Towards martyrdom

At the end of 1938, after the infamous Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, Edith's convent sends her and her sister Rosa (who was also a convert and an extern sister of the Carmel) to Echt, in the Netherlands, to protect them against the growing Nazi threat.

There, Edith resumes her teaching and research works. She focuses on the symbolic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, then on St. John of the Cross. This is when she writes "Studies on John of the Cross: The Science of the Cross."

On July 20, 1942, the Dutch Bishops' Conference issues a public statement, to be read in all the churches of the nation, unequivocally condemning Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. Retaliation comes a week later when the Reichkommissar of the Netherlands orders the arrest of all Jewish converts, who had been spared until then. 

Edith and her sister Rosa are arrested on August 2, 1942, along with 243 Jewish converts. 

Her last message, thrown from the train taking her to Auschwitz during a stop at Schifferstadt, contains these brief words:

”On the way ad orientem. Sr Teresa Benedicta a Cruce. Edith Stein.”

As the deportation toward East signifies certain death, she identifies the foreboding of death with the “Oriens” which in biblical and liturgical language stands for the resuscitated Messiah.

It was probably on August 9, 1942, that Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, her sister Rosa and many others were murdered in a mass gas chamber in Auschwitz. In the unleashed ravaging evil, she lives the mystery of Christ dead and resuscitated.

Edith and Rosa

Radiance

Edith is gone, but she still shines.  In the Carmel of Cologne, the “safekeeping” of mementos of Edith Stein begins with boxes of letters and testimonies piled under the bed of sister Margareta Drugemoller. Pope John Paul II beatifies her in 1987 in Cologne. He then canonizes her in Rome in 1998. 

The following year, she is proclaimed the co-patroness of Europe with Saints Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden.

 Letter from Edith Stein

This famous letter of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross to Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmid of Saint Lloba was written in March 1938, shortly after the death of her philosophical Master Edmund Husserl. She shares future-oriented thoughts:

I am not at all worried about my dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God's mercy allows itself to be circumbscribed by the visible Church's boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.