Rosa Stein

Rosa Stein is marked by a Stolperstein set into the pavement in Cologne, linking one street corner with Jewish history. The small brass plaque commemorates a woman born in Lublinitz on 13 December 1883. The woman remembered here was Edith Stein’s older sister. Family responsibilities kept her unmarried at home, while Edith’s conversion shaped their close relationship and shared visits to convents.

After their mother Auguste Courant Stein died, the hospital became the setting for Rosa’s baptism on Christmas Eve 1936. She received baptism at four o’clock and first Communion during midnight Mass. Letters describe Nazi harassment, exhaustion, and attempts to help her reach Edith’s Carmel in Echt through Belgium and the Netherlands. An impostor took her belongings in Belgium. By October 1939, she reached Echt with nothing from Germany, before Nazi forces deported both sisters to Auschwitz in summer 1942. The memorial’s final detail is a note written from a concentration camp.