Life-changing stories are inspiring. People from all walks of life make a 180-degree turnaround in their lives. These stories push me to look at myself and ask, do I have the power to change like that? Well, let me share a story with you.
Edith Stein was born the youngest of eleven children in 1891. At a mere six years old, she marched into school and demanded to be enrolled—not in kindergarten, but in first grade. Pretty bold for a six-year-old. The school let her in.
Then, at fourteen, everything changed. Edith looked at her mother one morning and said five words: “I’m an atheist now.” No more prayers, synagogue, or God for Edith. She didn’t waver. She wanted truth, and she believed she’d find it through reason, not religion.
Edith poured herself into philosophy. At university, her questions were so sharp that professors struggled to keep up. She transferred to study with Edmund Husserl, one of the greatest minds of the era. Then came World War One.
While all her male classmates went to the front lines to fight, Edith volunteered as a Red Cross nurse. Not just any ward—she specifically requested the infectious disease unit. For six months, she held dying soldiers. Men with typhus. Boys burning with fever, crying for mothers who would never see them again. She cleaned wounds most people couldn’t stomach. She wrote final letters home for trembling hands too weak to hold a pen. For all her work, the Austrian military gave her a medal for bravery.
After the war, she finished her doctoral dissertation on empathy with the highest honors possible. Her work was revolutionary. She didn’t stop there. She applied for university professorships across Germany. However, rejection after rejection came back. The reason they gave her was she wasn’t a man. She knew that brilliant men with half her intellect got the positions she deserved. Every door slammed shut. The year was 1920, and her gender was now insurmountable.
Then in 1921, she pulled a random book off the shelf out of boredom while visiting friends. It was the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Spanish mystic. She devoured the book overnight. When finished, Edith whispered: “This is the truth.”
The atheist who had rejected God for over a decade found what she’d been searching for—not in philosophy textbooks or university lectures, but in the words of a long-dead nun. She was baptized Catholic on New Year’s Day 1922. Her mother was heartbroken. “You’ve abandoned your people,” she said.
Edith continued attending synagogue with her mother anyway. They prayed the ancient Hebrew prayers together, even though everything between them had changed forever.
For eleven years, she taught, wrote, and lectured across Europe. She became a leading voice for women’s education and dignity, speaking to packed auditoriums in city after city.
Then came Hitler and the Nazi Party to power. Under new laws in April 1933, Jews were banned from university positions and Edith lost her job overnight. She didn’t go down quietly. She sat down and wrote a letter—to Pope Pius XI himself—begging him to publicly condemn the persecution of Jews. She warned him Catholics would be next. The whole world was watching, she wrote. The Vatican response came back but offered no action.
With her academic career destroyed, Edith finally followed a calling she’d felt for years. She entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne. The life of a cloistered nun. She chose her religious name carefully: Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. “The Cross,” she wrote, “is the destiny of God’s people.” From behind monastery walls, she kept writing about philosophy and mysticism, reason and faith, ancient wisdom and modern thought.
Then in November 1938, Kristallnacht occurred with broken glass, burning synagogues, and terror everywhere. Her superiors moved Edith to a monastery in Echt, Holland, hoping the border would protect her. Her sister Rosa, who had also converted, came with her. Together for two years, they lived quietly while praying, writing, and waiting.
On July 26, 1942, the Dutch Catholic bishops did something incredible — they ordered a pastoral letter be read in every Catholic church in Holland, publicly condemning Nazi treatment of Jews. The Nazis did not receive this well; their response was swift and brutal by ordering the immediate arrest of every Jewish Catholic convert in the Netherlands.
On August 2, 1942, the Gestapo arrived at the monastery while Edith was working on a manuscript about Saint John of the Cross. Terrified and confused, Rosa took Edith’s hand and they were sent to Westerbork transit camp. There were hundreds of prisoners packed in the transport with children screaming and mothers paralyzed by despair. However, amazingly, multiple witnesses later testified that while other prisoners collapsed under the horror, Edith moved through the camp with extraordinary calm. She washed children whose mothers couldn’t function. She combed their hair. She fed them. She told them stories.
A Dutch official, deeply moved, offered to help save her by pulling some strings to get her out. Edith quietly refused. “Why should I be an exception?” she said. “I will share the fate of my brothers and sisters.”
In her final days, she wrote one last note to her fellow nuns, asking for warm clothes. Despite all she had endured, she wrote that she had been able to “pray gloriously.”
On August 7, 1942, 987 people were loaded into cattle cars for the journey to Auschwitz. Then on August 9, 1942, Edith Stein, her sister Rosa, and hundreds of others were murdered in the gas chambers. Edith’s manuscript she’d been writing lay unfinished in her monastery room. But the story didn’t end there.
In 1998, Pope John Paul II declared Edith Stein a saint, calling her “an outstanding daughter of Israel and a daughter of the Carmelite Order.” Today, universities worldwide study her philosophical works on the relationship between faith and reason and on what it means to truly understand suffering. What makes her unforgettable isn’t just how she died—it’s how she lived.
At each crossroad in her life, she chose love over safety, truth over comfort, thoughts of others over herself. This atheist teenager who rejected faith, a Jewish woman who became a Catholic nun – everything in her life led to that moment in Westerbork when she washed a frightened child’s face and told them a story to help them sleep. She spent her life searching for truth and found it in the end – not in books or degrees – but in love, presence and staying when she could have run.
Yes, people do have the power to change if we recognize who is directing our paths and acknowledge Him.
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)
Tagged: Christian martyrs and saints, prayer, prison ministry, purpose and calling, world war II
