Edith Stein (1891–1942) was a Carmelite nun, philosopher, and spiritual writer who is known for her martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis, who executed her because of her Jewish ancestry. Stein was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) and later became an atheist. She studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 after becoming deeply impressed by the life of 16th-century Spanish Carmelite mystic St. Teresa of Ávila. She joined a Carmelite convent and took the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
In 1942 she and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were seized by the Gestapo and shipped to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where they died in the gas chamber. She was declared a saint in 1998.