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Edith Stein
A Sacrifice for Her People
When the grim-faced nun stood at the doorway of her cell and informed her that two SS officers had summoned her to the gate, Edith knew exactly what awaited her. She lay her pen down next to her manuscript and followed the sister down the dark hallway to the front entrance of the convent. The officers on the other side of the iron bars stated that Edith had five minutes to gather her belongings. A few minutes later when she reached the convent gate, her sister Rosa was already there. Edith took her sister’s hand and led her to the car. “Come, Rosa,” she encouraged. “We’re going for our people.”1
Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein as a martyr in Cologne in 1987. “We bow down before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and at the same time a daughter of the Carmelite Order, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a personality who united within her rich life a dramatic synthesis of our century,” the pope said. “It was the synthesis of a history full of deep wounds that are still hurting . . . and also the synthesis of the full truth about man. All this came together in a single heart that remained restless and unfulfilled until it finally found rest in God.”2
Edith was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint by him eleven years later, more than fifty-five years after she was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
A Quest for Truth
Edith Stein was born on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in Breslau, Germany, the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family. From the time her father died when Edith was just two years old, her mother, Auguste Stein, always considered Edith her husband’s last testament. Although Edith accompanied her mother to the synagogue and participated in the fasts and other rituals of Judaism, she abandoned her faith by the time she completed secondary school. “I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying,” she said.3 Instead, she enrolled in the University of Breslau to study philosophy, to “search for the ultimate grounds for being, the quest for truth taking the place of childhood faith.”4
After Edith graduated with honors, she enrolled in the Gottingen School to pursue graduate work under her mentor, Edmund Husserl, who pioneered the revolutionary method of phenomenological research. Phenomenology, the study of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness, greatly appealed to Edith in her search for truth. Ironically, it was one of the influences that led her back to faith. “With good reason we were repeatedly enjoined to observe all things without prejudice, to discard all possible ‘blinders,’” she wrote in her autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family. “The barriers of rationalistic prejudices with which I had unwittingly grown up fell, and the world of faith unfolded before me.”5
As World War I descended, Edith continued to both move toward faith and struggle against it. At one point she visited Frankfurt Cathedral, where she witnessed a woman enter the sanctuary with a shopping basket on her arm and kneel in a pew for a brief prayer. Edith, who up to this point had experienced religious people praying only during an actual church service, was intrigued by the fact that this woman prayed in the midst of her everyday life, as if she were engaging in an intimate conversation with God. Later Edith wrote that she never forgot that scene.
Around the same time, her good friend and fellow phenomenologist Adolf Reinach, who had converted to Protestantism with his wife a few years prior, was killed on the battlefields of Flanders. Edith dreaded visiting Adolf’s widow, but when she did, she was amazed by Frau Reinach’s hope and her ability to console her husband’s mourners. Shortly before her death, Edith recalled the experience to her friend, Jesuit priest Father Hirschmann: “It was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it bestows on those who carry it. . . . That was the moment my unbelief collapsed and Christ shone forth—in the mystery of the Cross.”6
Still, torn between her strong foundation in science and philosophy and the unfamiliar but powerful pull of Christ, Edith resisted faith. As she wrote later, an atheist can learn of the existence of God through personal experience yet still resist him, refusing to respond by holding God at arm’s length. She knew an intellectual willingness to believe was not enough. God required a full and complete surrender to achieve complete transformation, but Edith was simply too afraid to acquiesce.
All that changed with a book Edith picked off a friend’s shelf. The book was Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography, and once Edith turned the first page, she couldn’t stop until she had read it cover to cover in a single night. She found in Teresa’s autobiography confirmation of what she had suspected for a while: that God is not a God of knowledge but a God of love. According to Teresa, our inner resistance is healed and transformed via interior prayer, and so, at Teresa’s prompt, Edith embarked on a journey of quiet, meditative prayer. “The Spanish mystic told [Edith] to let the intellect rest in prayer, to let God come to her in solitude and silence, without the props of earthly consolations,” biographer Waltraud Herbstrith explains.7 Edith relinquished her dependence on a rationalist worldview and surrendered herself entirely to God in prayer.
She embraced her new quest with gusto, purchasing a catechism and daily missal and attending her first Mass. Immediately after that Mass, she approached the priest and asked him to baptize her. Surprised, the priest informed Edith that an extended period of study typically preceded baptism in the Catholic Church, but undeterred, Edith suggested that the priest test her knowledge. She passed the test with ease and was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church shortly after, on New Year’s Day 1922. She took Teresa for her baptismal name. Edith Stein had finally found the truth she had pursued so relentlessly for thirty years.
