Martyr of Auschwitz
by Mike Oettle
JESUS was a Jew,
as were all his early disciples. The Apostles were Jewish to a man and there
can have been few, if any, Gentiles among the 3 000 who made up the Church at
the end of its first Pentecost Day. But after New Testament times we lose track
of Jews in the Church, so it is almost a surprise to come across the name of
Edith[1] Stein, a German Jewess who became a Roman Catholic nun – and a martyr in Hitler’s notorious death camp of Auschwitz.[2]
Edith
(1891-1942), like Dietrich Bonhöffer, was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), and like him followed an academic career in Germany – but a very different one. Her family was Orthodox Jewish, but at the age of 13 Edith renounced her faith and became an atheist. Despite this, she was discriminated against in school, never coming first in class because her teacher detested this brilliant Jewish, girl. However, so as not to upset her mother, Edith continued attending shul, even when she was at Breslau University. Continuing her studies at Göttingen, now in Lower Saxony, she was influenced by the philosopher Edmund Husserl and a Jewish couple, Adolph and Anna Reinach.
Adolph was called up in 1914, and in 1916 he and Anna were baptised as Christians. “A year later Adolph was dead, killed in Flanders, and his wife begged Edith to sort out, presumably for publication, various papers concerning his work. Edith agreed but was miserable at the thought of going to that home to find, not the happy couple she had known but ‘the sombre shadows of deep mourning’. She found nothing of the sort. She discovered Anna Reinach radiant in her unshakeable faith in a living God. Edith was to say later that that had been her first encounter with the cross and the divine strength it inspires in those who carry it. ‘At that moment my unbelief was utterly crushed . . . and the light of Christ poured into my heart – the light of Christ in the mystery of the Cross.’ ”[3]
Edith had meanwhile gone to the University of Freiburg in Breisgau,[4] where Husserl had called her to join him. She attained her doctorate in philosophy in 1916 and established a reputation as one of the university’s leading philosophers.
It must have been a shattering disappointment to her Orthodox parents that her 1921
visit to their home in Breslau was a catalyst in her conversion to the Catholic
faith, as it was there that she read the autobiography of the mystic St Teresa
of Avila and was profoundly influenced. Baptised on 1 January 1921, she gave
up her post at Freiburg to teach at a Dominican girls’ school in Speyer, near
Heidelberg. “There she translated St Thomas Aquinas’ De veritate (On
Truth) and became known for her addresses to German universities on
Thomism,[5] Phenomenology,[6] education and women’s position in the church.”[7]
Appointed a lecturer in Münster (north of the Ruhr) in 1932, Edith was forced to leave the following year when the nazis began their anti-Semitic persecution. In 1934 she joined the Carmelite order at Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she completed her philosophical work Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being), which brought together Thomism and Phenomenology and reflects Edith’s search for truth.
In 1938 the prioress in Cologne arranged a dramatic escape to Echt in the Dutch province of Limburg, so that Edith could be free of the nazis. There she wrote her most important work, a study of St John of the Cross. Her sister Rosa, now also a Catholic, also went to live in the Netherlands. The nazis caught up with them there after the invasion of the Netherlands.
The nuns tried to get the sisters to Switzerland, which meant a visit to Gestapo
headquarters for a passport. As Edith entered she was expected to raise her
hand and say: “Heil Hitler!” Instead she boldly cried: “Heil Jesus Christus!”
She was insulted and made to wear a yellow Star of David.
In August 1942, Hitler ordered the arrest of all “non-Aryan” Catholics, and Edith and Rosa joined other prisoners at Westerbroek before being transported by train to Auschwitz. There “all surviving witnesses testified she aided all the sufferers with compassion”[6] before she and Rosa joined the four million who died in that terrible camp’s gas chambers.
Edith once wrote: “To be a child of God means to place every care and every hope in the Hand of God and not to worry about oneself or one’s future.”
