The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  Stein’s philosophies nonetheless put her at odds with traditional feminism. She held a traditional view of the female role: that of mother and spouse. A woman who gives birth has an innately greater need to nurture life, Stein reasoned. “To cherish, guard, protect, nourish, and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning,” she wrote.

  The two world wars Stein witnessed were masculine constructs. Men started and executed the wars. Male despots ruled the Soviet Union and Germany. Men, Stein argued, had a lesser capacity for empathy than women did. The people who knew Edith Stein said she had a tremendous capacity for empathy.

  She possessed “a tender, even maternal, solicitude for others,” wrote her spiritual director in the late 1920’s, Abbot Raphael Walzer. “She was plain and direct with ordinary people, learned with the scholars, a fellow-seeker with those searching for the truth. I could almost say she was a sinner with the sinners.”

  In 1933, Edith wrote about an insight she had at a Holy Thursday mass she attended at the Carmelite Convent in Cologne. “I told our Lord that I knew it was His cross that was now being placed upon the Jewish people; that most of them didn’t understand this, but that those who did would have to take it up willingly in the name of all. I would do that. At the end of the service, I was certain that I had been heard. But what this carrying of the cross was to consist in, that I did not yet know.”

  After she entered the convent at age 42, Stein’s mother and siblings—except her sister Rosa—viewed her as a traitor. “Why did you have to get to know him [Jesus Christ]?” Edith’s mother told her. “He was a good man—I’m not saying anything against him. But why did he have to go and make himself God?”

  Stein continued her scholarly work with a book on Christian philosophy, Finite and Being, as well as Ways of Knowing God and The Symbolic Theology of the Areopagite, a two-volume translation of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. She also formally requested Pope Pius XI write an official defense of the Jewish people. Had he done so, the Church may have been in a better position to defend itself against charges Church officials turned away from their Jewish brethren in the time of their greatest ever need.

  After the November 8, 1938 Nazi attack known as Kristallnacht—the Night of the Broken Glass—the Carmelite Convent Prioress transferred Stein to the Dutch convent at Echt. A driver from the convent drove Edith across the border after dark on New Years Eve 1938. At the convent, she offered her life to God for the Jewish people, global peace, and the sanctification of her Carmelite family. Her sister Rosa joined Edith in Echt as a Third Order Carmelite nun.

  The spreading Third Reich threatened Jews in Holland. When Holland fell to the Nazis, Edith and Rosa Stein were in danger again, and they made plans to move to Switzerland. They applied for Swiss visas so they could transfer to the Carmelite Convent of Le Paquier. The Swiss convent could accept Edith but not her sister, so both remained at Echt.

  For four years, Edith and Rosa Stein lived each day knowing that the fatal knock at the door would come. It did, on Sunday, August 2, 1942. Stein had spent the day working on a book about St. John of the Cross. At 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon, SS officers came to the Convent and took the sisters away. Edith grasped her frightened sister’s hand and reassured her that the two of them were “going for our people.”

  Eyewitnesses say Edith Stein was a model of composure during the early days of her captivity at the detention camp in Westerbork, Holland. She comforted and consoled the other women and fed the children and washed them and combed their hair.

  “Maybe the best way I can explain it is that she carried so much pain that it hurt to see her smile,” wrote a female survivor who was with Edith Stein at Westerbork. “In my opinion, she was thinking about the suffering that lay ahead. Not her own suffering—she was far too resigned for that—but the suffering that was in store for the others. Every time I think of her sitting in the barracks, the same picture comes to mind: a Pieta without the Christ.”

  Five nights later, the Nazis deported the Westerbork captives to death camp Auschwitz. No one from the transport survived. On August 9, 1942, the Nazis gassed Stein. She was fifty years old when she died.

  On May 1, 1987, Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein together with Father Rupert Mayer, a Jesuit Nazi-resistor, during a Mass in Cologne, West Germany. Eleven years later, this same Pope canonized Edith Stein, Saint Edith Stein, philosopher and martyr, Christian and Jew, the patron saint of lost parents, on October 11, 1998 at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

  SHOSHA MORDECHAI PRICE—WHO NEVER LEARNED the fate of her own lost parents or many of her closest friends during and after the war—opened a letter at her home in Brooklyn on July 2, 1991. She was sixty nine years old.

  My Dearest Shosha:

  It is my profoundest joy to inform you that the Holy Father, John Paul II, will return to his native land to beatify Jakub Chelzak at a Mass at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Malbork, Poland on September 17 of this year. We have positive and irrefutable confirmation of the first canonical miracle in his name.

  It is also my sincere pleasure to invite you and your family to attend this very special occasion in honor of the friend you supported on his long journey to the pinnacle of honor in his Church.

  I want to express to you my gratitude for your support and defense of Jakub Chelzak during the proceedings of so many years ago and your patience with this interminable process. His is a most remarkable case and a similar one in my lifetime I will almost surely never see.

  I recall what our friend and patron Edith Stein said as we walk in her path:

  “The darker it becomes around us, the more we ought to open our hearts to the light that comes from on high.”

  In the darkest moments of your lives, Jakub Chelzak had a remarkable friend in you and you in him.

  I sincerely hope to see you at the Mass—it’s been some years! My best to your daughter and her family.

  I remain,

  Yours in the Lord,

  Francisco Darelli, S.J., J.C.L, J.C.D.

  Shosha’s hands shook and she set the letter down and she wept for an hour alone. She didn’t pick up the letter again until she was standing at the window on the evening of the 4th of July, watching fireworks across the bridge near the river. She heard the nearby explosions and watched the brilliant rain, the blues and the reds and the yellows. She turned away when she heard voices and the bell at her door—she was going out tonight, grandkids and all, and telling her daughter the news.

  She went to answer the door when a bright burst lit up her living room and for a moment reminded her of Warsaw. She stopped short and she was startled until she realized what it was: A light from on high, come to remind her she was not in the dark anymore.

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  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  These questions address themes and subject matter in The Fires of Lilliput.

  Symbolism

  1) Which number or numbers recur in the story? How might they relate to the novel’s themes?

  2) What do you think the title means?

  3) What purpose does the river Wisla serve as a recurring motif?

  4) What do you think Shosha’s visit to the empty orphanage symbolizes?

  Relationships

  1) Describe the relationship between Shosha, Rebekah, and Leiozia. How do you think it is like friendships between women generally? How is it unique?

  2) How does Rabbi Gimelman’s rel
ationship with the Mordechai family change him?

  3) How would you describe the relationship between Jakub and his brother Karl? Jakub is unique; do you think Karl really understands him?

  4) Why do you think the rabbi recites the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew with Jakub?

  Love and Friendship