Atonement
After her conversion Edith abandoned her dream of a professorship and accepted a job teaching German at St. Magdalena’s, a school run by Dominican nuns. She refused a salary beyond what was necessary for clothing, room, and board, and she dedicated herself entirely to her students and to serving the inner-city poor. She also persisted in her practice of contemplative prayer, and when she spoke to both religious women and laywomen alike, she suggested they do the same. Every woman, she urged, should try to find “breathing spaces” in her day, moments in which she can center herself and rest in God. “God is there [in these moments] and can give us in a single instant exactly what we need,” she explained. “Then the rest of the day can take its course, under the same effort and strain, perhaps, but in peace.”8
Edith also worked as a translator, first translating the letters and diaries of Cardinal Newman from his pre-Catholic period, then Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate. Her spiritual mentor encouraged her to write her own philosophical works as well. Little by little, Edith began to return to academic work as she realized it was possible to pursue scholarship as a service to God. As a result of this revelation, in 1932 she accepted a lectureship position for the Roman Catholic division of the German Institute for Educational Studies at the University of Münster, where she successfully combined scholarship and faith in her work and her teaching. She sought to be a tool of the Lord, endeavoring to bring anyone she connected with to Christ.
The year 1933 was a dramatic turning point for Edith. With the Nazi takeover and the large-scale offensive against the Jews, her life’s purpose and calling began to crystallize. She realized Jesus’ cross was being laid on the Jewish people—her people—and herself. As “one of the few who understood this [and] had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all,”9 she was willing to accept this burden and prayed to God to show her how. She was convinced that her calling included admission into the Carmelite convent in Cologne, and she was accepted into the convent in October of 1933. Her mother was devastated by Edith’s decision, and their parting was excruciating—a step, Edith admitted later, “that had to be taken in the absolute darkness of faith.”10 Although Edith wrote to her mother faithfully from the convent, she never received a reply.
The situation in Germany worsened dramatically with the SS attack on November 8, 1938. Enclosed behind the convent walls, Edith was safe as Jews were driven from their homes during the night, their businesses confiscated or destroyed, and their synagogues burned. But her prioress knew Edith would not remain protected for long. She arranged to have Edith driven across the border to Holland under cover of darkness on New Year’s Eve. A year later, her sister Rosa, who had also joined the Carmelites, narrowly escaped arrest as she fled from Belgium to Holland and was reunited with Edith in Echt.
As biographer Waltraud Herbstrith notes, Edith’s escape to Holland should not be misconstrued as a flight from reality but rather her “entrance into the redeeming action of Christ.”11 She clearly stated her intentions in a letter written to her prioress just before the start of the war:
Dear Reverend Mother: please permit me to offer myself to the Heart of Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement for true peace, that if possible the reign of Antichrist might be broken without another world war and a new social order might be established. I would like to do it today, if I could, since it is already the final hour. I know I myself am nothing, but Jesus desires it, and I am sure he is asking it of many others in these days.12
Edith felt a sense of peace even as the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940. Although she applied for a Swiss visa and was accepted by Carmel of Le Paquier, a convent in Switzerland, when she realized Rosa would not be allowed to accompany her, she chose to remain in Echt.
On August 2, 1942, the moment she had anticipated arrived: all Jewish Catholics were ordered under arrest, including members of the Catholic religious orders. Edith and her sister Rosa were brought to a temporary camp in Amersfoort and then herded with 1,200 other Jewish women onto a train and brought to Westerbork, the central detention camp in north Holland. Edith occupied her time in the camp by caring for the abandoned children, washing their clothes, cleaning the living quarters, and comforting them. In the middle of the night on August 7, 987 Jews were awakened and loaded onto yet another train. The train stopped at Breslau, Edith and Rosa’s hometown, on its way to Auschwitz. No one from the transport survived. Edith Stein, her sister Rosa, and more than one thousand others were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on December 9, 1942.
It’s natural for us to feel intimidated by Edith Stein, a woman who humbly and bravely offered her very life for God and considered her sacrifice an atonement for the horrors inflicted upon her people. How can we compare ourselves to a woman who made the ultimate sacrifice? we reason. Yet the prescient words she penned in 1930 are just as applicable to those of us who face far less dire circumstances: “Every time I feel my powerlessness and inability to influence people directly, I become more keenly aware of the necessity of my own holocaust.”13 Although she literally sacrificed herself for her love of Christ, Edith argued that each of us must die to ourselves in order to live as humbly, obediently, and lovingly as Jesus Christ desires. If you’ve lived as “a person more or less contented with himself, the time for that is over,” she challenged.14 It’s not about us, she reminds us matter-of-factly. We do not have the power to influence and impact others on our own. We, like Edith Stein, are simply his instruments.