, the creation of this play from Etty Hillesum's words was a personal journey, both toward understanding Etty and herself more deeply.

A friend had told Stein about Hillesum's diaries, so when she saw a copy for 50 cents at a yard sale in 1994, she bought it and read it.

"I remember when I was finished," Stein said. "You know she doesn't make it, but you don't feel that way. You feel like she's alive with you."

Although Stein had studied acting in college and graduate school and acted in several plays, including Austin Pendleton's 2005 production of Arthur Miller's "American Clock" at HB Playwrights Foundation, playwriting was entirely new to her, and she had no idea how difficult the process would be. Starting naively with the idea that she would just string together sentences she liked, Stein learned quickly from her mentors, her research, and through the process itself to be a professional aware of the nuances of projecting meaning to an audience.

As the one-hour monologue was developing, Stein spoke to a number of people with connections to Etty. One was Gerd Korman, a professor emeritus of history from Cornell University whose father Osias was Etty's friend at Westerbork. Korman challenged Stein to think more about Etty's relationship with God. After reading an early draft of the play, he asked Stein, "Is she an agnostic or is she Tevye (the Shalom Aleichem character who, like Abraham in the Bible, argues with God)?" When she responded, "Tevye," he said, "You're making her look like an agnostic. If she's Tevye, make her Tevye."

While developing the play, Stein also visited Auschwitz, where she hoped to unearth her family's ghosts as well as to better penetrate Etty's experience there. Stein's great-grandmother was a victim of the Holocaust, but Stein's father knew her quite well -- because she had spent years in America, coming over to help her daughter raise Stein's father but then returning to Europe after her grandson's bar mitzvah. This grandmother was part of Stein's family lore, as was a hatred of Poland, where she died.

"Auschwitz was my nightmare when I was growing up," said Stein.

Despite her family's dismissal of Poland, Stein knew she needed to visit as part of her odyssey to understand Etty. When asked whether she actually found Etty there, she said, "No, but I found my great grandmother. I realized the trip was much more about my own father's family than it was about Etty." She did say Kaddish at Auschwitz, however, for both women.

Stein also visited the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, where Etty, the intellectual, spent the last year of her life and discovered her ability to give to others. Westerbork was where Stein was able to "find" Etty. "Unlike Auschwitz, Westerbork is very small, which you can really take in," said Stein. "I see a suitcase, open, and it has these things in it, and I really fell apart. Westerberg undid me; it brought me into that experience."

While in Europe, Stein also visited Ghent University, where she met with a woman who had recently defended her doctoral dissertation at the Etty Hillesum Research Centre; the subject of her dissertation was how Etty Hillesum found that love was the only solution to hate. For Stein, her conversation with this woman ironically connected her to prayer and God in a way that her Orthodox Jewish background never had.

When the woman asked her, "Do you pray?" Stein began to cry and responded, "I don't think anyone asked me that question since I was a little girl." The woman offered advice in reply: "Let Etty teach you." Then, Stein returned to her cheap room in an Amsterdam bed and breakfast, and she prayed.

Stein had to really dig deep to find a way to represent Etty as she spoke to God, to feel that she had a right to represent Etty as such. It required her to get in touch with her own feelings about God.

When Pendle-ton, Stein's director, asked her to consider what God she was talking to, she realized it was the God she had reached to for help as her 4-year-old self. This left her feeling at an even greater loss: "I'm 4 years old -- I can't contact this brilliant woman in her 20s." Pendleton responded, "It's the same God, it's the same voice. You've gotten to your 4-year-old helpless self in talking to God because, on some level, that is the God Jews are talking to in the situation you are talking about. It's brought you to your most helpless self, where the Nazis brought the Jews."

From the man who eventually became the play's director, Austin Pendleton, Stein learned about the craft of writing a play. At one point, he suggested that Stein let go of chronology. She went home and, sitting alone in her apartment for the next five days, let Etty's words flow in a stream of consciousness and pulled out Etty's moments of clarity.

"Gaining insight is what Etty is trying to do," said Stein. "That's her weapon. They are sending terror, and this is her way of fighting."

Musing about what Etty learned during her time at Westerbork, Stein suggested that Etty was really transformed while at the transit camp. "Westerbork becomes a test -- a challenge that she could hold onto God, God being the deeper part of herself," Stein said. "When she says to God, 'You cannot help us, I'll have to help you God,' she refuses to turn into a hating machine."