Today, 9 August, is the Church (especially Carmelite) feast day in honor of an important figure in the history of the holocaust, *Teresa Benedicta of the Cross*
who was murdered by the Nazis on this day in 1942 at the Birkenau death camp.
Born in Breslau/Wroclaw to an observant Jewish family on Yom Kippur in 1891, Edith Stein finished her PhD at the University of Freiburg in 1916 while also volunteering as a Red Cross nursing assistant to casualties of WWI. Her dissertation was on empathy.
She was moved by the story of Teresa of Avila and by the people she worked beside at Carmelite care facilities, and sought to join their Order. She entered their monastery in Cologne in 1933 and took the name of St. Teresa.
With the rise of the nationalists under Hitler, she and other converts were transferred to the Netherlands to try and avoid their vicious takeover of the State. But it didn't save them. She and almost 250 other baptized Jews were arrested by the SS on 2 August, Before they were shipped to Auschwitz a Dutch official offered her a chance to escape and she refused it, saying "If somebody intervened at this point and took away [her] chance to share in the fate of [her] brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation."
On 7 August she was among 987 Jews transferred to Auschwitz for extermination.Two days later they were gassed at Birkenau.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein
Following her life story, without even diving into her philosophical writing (she trained with Husserl as a realistic phenomenologist) will enliven your experience of Wroclaw, Gottingen, Freiburg, Limburg, Bad Bergzabern in the wine country (where she spent her summers) Speyer and Munster (where she taught), as well as the Church's responses to the rise of the reich.
She was beatified by John Paul II in 1987 and canonized in 1998.
from wikipedia:
Today there are many schools named in tribute to her, for example in her hometown, Lubliniec, Poland [27] Darmstadt, Germany,[28] Hengelo, Netherlands,[29] and Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.[30] Also named for her are a women's dormitory at the University of Tübingen[31] and a classroom building at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In April of this year, Pope Francis received a formal request from the superior general of the Discalced Carmelites, Miguel Márquez Calle, to declare Stein a Doctor of the Church.