Edith Stein is born in Breslau, Germany. She is the youngest child of a large Jewish family.

Edith's father dies and her mother Auguste Stein has to take over the family's failing lumberyard. Auguste builds the family business into such a successful enterprise that Mrs Stein is called "the best businessman in Breslau."

At the age of six the precocious Stein demands to be enrolled in the Victoria School of Breslau. She is indignant at being sent first to kindergarten.

At age 13 Edith briefly drops out of school because it is not challenging enough her. She also made a conscious decision to give up praying and the devout Jewish faith of her family.

Enters the University of Breslau, but finds it has "nothing more to offer me." Instead she feels "something was pushing me to move one." Hearing of the work of philosophy professor Edmund Husserl Edith decides to leave Breslau

Edith's studies are disrupted by World War I. She volunteers for nursing duty.

Completes her doctorate, summa cum laude, with a dissertation "on the problem of empathy." Edith becomes Husserl's assistant, transcribing his writings and organizing his manuscripts.

She went to console the wife of one of her favorite professors, Adolf Reinach, who had been killed in battle on Nov 16, 1917. She was surprised to find herself consoled instead by Anna Reinach's great faith. Experiences like this began to make her rethink her casual dismissal of religion.

Edith is unable to find a university teaching position. German universities were not yet ready to accept female philosophy professors. Martin Heidegger begins to work with Husserl. Heidegger eventually publishes some Huserl manuscripts that Stein had initially worked on.

During the course of a single evening, Edith reads the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. When she finished the book she exclaimed, "This is Truth!"

Edith Stein is baptized. Her Jewish friends are hurt and disappointed. Her mother is heartbroken.

Teaches in a Dominica teachers' college in Speyer

Teaches at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Munster. Stein becomes a renowned lecturer, speaking at philosophical seminars in France, Switzerland, and Austria. She continues to look for a professorship in philosophy and visits the leading German professors of philosophy and theology. She translates Thomas Aquinas's Disputed Questions on Truth and tries to reconcile phenomenology with Catholic thought.

She plans a trip to Rome. Her goal is to ask Pope Puis XI in a private audience to issue an encyclical against Nazi anti-Semitism. Unable to make the trip, she sends his Holiness a letter imploring the Vatican to take a stand against the tide of anti-Semitism. She never receives a reply.

The growing Nazi presence makes it clear that Stein will never be accorded a university teaching position. She turns to the religious orders with whom she has leved for many years. Edith Stein joins the Carmel of Cologne. Based on her love of St. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, she becomes Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa Blessed of the Cross). She is drawn into kreuzewissenschaft, the science of the cross. Her life begins to focus on the mystery of joy in suffering, of victory in failure, and of dying and rising with Christ.

In April Edith Stien takes her final vows and makes a permanent commitment as a Carmelite nun. There is a going fear that the Nazis will bring reprisals on the Carmelite order for sheltering Jewish Catholics. On the last day of December Sister Teresa Benedicta is forced to flee to the Carmel in Echt, Holland. This move was to avoid the increasingly dangerous environment of Nazi Germany.

The Dutch Catholic church formally protest the policies of the Nazi occupation troops and the treatment of the Jewish peoples. The day after the bishops' letter is read aloud in the churches of Holland, all Catholics Jews, approximately 700 in number, are ordered to be deported. In retaliation Sister Teresia, along with her sister Rosa, are send to the concentration camp at Theresianstadt, Germany.

"Come, Rosa, we are going for our people."- E.S. to her sister, Rosa Stein, as the Nazis led them away.

1942, August 7

A railcar packed with the dead and dying stops briefly in Breslau. When the door is opened the stench is overwhelming to the soldiers on the platform. A nun steps forward from the huddled children and says, "This is my beloved hometown, I will never see it again. We are riding to our death."

Sister Teresia Benedicta is killed in the suffocating gas chambers of Auschwitz.

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