What grabs and holds my attention in “Facing the Lion – Memoirs of a Young Girl in Nazi Europe” is the author’s blazing honesty. Rarely does a memoir this frank get onto our bookshelves, despite George Orwell’s rancidly cynical jibe that “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” 

So it should have seemed to Simone Liebster, née Arnold, for she had the misfortune to spend herchildhood and adolescence in German-occupied Alsace during Europe’s long, black night of Nazi domination. She observed and endured endless ‘defeats’ of all that she loved and believed about life. She saw her father arrested in September 1941 and sent to Dachau and other concentration camps. She learned to dread the sound of men’s boots on the stairs up to the family apartment. In 1943, with her banned religion underground and persecuted, Simone was expelled from grammar school for refusing to embrace Nazi beliefs and practices; she spent her formative years in a brutal, inhuman German ‘re-education’ centre for delinquent girls. Her mother’s arrest followed a month later. Her best friend and fellow Bibelforscher, Marcel Sutter, was beheaded that same year for refusing to renounce his faith. No wonder she felt “alone”, “isolated”, “left out”, “tiny”, “defenceless”, an “outsider”, “faint-hearted”, sustained only by happy family memories, Bible reading and prayer.

             Her family were Christians, by birth Roman Catholic, then later by choice ErnstBibelforscher or ‘Sincere Bible Students’, a small Christian group no more than 20,000 strong in Germany at the time, but who attracted a disproportionate ire from the Gestapo for their refusal to conform to Nazi standards. At school and church the Lord’s Prayer had the added the words, “God bless our Führer and the Fatherland!”, which the Bibelforscher would not say;  they also refused to heil Hitler as the country’s saviour, insisted that all people of all races were equally loved by God, refused to join the Nazi killing machine, and would do nothing that supported the Nazi military - not even mend their uniforms. All of which put them on a collision course as certain as any faced by early Christians in the Roman arenas. Teachers, local officials, supervisors and judges all shouted the same satanic mantra, “Let it be known no-one can swim against the German current! The one who doesn’t want to bend has to be broken!”  To Simone’s own surprise at times, she swam against that foul current, and she neither bent nor broke. She and her family emerged from incarceration and torture deeply scarred, but with their integrity intact

 All this is the stuff of martyrs, heroes and heroines, from which a triumphalist hagiography might be expected to emerge.  But this astonishing book is not called “Conquering the Nazi Lion”, or even “Fighting the Lion”, but more modestly, “Facing the Lion.” It is the story of a young girl determined to remain a Christian and not descend to the amoral degradation of those around her, battling pride, anger, hatred of the brutally sadistic Herr Ehrlich - and an urgent need for revenge, but ‘a Christian doesn’t pay back evil for evil,” her mother tells her.

 At first the ban on worship was almost fun – holding their forbidden Christian meetings in an allotment shed, smuggling Bible literature in bicycle frames. But then the Nazis grabbed the schools. All children must give the German greeting, heiling Hitler as saviour. Like the Three Hebrews threatened with the fiery furnace, Simone would keep her integrity. She would not drop Jesus for Hitler, although it posed problems for a frightened eleven-year-old: “Hiding behind tall girls in class was possible, but in the street? It meant scrutinising people like a hunter, or rather like the prey watches the hunter! Every walk was nerve-wracking.”

            Later, she was almost paralysed by fear when she had to enter 24 classrooms in turn to have a Nazi teacher’s denunciation of her read out to her peers and neighbours. Her pride was hurt when her schoolmates then jeered at her for being ‘stupid’ and a ‘coward’.

She had to battle time and again with a rebellious, wild spirit that challenged her perception of Christ-like conduct. She gets mad with her teachers, her classmates, her parents, and often she feels unable to assuage her anger by confessing it to her mother: ‘I decided not to tell my mother anything about my problems of school. Mum didn’t have to tire herself out worrying about me. . . Keeping the whole matter secret from Mum increased the pressure, but I slowly learned to lean on God alone.’

Soon Simone was really alone, “standing in a uniform, barefoot and dumb,” as she is bundled out of school in disgrace and sent across the Rhine to a German reformatory for immoral girls. In this cold institution she had none of childhood’s rights, “nothing, absolutely nothing, not even privacy.” No talking, no chatting, no running, no playing, no singing, no friendships, no education,  no toys, no dolls, no pictures - all were banned for these children: one bath a year, one letter a year, hair washed once a year.

She flies into rages over injustice, risks punishment to get food for a girl who had beaten into subjection, feels bitter about the ‘teachers’’ stealing the girls’ meagre rations. When she mistakenly believes her parents have been killed, she comes close to accepting the place as normal, feeling “deeply attached  to the place. . . I didn’t care any more when children were punished. They were so stubborn – worse than animals! . . I secretly decided I wanted to stay in the home as  maid.”

            Fading memories of her blissful childhood and her friends in  the little congregation of Zeugen Jehovas (Jehovah’s Witnesses, as they were now called), support her faith, as do occasional family letters urging her to hold fast to God. The words that Marcel Sutter’s, her murdered friend, had inscribed in her poetry book came back to mind to help her: “Hope is man’s greatest asset. Those who have nothing at all still possess hope.”

            In April 1945 Simone’s mother, unrecognisable after her years in concentration camps, came to take her home. Pushing aside the bureaucracy of the defeated Third Reich, her mother, her “personality, come alive, form and determined, as I had always known her. That woman, fighting like a soldier, was indeed my mother! My mother was alive!” They had no papers, but “our passport was written on our faces.” Soon her father returned, too, emaciated, deaf and subdued, dragging his feet, his eyes lifeless, holding his beret at his side when people spoke to him.

            To the 14-year-old Simone’s initial disgust, her parents refuse to take legal revenge on the catholic priest, the protestant pastor or the axe-wielding neighbour who callously betrayed them. After boiling with rage at her parents’ forgiving spirit, she comes to terms with their Christian view, but it takes the family three years to regain their closeness: “Only someone who has been deeply humiliated, who has experienced degrading pressures, and extreme, debasing treatment, can know how this brands one’s innermost consciousness, leaving deep scars.”

            While Simone Arnold Liebster does not write with Anne Frank’s precociously lapidary skill with words, she does write vividly from the heart and to the heart, lifting the reader’s spirits with the knowledge that for all man’s murderous skills and pitiless lust for war, it is within the human spirit – of adults and of youngsters – to face their lions and not run away. Her honesty makes the glory of the Christian spirit all the more attainable.