In 1938, the superiors of the Order of Discalced Carmelites decided to transfer one of their number away from her convent in Cologne, Germany, to one in Echt, the Netherlands. This was for her own safety, as she was a Catholic convert of Jewish descent. So, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross moved countries; later she was joined by her biological sister Rosa, also a convert, who was a lay (not vowed to remain fully cloistered) Carmelite.

Prior to entering the convent, Sr Teresa Benedicta was known as Dr Edith Stein, of Polish Jewish descent — though from an ‘assimilated’ German background — and a rising star in German philosophical circles before her career was abruptly terminated by the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies.

Then, on the 26^th of July 1942, the Dutch Catholic bishops, along with nine other denominations, ordered a notice read aloud as part of Sunday services that the measures against the Jews were in opposition to Christian teaching and must stop immediately. In retaliation, the Nazis ordered the arrest and deportation of four thousand Christians of Jewish descent. On the second of August, at 5:00 pm, the hour for evening mental prayer in the Carmelite Order, SS men entered the convent at Echt to take the Stein sisters away.

The last confirmed sighting of Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was on the seventh of August, when she leaned out of the window of a train heading to Auschwitz and spoke to a German postal worker, who later identified her based on photographs. After an extensive search for them by the Carmelite Order, the Stein sisters were declared dead in 1950.

In the convent in Germany, Stein continued her work on ontology, psychology and ethics, as well as receiving commissions to write biographies and commentaries on various Doctors of the Church — a title given by the Catholic Church to the few saints recognised as having made a significant contribution to theology or Church doctrine. When the order to transfer to the Netherlands came, the urgency was so great that she was unable to take all her manuscripts with her. The convent kept them and, after World War II, the Carmelite Order organised the publication of the works written by Stein. Her writings, many of which are incomplete, total eleven books mostly focussed on her academic interests.

Of these works, her autobiography, translated into English by her great-niece Waltraud Stein under the title Life in a Jewish Family: Edith Stein: An Autobiography 1891 – 1916, is part of her body of work that she wrote after fleeing to the Netherlands. In 1941, the Prioress of the Carmelite convent in Echt asked Stein to write down, as much as possible, her thoughts on philosophy, and to include an autobiography. Aware that she was unlikely to survive the War, Stein worked with a sense of urgency at simply inscribing her thoughts. Sadly, the autobiography remained incomplete, as Stein turned her attention to finishing her theoretical philosophical and theological work first. The manuscript was also bowdlerised by Rosa Stein, who appears to have removed pages and passages relating to familial problems without Edith’s knowledge.

Despite the ‘editorial assistance,’ the autobiography is unusual among Jewish memoirs because it is by a woman who not only received a high level of secular education, but she also converted to Roman Catholicism and then became a fully cloistered nun. The book therefore is a deeply personal account of a strain of Judaism that had little in common with similar works by Stein’s contemporaries on that theme such as the male-viewpoint, fully religious experience documented in Israel Joshua Singer’s Of a World That Is No More. On the socio-cultural side, too, being that the Stein family were fundamentally urban Germans, Stein’s autobiography has little in common with the anthropological memoir and culture study, Life is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog.

The Stein autobiography does not slot well into the pigeonhole for the Jewish experience pre-World War II because its value is something else: the book is a testimonial to the mother, the siblings and the family whose qualities were necessary to forming a mind so formidable that Stein is under consideration for the highest honour the Catholic Church can bestow on writer: enshrinement as only the fifth ever woman Doctor of the Church.

Original image is a photo that Edith Stein had to have taken for her passport, taken in the doorway of the Cologne Carmel in the late 1930s.