Holocaust Remembrance Day: Forgetting the Holocaust Would Mean Killing a Second Time

“Forgetting the Holocaust would mean killing a second time” are the words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and defender of human rights.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international observance, commemorated on 27 January each year as a day dedicated to remembering the victims of the Holocaust. It was designated as such by Resolution 60/7 of the United Nations General Assembly on 1 November 2005, during its 42nd plenary meeting.

The Nazi genocide caused the death of approximately six million Jews, as well as thousands of Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, and homosexuals. Others, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, and communists, were targeted because of their religious beliefs and political ideas.

There are countless stories of survivors of the concentration camps, and it is especially important on this day to focus on them, because only the memory of those who lived through that tragedy has the power to awaken in us resistance to every form of oppression and the courage to oppose violence in defence of every human being.

One such story is that of Simone Arnold‑Liebster, born in Alsace on 17 August 1930, who, together with her parents, belonged to a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mulhouse.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were systematically persecuted in the German Reich and in large parts of Nazi-ruled Europe. More than half of the believers—at least 10,700 German Jehovah’s Witnesses and 2,700 from the occupied countries of Europe, women just as much as men—suffered direct persecution, mostly in the form of imprisonment. About 2,800 Jehovah’s Witnesses from Germany and 1,400 others from Nazi‑occupied Europe were imprisoned in concentration camps. They were stigmatised with a special identification mark, the “purple triangle”, and they constituted one of the largest groups of prisoners in the early concentration camps. 1,250 of those persecuted were minors, and 600 children were taken away from their parents by the Nazi state. At least 1,700 Jehovah’s Witnesses lost their lives as a result of National Socialist tyranny. Among them were 282 Jehovah’s Witnesses executed for conscientious objection. A further 55 conscientious objectors died in custody or in penal units. This is the largest group of conscientious objectors under National Socialism. (Data drawn from: https: https://alst.org/it/la-storia/)

Foundation website: https://alst.org/en/the-foundation/

Simone’s story, together with many others, is told on the website of the Arnold Liebster Foundation, whose founders address visitors with the following words: “May these reflections, testimonies, and narratives help our visitors understand that intolerance leads to exclusion, persecution, and ultimately annihilation. May these historical accounts likewise inspire strength and courage in those suffering oppression of all kinds.”

Simone and Max Liebster

For Simone, school became a place where she had to put her religious principles to the test every day, starting with the German invasion in 1940, as the “Germanisation” of Alsace turned teachers into fanatical National Socialists. Simone Arnold‑Liebster suffered psychological and physical abuse, was expelled from secondary school, and was eventually torn away from her mother in April 1943 and taken to a Nazi reformatory in Constance. There she was forced to perform hard labor and to endure psychological abuse. Had liberation not arrived, she would have been transferred to a concentration camp at the age of fifteen.

Alsace, 1930s. Simone, a happy and carefree young girl, gradually comes to know poverty, injustice, and intolerance, and eventually the anguish of war, arrests, and interrogations. At school, in the city, and everywhere else, she finds herself increasingly alone in the face of the “Lion”, the Nazi system voracious for its prey.

Constance, 8 July 1943. The heavy door of the Wessenberg Institution is slammed shut. Simone is cruelly separated from her mother and interned in a Nazi reformatory. Deprived of all her joys. Alone in the Lion’s den…

With a lively style and even a touch of humor, Simone Arnold Liebster recounts her survival in a world that had suddenly become tragic and harsh, and the victory of an ordinary, vulnerable young girl fighting against the Lion. Her autobiography gives an identity and a face to the forgotten victims of National Socialism. It is also a compelling testament to the power of conscience to resist all forms of manipulation, even under extreme pressure.

(https://editions-schortgen.lu/en/book/facing-the-lion-simone-arnold-liebster/).

On 1 July 1933, Hamburg introduced the morning roll call in schools, while other Länder made compulsory, among other things, commemorative ceremonies, marches, flag salutes, the singing of the national anthem, and the Horst Wessel song.

This turned school attendance, for children and young people who were Jehovah’s Witnesses, into a daily ordeal and a matter of conscience. Subsequently, beginning in 1936, many children of Jehovah’s Witnesses were taken away—like Simone—from parents considered “hostile to the State”. National Socialist tyranny tore approximately 600 children of Jehovah’s Witnesses from their parents and placed them with foster families or deported them to educational institutions.

The fate of those Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to take up arms was beheading, something Simone witnessed when it happened to her closest friend, Marcel Sutter, executed for conscientious objection in Halle on 5 November 1943, at the age of 24.

Simone’s father and mother were imprisoned in concentration camps. Despite deprivation and torture, both of Simone’s parents survived the camps, though they remained marked by imprisonment and torture for the rest of their lives. Throughout their lives, faith gave them the courage to embark on a path of reconciliation and compassion.

The “religious resistance” of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the concentration camps is an emblematic example of how faith can mobilize extraordinary spiritual and psychological resources. In this regard, Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) observed that Jehovah’s Witnesses in the camps “not only demonstrated uncommon human dignity and exceptionally high moral conduct, but also seemed protected against those very concentration camp experiences that quickly destroyed people considered very well integrated by my psychoanalyst friends and myself” (Bettelheim 1998, 35).

Jehovah’s Witnesses were able to remain faithful to the moral principles rooted in their faith in an alienating environment, while being subjected to inhuman violence, and they showed solidarity and willingness to help and support not only fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses but all other inmates. This extraordinary solidarity towards other groups of prisoners had a significant moral impact and thus also strengthened physical resistance to deprivation, as demonstrated by the analyses of Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) on life in the camps. Because of this solidarity—expressed, for example, through sharing food and caring for the sick—Jehovah’s Witnesses often exposed themselves to Nazi violence (Lotto 2008, 301).

On Remembrance Day many people are commemorated, and it is important not to forget any of them, regardless of ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, health status, nationality, sexual orientation, and so forth.

It was precisely the victims of the Holocaust who established numerous foundations around the world to keep alive the memory of what happened and to commit themselves to the defense of fundamental human rights through the education of children and young people, who bear the responsibility of preserving and passing on this legacy.