Overview

Edith Stein (1891-1942) had been born Jewish in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland). She studied philosophy in her native town before joining Göttingen University. In Freiburg, she worked with Professor Edmund Husserl, the philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. At the age of thirty, she converted to Catholicism and later entered the Carmel of Echt, in the Netherlands. In 1942, she was arrested there and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where she was gassed. Edith Stein, who had become Sister Theresa of the Cross, was canonized in 1998.