Sixty-six years ago today, on August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Carmelite nun, was among those gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.A few weeks earlier the Dutch Catholic bishops and other religious leaders in the Netherlands had composed a pastoral letter in which they described themselves as “deeply shaken by the measures taken against the Jews” and their “terror of the latest regulations” to deport men, women, children and whole families to “the territory of the German Reich”.
They pleaded that these regulations should not be carried out.
To no avail.
Rather the contrary.
The Nazi authorities who had agreed to defer the deportation of Jews who had converted to Christianity on condition that no public protest was made against their treatment of Jews reacted to this letter without mercy. Sister Benedicta, Jewish by birth, was taken from her convent at Echt on August 2.
She arrived at Auschwitz five days later and was put to death two days after that, August 9, 1942.
The loss of every life in such circumstances is heartbreaking. Why draw attention to this one in particular?
Because in her person and life many elements are combined and reactions to her death have aroused fierce debate.
Sister Benedicta was known in the world as Edith Stein. She was indeed Jewish by birth, but as a girl abandoned Judaism for atheism. She was German by nationality. She studied philosophy and sought academic posts at universities. She was unsuccessful, not because of any inability, but because of her gender: women were not appointed, victims of discrimination. Her studies also led her to explore Christianity. She turned gradually away from atheism.
One night she sat up reading Teresa of Avila’s autobiography. “This,” she declared the next day, “is the truth.”
Soon after she was baptised as a Catholic. For some years she continued to teach and hope for a university appointment. Then she came to recognise a vocation to religious life as her true calling.
She joined first the Carmel in Cologne, but Nazi violence made her presence there a danger to her community. She moved to Echt in Holland in 1938, where she was to be arrested. She was joined the following year by her sister, Rosa. They were taken away together. And then they were killed.
These elements in the life of Edith Stein are not like pieces of a jigsaw which can be fitted together neatly to reveal a smoothly coherent picture. There are rough edges. There is, for example, that clash between a Christian sense of Jewish origins, the Jews as our ancestors in the faith, and the Jewish sense that those Jews who embrace another tradition betray what they have left.
Again, honouring Stein may seem to some to be a way for Christians to appropriate the Shoah.
That must never happen.
The Shoah stands out as a defining symbolic moment for Jews. Christians have rather to confess with shame their thousand years of anti-Semitism from the First Crusade to the Holocaust, to echo the Chief Rabbi recently at Lambeth. It is not possible to make all the rough edges smooth. But nor need we stand paralysed.
To honour Edith Stein as a Christian martyr is not to lay Christian claim to the Shoah. We need rather to remember that the essence of martyrdom is not a desire to die, but acceptance of the demands of loving, however extreme they may be, even ultimately to death.
Her words to Rosa, as they were arrested, “Come, we are going for our people”, are not to be misunderstood. That “for” is not condescending, still less expiatory; it affirms a bond. Her sense of being Jewish made her identify with her people; her sense of being Christian shaped the way she accepted her death.
The elements in her life that formed her — Jewish, German, a philosopher, a woman, a Christian, a Carmelite — make her stand out. She was one of millions, but she was also outstanding, an exemplar, a witness, a martyr.
Each one of us is a mystery.
We respect mysteries not by solving them, but by contemplating them.
The mystery of Edith Stein should prompt in us neither triumphalism nor resentment.
We cannot smooth all the rough edges, but we can ponder with humility.
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