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Woman recalls persecution by the Nazis
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE © St. Petersburg Times, published November 4, 2000 ST. PETERSBURG -- In schools, offices and neighborhoods they stand out by their refusal to celebrate birthdays, national holidays and feasts traditional to many other Christian groups. They routinely stand silent during the Pledge of Allegiance, don't vote and will not serve in the military. And with a devotion unabashed and apparently indomitable, they knock on doors at wee hours on Saturdays, waylay unsuspecting shoppers in supermarket parking lots and take up street corner posts to proclaim their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. Over the years, their beliefs have puzzled and even annoyed outsiders. But for a little girl growing up in Nazi-occupied France, intolerance of the group's beliefs brought ostracism from classmates and neighbors, removal from her home and confinement in a German reform school. Recently Simone Arnold Liebster, that little girl of decades past, traveled from her home in the French Alps to promote a book about her life then. During a program at the Florida Holocaust Museum, she read from Facing the Lion, her autobiography, and answered questions posed by an audience consisting of a high percentage of fellow believers. In an interview, Mrs. Liebster, now 70, said she wants her story "to serve as an encouragement that the spirit is stronger than the sword."
Through her story, Mrs. Liebster hopes to spotlight the little-known persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and the courage of believers during the Nazi regime. Jehovah's Witnesses were among the 11-million men, women and children who died as a result of the regime's brutality. Latest research puts the number of Jehovah's Witness victims at 2,500, 350 of whom were executed. Her story often astonishes American audiences, Mrs. Liebster said. "In America it's a big surprise that as a religious body, Jehovah's Witnesses were targeted by Hitler from the very beginning," she said. "(Americans) are surprised Jehovah's Witnesses made resistance against the Nazi theory. It's a moral resistance, because it would say no to anything that went against our conscience and this is very new to the American audience." Jehovah's Witnesses refused to relinquish their faith to avoid persecution and even death, she added. "There was a choice," Mrs. Liebster said. "But you had to pay the price." On the contrary, Mrs. Liebster said, "The Jews had no choice. The Gypsies had no choice." Peter Black, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said that Jehovah's Witnesses in many ways were like homosexuals, Communists and other groups despised by the Nazis but thought to be of valuable racial stock and therefore potentially redeemable. The Jewish people and Gypsies did not fall into this category. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, there were about 20,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany. The regime shut down the group's printing presses, burned their literature and removed their children from their homes. Adults were sent to prisons and concentration camps.
"Their creed forbade them to swear allegiance to a temporal state and also forbade them from serving in the armed forces of a temporal state," Black said. "As a result, they became enemies of the state simply by practicing their religion." Members of the religious body, which was founded in the 1870's, pledge allegiance only to God and his kingdom. They therefore don't participate in politics, vote or serve in the military. They accept Jesus as God's son, believe that they receive salvation through him, but do not acknowledge him as God. Birthdays and holidays such as Christmas and Easter are not celebrated because members of the group believe those events have non-Christian origins. Members do celebrate anniversaries, weddings and high school graduations, however. Jehovah's Witnesses also evangelize door-to-door in obedience to Jesus' command to make disciples of all nations. Mrs. Liebster's story, told in three parts, recounts her mother's conversion to the faith and her father's initial resistance. The young Simone was baptized in 1941. A month later, the Nazis arrested her father. During an interview, Mrs. Liebster said her family had known all along what to expect from their loyalty to their newfound faith. "We got the news of the persecution in Germany. In those days, we were still free, but there were documents that were smuggled out of the concentration camps to Switzerland and those were gathered together and published under the title of Crusade Against Christianity and we got that book, which right away told us what we would be heading for if the Germans were to come to our country," she said. Reading the Bible gave them the courage to resist, she added. "The Bible says that you should not bow before another god, except the creator, but Hitler said that he was a savior and he demanded that all the people should say, "Heil Hitler." The Bible also says that you must love your neighbor as yourself, so you would not do any harm or go to war. The Bible-trained conscience also knows that gathering together, reading the Bible is a part of the Christian's duty, so we continued underground." Nonetheless, the family was devastated when her father was arrested and sent to prison. His wife and only child faced financial struggles and became virtual outcasts among the people they'd always known. "Just as flies that had gathered on waste would fly away when someone came close," Mrs. Liebster writes of the time after her father's arrest, "people stopped talking together and quickly separated as soon as they saw Mother coming. It was as if we had leprosy." At school, young Simone's refusal to say Heil Hitler or enroll in the League of German Girls brought ridicule from classmates and teachers. The authorities eventually removed her from home and remanded her to a reform school in Germany. She was there when she learned of her mother's arrest. The family was reunited in 1945, but even that was painful, Mrs. Liebster recalled recently. "When you have been pulled apart for so long, you don't come back the same," she said. "Those years of separation had put the family in three pieces. We lived each one in a different surrounding, a harsh surrounding. When father came back, he was in a wretched condition. . . . When my mother came back, she had been dying in camp, she too had no strength. . . . Both my parents looked so bad that I could not look at them. If it was not for our common Bible reading, going to (Jehovah's Witnesses) meetings and talking to people, I don't know what would have happened to us." In 1956, she met her husband, Max Liebster. Born to Jewish parents in Germany, he became acquainted with the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses while being transported in a Nazi prison train. Now 85, Liebster is working on his memoirs. Mrs. Liebster hopes her book will inspire young readers to resist peer pressure. Her story, said Black of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is fraught with lessons for today. "I'd like to think that the key lesson for all of us," he said, "as individuals and for us as communities that are run by governments of our elected representatives, that we will cherish the principle and the practice of valuing individual human lives and permit the toleration of the broadest diversity in human interactions."
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