The Pressing Stones

The Healing Journey of a Nazi’s Daughter by Andrea van de Loo

Through heartfelt prose, Andrea shares her inspirational path of healing, tracing her quest to find her place in the world amidst the shadows of history.

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The Pressing Stones by Andrea van de Loo

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About the Pressing Stones

Born during WWII in the Netherlands, Andrea van de Loo experienced a traumatic childhood, with her father’s past as a member of the Nazi SS casting a long shadow over her life. Despite these challenges, she embarked on an inspirational journey toward healing and self-discovery. Her search for self took her across the globe, where she found solace, purpose, and community.

Encompassing eighty years of the author’s life, The Pressing Stones guides readers through a deeply intimate and emotional journey, exploring family, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, motherhood, psychedelic therapy, addiction recovery, and the generational impacts of war. It also presents a personal portrait of life in Auroville, the “City of Dawn,” dedicated to the spiritual visions of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

This poignant portrayal of one woman’s courage and determination to follow her inner guidance, and overcome her childhood trauma, is a testament to the power of consciousness and the human spirit, inspiring readers to find their own paths toward healing and fulfillment. Andrea’s story illustrates how freedom, joy, peace of mind, and happiness are possible, as we face our deepest truths and emerge from our darkest tribulations.

Her search for self takes her across the globe, where she finds solace and purpose. Dedicated to the spiritual visions of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Andrea is guided by her inner promptings on the path of healing—which continues through her eighth decade, showing that peace, freedom, joy, and happiness are possible, even through our darkest tribulations.

andrea van de loo

Meet the Author

Andrea was born as Angela van de Loo in the Netherlands in 1942 during WWII, to a father who was part of the German occupying forces, as a member of the Nazi SS. He was sentenced to death for war crimes, but later released. She studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam. In 1971 she hitchhiked to India where she met the Mother at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. She lived in Auroville, South India, Mother’s experimental city in the making, dedicated to the evolution of human unity, till 1978. Her two daughters were born there.

Andrea has been living in Santa Cruz, CA, since 1979 where she had a healing practice. After retiring in 2007, she continues to open and learn from life, devotes her energy and presence in service of family and friends and dedicates herself to offer her memoir as her small contribution to a peaceful world.

About andrea

Andrea van de Loo, author of The Pressing Stones - The Healing Journey of a Nazi's Daughter

What Readers Say

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“A remarkable book that is at once a personal memoir and an intimate history of our era. The author takes us, through her life, from WW2 to the idealism of the sixties, and onto the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The writing is crisp, often gripping and moving, and always honest. A good read for readers who are interested in the sixties, spirituality, shamanism, and overcoming grief and trauma. The book also contains a powerful and detailed description of the author’s life in the community of Auroville, adding to the growing body of memoirs and other testimonials emerging from that community.”

Akash Kapur

Author of Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia

“The book is beautifully written and will undoubtedly be deeply therapeutic and moving to many.”

Debashish Banerji

Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures
California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)

“Andrea Van de Loo’s remarkable autobiographical book, The Pressing Stones: The Healing Journey of a Nazi’s Daughter, invites the reader to share her long and ever widening journey from childhood trauma. This journey moves through three continents and propels a wide range of human experience. There are sections of this book that may be difficult and painful to read because, for the most part, the author does not insert her later life insights into her earlier life experiences until the end. This book invites us to walk the winding path of trauma, healing and becoming a healer as she walks it. We learn as she learns and see others, and yes ourselves too, with clearer and more compassionate eyes, eyes that also see new possibilities for healing.”

Karen Mitchell

Author of Woman Without A Name

“One thing that’s almost impossible to get from an addict (or ex-addict) is honesty about their usage of the drug or activity that they became dependent upon. They will easily gloss over or minimize. But not Andrea! She tells in a great amount of honest detail how she got into usage, how she sustained it and how she managed to leave it. She does not exaggerate, moralize or make a lesson of it. She simply tells it the way it was. I found myself in complete understanding and compassion of her decisions.
I was very interested in her life story and found the book very readable. I stayed interested and the pages flew by.”

Joanna Jarvis

“I’ve both listened to and followed along in the printed book of Andrea’s fascinating life story. I could not put them down. The Audible has touches of her mother’s beautiful piano music and the book has pictures. Her words are so descriptive and her narration expresses the emotion in such a way that made me feel as if I was right there with her. What a testament to the human spirit to survive and thrive. Truly inspiring!”

Cheryl Stone

“The Pressing Stones grabs the reader immediately. The first person account of life during recent historical events is riveting. In addition the author presents real life examples of controversial topics through a non-threatening lens. It is easy to read despite its number of pages. I highly recommend this book.”

Ellen Cool

“Phenomenal. A life history of a deeply emotional woman. 16 hours of audio in her voice made me feel I was living her life with her. As a man I greatly appreciated her descriptions of her sexual feelings. As an emotional man myself I felt my emotions aligned with hers. As a Jew, I have no animosity toward a child of a nazi. She loved her father and as a person with a daughter myself, that is a blessing. Thank you, Andrea.”

Eric Selvin

“I highly recommend Untimely Books author, Andrea van de Loo, whose terrific book The Pressing Stones: The Healing Journey of a Nazi’s Daughter, just came out. Andrea is not only a writer of wonderfully crafted, terse, evocative, sometimes haunted prose, she is also a compelling speaker. The complex twists and turns of Andrea’s shadowed childhood during WW2, her slow excavation of trauma and search for spiritual vision, seem, with the publication of this book, to have traced a prescient, even prophetic series of toroidal spirals, which have come to rest, quite weirdly, in our current cultural/political/spiritual moment.”

Brian George

Author of Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence