After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila from a friend's library, Edith Stein, a 30-year-old Jewish philosopher, exclaimed, "This is the truth!" She was baptized in 1922 and later became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In response to World War II and the horrors leading up to it, she formally consecrated her life to atonement and to world peace. Though she fled to Holland during the holocaust, she and her sister Rosa were apprehended and sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz because they were Jews.
