Pink stone

Rosa Stein (born December 13, 1883 in Lublinitz / Upper Silesia ; † August 9, 1942 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a biological sister of the Carmelite Teresia Benedicta of the Cross ( Edith Stein ), who was canonized in 1998 . You and St. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross were murdered with many other Christians who had converted from Judaism to the Catholic Church in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp .

Life

childhood and education

Rosa Stein was born into a Jewish family as one of eleven children of the entrepreneur Siegfried Stein and his wife Auguste (née Courant) . Four of her siblings died at a very young age. In 1890 the family moved to Breslau . After Siegfried Stein died in an accident at work in 1893, the widowed mother was able to give all children a solid education. An exception was Rosa, who after graduating from the Victorian School was sent to relatives in Lublinitz for a year to study in the household and then - as had been the case since 1897/98 - to run the maternal household. There cared pink stone around their adolescent siblings took care later to live in the house of her mother nieces and nephews and finally supervised volunteer orphans who of the city in family care were housed.

Conversion and Baptism

Influenced by the faith of her sister Edith, Rosa Stein also sought contact with the Catholic Church. She accompanied her sister on visits to various monasteries and in the late 1920s made the decision to be baptized . Out of consideration for her mother's feelings, Rosa initially waited to be baptized, but made the necessary preparations after her mother's death in 1936 and was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in Cologne-Hohenlind in December 1936 .

Persecution and assassination

In the course of the anti-Jewish measures of the National Socialist regime , Rosa Stein, a native Jew, was withdrawn from caring for the orphans. Rosa Stein later lived as a guest at the Karmel in Cologne and looked after the gate. After her sister moved to the Karmel in Echt in the Netherlands in 1938 , Rosa followed her after a detour via Belgium and from then on lived as a cloister porter in the Karmel. She did not join the Discalced Carmelites , but made promises in June 1941 as a member of the third order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel .

Stolperstein in Werthmannstrasse in front of the St. Elisabeth Hospital Cologne-Hohenlind (2015)

Due to an intervention with Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyß-Inquart , he offered to spare all Jews baptized before 1941 if the churches would not make this public. However, after the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht, Johannes de Jong , denounced the action of the Germans against the Jews in a pastoral letter in July 1942 , 244 former Jews who had converted to Catholicism , including Rosa and Edith Stein and Lisamaria Meirowsky , were accepted on August 2, 1942 by the Gestapo arrested and the Amersfoort concentration camp in the Westerbork transit camp spent. From there, Rosa wrote her last received letter on August 4th. On August 7, the two Stein sisters were deported by Reichsbahn to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where they were murdered in the gas chamber on August 9, 1942 . It was no longer possible for Rosa and Edith Stein to flee from Echt to the Swiss Carmel Le Pâquier . Apparently the Le Pâquier convent had not recognized the threat clearly enough that too much time passed in obtaining the necessary documents and accommodation.

The German Martyrology of the 20th Century lists Rosa Stein as a witness of faith.

The artist Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling stone in commemoration of Rosa Stein in Werthmannstrasse 1, Cologne.

literature

• Carla Jungels, Art .: Rosa Stein , in: Helmut Moll (ed. On behalf of the German Bishops' Conference): Witnesses for Christ - The German Martyrology of the 20th Century , Paderborn et al. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, Vol. I , Pp. 414-418. ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 .
• Lexicon for Theology and Church ³, Freiburg 2000, Bd. 9, Sp. 946. ISBN 3-451-22009-1 .
• Elisabeth Prégardier , Anne Mohr, with the collaboration of Roswitha Weinhold: Edith Stein and her companions: Path in death and resurrection, in: Zeugen der Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 5, Annweiler ²1998.

Web links

• Martyr of the Archdiocese of Cologne Rosa Stein
• Central database of the names of Holocaust victims Rosa Stein