Meet Susanne Batzdorff, Niece of Edith Stein
Interview pieces compiled by Kristen West McGuire
For the next year, My Secret is Mine newsletter will be centered on the autobiography of Dr. Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family. Canonized in 1998, she is now known by her Carmelite name of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, co-patroness of Europe. Many apostolates today have St. Teresa as their patroness, including My Secret is Mine. This series will explore the Jewish roots of the Catholic faith found in the Old Testament and Magisterial teachings. All of our content will explore the themes of conversion, family relationships, and Jewish heritage in the life of Edith Stein.
Biographical Notes: Mrs. Susanne Batzdorff, an observant Jewish woman, is Edith Stein’s niece and lives in California. She is 105 years old! Her mother, Erna, was Edith’s closest sibling in age and her closest confidant within her family. Mrs. Batzdorff has a masters degree in library science has written numerous articles and books on her aunt, including the excellent book Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint. The following excerpt is from an interview conducted in 1994 with Sandra Bendayan of the San Francisco Holocaust Oral History Project. You can listen to the entire interview at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Sandra Bendayan: Could you please introduce yourself and tell where and when you were born, and if your name was different than it is now.
Susanne Batzdorff: I’m Susanne Batzdorff, and my maiden name is Bieberstein. I was born in Breslau, which was then Germany. It’s now Wroclaw, Poland. And I was born in 1921.
Sandra Bendayan: And what were your parents’ names?
Susanne Batzdorff: My father’s name was Hans Bieberstein. And my mother was Erna, and her maiden name was Stein.
Sandra Bendayan: And did you have brothers and sisters?
Susanne Batzdorff: I have one brother, who was about a year younger than I am. And his name is Ernie now, but it was Ernst Ludwig. And he was born in November of the following year. So we’re practically twins.
Sandra Bendayan: What kind of work did your family do?
Susanne Batzdorff: My father and mother were both physicians. My father was a dermatologist and my mother was a gynecologist and obstetrician. And she was one of the early university students, female university students. That was quite a rare thing at the time.
Sandra Bendayan: She sounds like she must have been quite a strong and independent person.
Susanne Batzdorff: Well, I think she must have been. I mean, she never made it seem that way. But it turns out that she was pretty much of a pioneer in those days.
Sandra Bendayan: Well, it would sound that your family was, say, upper middle class.
Susanne Batzdorff: Yes.
Sandra Bendayan: And did you own your own home?
Susanne Batzdorff: No, when I was born, I was born in the home that belonged to my grandmother, maternal grandmother. And she had bought a large house. And in it lived quite a large number of the extended family.
We had an apartment there. And then later on, we moved to another apartment, which was in a different part of the city. And it was like a professional apartment, which had a doctor’s office right on the premises. And that was in 1933. But we never owned a home.
Sandra Bendayan: You had a lot of other relatives living nearby in that town?
Susanne Batzdorff: We had a lot of relatives all clustered around in Breslau, and then some lived in Berlin. There were a lot of them living together and getting together occasionally. And my uncle and aunt and their four children lived in the same house that we did. My grandmother lived there with a maiden aunt of mine, and a cousin, and her mother, who was a divorced woman. And so they all lived under one roof.
Sandra Bendayan: Did you have your paternal grandparents and family there in Breslau?
My father’s mother lived in Breslau and she first lived by herself and then came to live with us. And his father died when my father was very young. So we never met either of our grandfathers. They had died before we were born.
Sandra Bendayan: It sounds like you got a close family.
Susanne Batzdorff: Yeah, my mother would be busy in the office, but there was always my aunt to go to. And she would be in the kitchen and we’d talk with her. And there was always somebody to look after us or to talk to us when we came home from school.
Sandra Bendayan: Was your family a religious family?
Susanne Batzdorff: Well, my grandmother kept a kosher home and was fairly traditional. But the children didn’t have a whole lot of Jewish education, especially the girls. We did not learn Hebrew, and they only had a little bit of religious instruction in the school.
They had a sort of arrangement there, where the rabbi or a Jewish teacher would come in once a week, and for an hour talk to them about something related to Jewish history, or Bible, or something like that. But it was very minimal. The boys had a bit more because they had to be prepared for their bar mitzvahs. And so they learned some Hebrew.
And they were not very observant at that time. It changed later on, but in my earliest memories, it wasn’t that much. My father was quite knowledgeable in things Jewish, and he always conducted the family Seder for the whole extended family, which was probably the high point of our Jewish observance– that and going to synagogue on the high holidays and occasionally on Shabbat.
Sandra Bendayan: So I presume that along with whether you were really that observant when you were young, your family had a belief in God. It wasn’t simply the cultural aspects of Jewish life.
Susanne Batzdorff: Yes, we did. I would say we were probably more– I wouldn’t say “observant.” We were probably more involved with celebrating Jewish festivals and home observances than a lot of our friends were. There were a lot of them who had really totally assimilated…And as I said, my grandmother was a very strong character, was traditional, and emphasized her belief in God and her religious observances. And then that carried a lot of weight with the family.
Sandra Bendayan: Were your family’s friends primarily Jewish or did they associate with any Christians or non-Jewish population?
Susanne Batzdorff: Well, they associated with Christians, too, but actually, most of their all good friends were Jewish. There was a social cohesiveness among the Jewish people, not necessarily a religious aspect to it. I never realized that as much as when I thought about it later, how many of my parents’ friends were Jewish.
There were a lot of converts to Christianity in the university. My father taught at the university. It was the fact that you couldn’t become a full professor at the university if you were Jewish, so there were many people that we knew who had converted merely because it was a stepping stone career-wise. Now, my father never did that and he was an Assistant Professor, but he never could go beyond that.
(Editor’s note: in August 2027, we will include more sections of this fascinating interview with Susanne Batzdorff, where she talks more about her family members who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, including her aunt, Edith Stein. Mrs. Batzdorff wrote several books about her famous aunt. )
