Edith Stein was born in 1891 to an observant Jewish family in Germany. She received her doctorate in philosophy in 1916 and taught at the University of Freiburg. After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila in 1921, she converted to Catholicism. She gave up her teaching position and taught at a Catholic girls' school from 1922 to 1932. In 1933, she entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne and took the name Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. To escape the Nazis, she was transferred to a monastery in the Netherlands. However, in 1942 she and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed in the