Inspiring Christian Lives

Edith Stein, 1891-1942

2nd August 1942, Utrecht Uniformed Gestapo men burst into a convent and arrest all of the sisters there. They are given 10 minutes to pack and then bundled into the back of the police van parked outside. The Gestapo had been looking for all 'non-Aryan' members of every Dutch religious community. This was a backlash against a letter from the Archbishop of Utrecht protesting publicly against the Nazi treatment of the Jews. The nuns in the van were all eventually transported to Auschwitz, where they met their death.

Amongst the nuns was Edith Stein. Edith had been on an incredible life journey to be sitting in the van with a group of nuns, a journey that was really a quest for the truth. She had been born and raised as a devout Jew in Poland. As she matured she became a prominent university intellectual with a brilliant, incisive mind: Edith soon declared herself an atheist in her early twenties. Yet through a friend she had a chance encounter with The Life of Theresa of Avila by St Theresa herself. She was unable to put the book down, but when she did, she remarked, 'That is the truth'. Not long after she was baptised, received into the Church and became a member of the Carmelite order of nuns, where she prayed, taught and lived in community with her sisters.

Here her reputation and intellectual genius flourished, particularly in her writings and teachings. She also campaigned vigorously for women's rights. In one of her talks she proposed to her listeners: 'More than anything else today, what is needed is the baptism of spirit and fire. This alone can prepare those who shape human life to take their rightful place at the front lines in the great battle between Christ and Lucifer. There is no more urgent task than to be constantly armed and ready for this battle'. For, 'If the salt loses its savour, how can it be restored?' Given the intellectual, emotional and religious distance she had travelled from her origins, Edith was well aware of life as a journey, an all consuming pursuit for the truth. She wrote: 'My being is transitory and exposed to the possibility of not being; in spite of this, I am and am kept in being from one moment to another. I know myself held, and in this I have peace and security - not in the self-assured security of a man who stands in his own strength on firm ground, but the sweet and blissful security of the child who is carried by a strong arm - a reasonable security. Would the child be 'reasonable' who lived in constant fear that its mother might drop it?" Edith also knew that to journey with Christ is to take up our own cross, our frustrations and restrictions and follow him. She was gassed in Auschwitz, along with the Jews. Those who survived the camps remember the comfort and serenity she gave to all those around her, especially children, whilst being transported to Auschwitz on the cattle trucks.