She was born in Wroclaw – today Wroclaw – capital of Silesia, a region of Germany that became part of Poland after World War II, on 12.10.1891.
Her parents, Sigfred and Auguste, both merchants, were Jewish. Edith was the last of eleven children. Her father died in 1893 and her mother had to take over the running of the sawmill and the upbringing of her children.
Little Edith wrote of herself that as a child she was very sensitive, dynamic, nervous and quick-tempered, but at the age of seven she began to develop a reflective temperament.
In 1913 she entered the University of Gottingen and devoted herself to the study of phenomenology. That was her life: her books, her classmates, and, above all, the famous professor E. Husserl. During this time he reached an almost total atheism.
The First World War broke out in 1914 and Edith worked as a nurse in a hospital with four thousand beds. To this work she gives herself fully.
The study of phenomenology made with seriousness leads her to the deep knowledge of the Catholic Church and she is baptized on 1.1.1922. God or the Absolute fills his whole soul: “Christ rose radiantly before my gaze; Christ in the mystery of the Cross”. Her definitive encounter was in 1921 when she read the Autobiography of St. Teresa.
When she was baptized on January 1, 1922, she received the name of Therese Edwig.
At the age of 42, on 15.4.1934, feast of the Good Shepherd, she received the Carmelite habit in the convent of Cologne.
Her family breaks up with her. On April 21, 1935, Easter Sunday, she took her religious vows and three years later, on the same day, her perpetual vows. His life will already be a “Cross” turned into “Easter”.
Soon, the atmosphere in Germany became tense. The Nazis hated the Jewish people. She foreshadows the fate that awaits her. They want to save her by making her flee to Holland. On August 22, 1942, members of the SS came to the convent and arrested Sister Bendicta and her sister Rosa.
After several torments, on August 9, 1942, in the gas oven of the “hell of Auschwitz”, the martyr of the Cross, Sister Bendicta, died.
She was beatified on May 1, 1987 in Cologne. Her feast is celebrated on August 9.
