One of Six Million Jews Slaughtered by the Nazis: Edith Stein
Edith Stein (1891-1942, the youngest of eleven children born into a German Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia, was a gifted philosopher who completed her dissertation in 1916 at the University of Freiburg. Shortly after reading a biography of St. Teresa of Avila in 1921, she was inspired to convert to Catholicism and became a religion teacher. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power and imposed an "Aryan Certificate" rule for civil servants at this time, she could not produce such a certificate, so she gave up teaching. In 1938 her order of Carmelite nuns moved her to a monastery in the Netherlands. Four years later, however, she was arrested by the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands, transported to Auschwitz, and was killed in the gas chamber in 1942. She is remembered today as a martyr. This poster hangs in a Catholic church in Regensburg, and her marble bust appears in the German hall of legendary figures known as the Walhalla near Regensburg.
