Unknown author · Public domain

Stein was born into an observant German Jewish family, had become an agnostic by her teens, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1922 after reading the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila; she entered a Discalced Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1933 and took the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Before that she had been a philosopher, earning her doctorate under Edmund Husserl and working as his assistant at Freiburg. Nazi race law stripped her of her teaching post in 1933 regardless of her conversion, and in 1942 she was deported from a convent in the Netherlands to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in the gas chambers. The Catholic Church later canonized her as a martyr and named her a patron saint of Europe.