Edith Stein was born October 12, 1891, in what is now Wroclaw, Poland, but which had been Breslau since the Prussian occupation of western Poland in 1741. Edith was the youngest of eleven children. Because her father died when she was very young, her mother, who was a devout Jew, raised the family and saw to its support. Though the mother was meticulous in observing all Jewish holy days and customs, nevertheless, by the time Edith reached her early teen years, she was an avowed atheist. In 1911, she matriculated at the university in her native city; she intended to study German and history, but she became interested in experimental psychology, in the hope that this would help in her search for truth. While at the university, she was introduced to the writings of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and because she found them inspiring, she transferred (1913) to Göttingen to be one of his students. While there, she met the philosopher Max Scheler (1874–1928), and it was through him that she had her first contact with Catholicism. When Husserl moved to Freiburg in 1916, Edith went along as his graduate assistant and there received her doctorate. Feeling the beginnings of an interior transformation, Edith now began to read the New Testament.
During the summer of 1921, as a house guest of friends in Bergzabern, she began reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Jesus (see October 15). She spent the entire night reading, and when she finished it the next morning her remark was, “This is the truth!” Having been moved by what she had read, she then purchased a catechism and a missal, and after studying both, attended her first Mass in Bergzabern. After Mass, she asked the priest to baptize her. She was finally baptized on January 1, 1922, at which time she took the name Teresa. There was also growing within her the desire to be a Carmelite nun. Later, in 1922, she began teaching German at St. Magdalena’s School in Speyer. The school was operated by Dominican sisters, and because Edith had taken private vows, her manner of life was similar to that of the sisters. She left Speyer in 1931 and returned home, busying herself in translating philosophical treatises of St. Thomas Aquinas (see January 28). Then, in 1932, she was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Educational Theory in Münster; but the following year, she was asked to leave because of her Jewish heritage. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) had recently come (1933) into power, and Germany had launched a large-scale offensive against the Jews. It was now time for her to fulfill her deepest desire.
On October 14, 1933, she entered the Discalced Carmelite convent in Cologne, and when she received her habit in April 1934, she took Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as her name in religion. Then, on November 9, 1938, there occurred Kristallnacht—when synagogues were burned and Jews were driven from their homes. Knowing that her presence could cause difficulties for the nuns, she left her Cologne monastery on December 31, crossed the border into Holland under the cover of darkness, and arrived at the Echt convent the following morning. But when Germany occupied Holland (1940), she knew she was no longer safe even there. On July 26, 1942, the Dutch bishops issued their pastoral letter denouncing the deportation of Jews. The Nazis responded by ordering the arrest of all non-Aryan Catholics in Holland, and on August 2, 1942, Sr. Teresa Benedicta was arrested and taken from her convent. Then, on the morning of August 7, she and about a thousand others were transported to Oswiecim (also known by its German name, Auschwitz), and there, on August 9, 1942, she met her martyrdom in the gas chambers. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998.
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