Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891, of Jewish parents in Breslau,   Germany, (today  Poland.)  She was a precocious child with a marked aptitude for learning and at the age of 23 (1914) she had studied philology and philosophy in two universities. After World War I she resumed study and gained her Doctorate summa cum laude in philosophy at Freiburg University. She then embarked on an academic career.  But Edith was athirst for Truth. Her inner journey led her through winding paths, even to atheism, but culminated in her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 after reading the life of St. Teresa. However, she maintained a lifelong love for her Jewish heritage and people. Her elderly widowed mother, Auguste Courant Stein was deeply afflicted by her daughter's becoming a Catholic. Edith continued to accompany Frau Stein to synagogue services.  Edith's very active apostolate of service to the Church -  speaking, writing and teaching on matters philosophical, theological and feminist were curtailed by the rise of Nazism and anti Semitic attitudes.

Edith entered Carmel of Cologne in 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Prayer now became her sole work for the Church and the suffering Jewish people. As the persecution of Jews increased in Germany, Sr. Teresa Benedicta and her sister Rosa, also a convert to Catholicism, sought refuge in the Dutch Carmel of Echt. The Dutch Catholic hierarchy, in a pastoral letter condemned anti-Semitic policies of the Hitler regime. Retaliation by the Gestapo was immediate - the arrest of Catholic Jews, many, even most of them members of Catholic Religious communities. As Sister Teresa Benedicta was taken from the Carmel, she encouraged her sister (also under arrest): "Come, Rosa, we are going for our people." They both died in Auschwitz gas chambers in early August, 1942.  Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Teresa Benedicta in Cologne in 1987 and canonized her in Rome in 1998.