The insanity of the Holocaust is brought into stark relief in this moving book Edith Stein and Companions on the Way to Auschwitz by Fr. Paul Hamans about the lives and fate of the CatholicJews arrested in Holland on August 2, 1942, in retaliation against the Dutch Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter read the previous Sunday condemning the Nazis’ persecution and deportation of the Jews in the occupied Netherlands.
It is a great pleasure to be asked to write this review: St. Edith Stein’s writings and life both have impacted the spiritual life of the author, but the various biographies had only snippets of information about the other Catholic Jews arrested with her. This lack of information is now on its way to resolution with a marvelous book that gives us not only moving testimony from the victims, but also their conversion stories which would stand alone as spiritual testaments.
When St. Edith Stein was beatified and then canonized as a martyr, many voices were raised in objection, saying that she died because of her Jewish blood, but not because of the Catholic religion to which she had given herself. She was indeed recognized by the objectors as having been a Catholic woman who was a mystic, feminist and philosopher: but was it fair to call her a martyr at Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis who arrested her, after all, because of her Jewish blood?
When Dr. Ruth Kantorwicz was being picked up at the Ursuline convent of Venlo on the same day, the Mother Superior argued with the SS that Ruth was a Catholic and therefore exempt. At that one of the soldiers said, “You can pour as much baptismal water as you want over an ox. It will never become a cow. A Jew remains a Jew” (pp. 101–102). Surely it was their Jewishness for which they were killed?
But among the objecting voices had been some which proposed that the phrase “and Companions” be added to Edith Stein’s name, so as to recognize the martyrdom of the scores of Catholic Jewish adults and children who were killed along with her at Auschwitz. Examples of such groups of martyrs have abounded since the early days of persecution down to our time. But there was never a devotion to the collective group of victims, only to Edith Stein, nor did the Church did not waver on its approach to seeing Edith Stein’s death as being one of Catholic martyrdom. Reading now of her Companions, all of whom died because of the Dutch Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter condemning the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, one can see that they were indeed slaughtered as Catholics of Jewish origin; they would not have been arrested at all except for that common bond of baptism.
Read the entire review at The Cutting Edge. You can read the Foreword, written by Dr. Ralph McInerny, on Ignatius Insight:
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