Although this is actually a book review, I thought it might better go here because it brought up issues that are especially pertinent for us here on the board in light of the Bryant, Long, Slack, Stovall and Freeman (and so many many more)family tragedies.
FACING THE LION: Review and Comments
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Short summary:
Facing the Lion is the autobiographical account of a young girl’s faith and courage. In the years preceeding World War II, her parents turn from the Catholic Church and become devout Jehovah’s Witnesses. Simone, too embraces the faith.
The Nazi Party (the Lion) takes over Alsace-Lorraine, France, and Simone’s schools become Nazi propaganda machines. Later, Simone is sent to a reform school to be “reeducated”, where she remains untill the end of the war.
Facing the Lion provides an interesting and detailed view of ordinary country and town life in the prewar years and during Hitler’s regimes. This inspiring story of a young girl standing up for her beliefs in the face of society’s overwhelming pressure to confirm is a potent reminder of the power of remaing true to one’s beliefs.
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The ‘conversion’ of the family from Catholic to Jehovah’s Witnesses goes something like this:
December, 1936, a theater play for Chrstmas in which Simone is Gabriel the Archangel:
“Suddenly the door opened. Henriette, a poor mentally ill girl, stood in the doorway, a basket hanging around her neck. She trembled all over….She went to the next loge. A solitary man waved his hand and shook his head “no”. She blushed and ran away. Poor girl! How terrible! I felt so bad for her. Mother, disgusted, stared at the man. I followed Mother’s eyes and recognized our parish priest.…The bell rang for the next act. I had to leave…I passed Henriette, coming back down the hallway. The priest had called her back in. …something had made mum very upset. With indignation, she said to the theatre manager, “Simone will not be in the play again, and I am taking her out of the Skylark girls group. I do not raise a girl to expose her! ..You should have seen what happened in the loge next to us!” (The priest had abused Henriette.)
And on another occasion, sometime during a nice warm February day, returning home from church…‘suddenly, in the distance, I spotted a young man and a boy crawling out from underneath the thicket. They hurried off and quickly disappeared from view.’
Sometime in the year 1937, Simone was playing with her doll inside the house while her mother was waxing the shared wooden stairs outside the apartment. “I heard her talking to someone in the hallway; suddenly she came in to get something and went back out. “l’ll read them," I heard Mum say. “I believe our God is sleeping and doesn’t see what is going on. I wonder what you have to say.”
Mum was enthusiastic about the books she had gotten. Day after day she would read and read and read—she barely cooked anymore….after a while, she decided that she wouldn’t attend Mass anymore. So Dad and I went together. He seemed really down, and I felt uncomfortable too.
One night as I was lying in bed, I could hear my parents’ voices. “We are Catholics!” Dad kept repeating. “We have to stay faithful” “Do what you want!” “I forbid you to talk about your ideas and your readings to Simone!”
A strange atmosphere had crept into our home. Mother still didn’t go to church…Father didn’t talk anymore…his greetings to Mother were mechanical---no warmth, no enthusiasm, only questionings. “Do you mean the men who gave you those booklets didn’t come back?” “No, and I feel bad about it. I have so many questions I want to ask them. “Who brought these other brochures?” “I ordered them,” and nervously Mum pulled out a brown paper with stamps. “Here is the proof,” she said with annoyance. “Why did you order so many, and where are they all?” “I ordered three kinds. They sent me ten of each.” “And what did you do with them?” “I shared them with our neighbors in the apartment and down the street…Adolphe, people have the same right that each one of us has—the right to choose. But to do so, they have to have a choice; this is not propaganda.”
A heavy silence enveloped our family. Mother didn’t try to communicate with Dad, who had no voice anymore. The gloomy days seemed endless. Later, “I’ll investigate that book of those Bible Students, those Jehovahs…They must write lots of nonsense in that Jehovah’s Witness Creation book.” Mother explained herself. “Yes, we have been cheating you. People who do not study the Bible don’t think it’s bad to make a pagan feast, and they do not know that Christmas started with the Roman sun feast…Together we will work to get all the fairy tales and lies out of our worship.”
And finally…Dad said: “Tomorrow, Mum will go with you to school. Your classmates are right. You, we, are not Catholics anymore. Your mum has found the truth: the Bible is the truth, and we all will hold to it as closely as possible.”
Music, laughter, and games had returned to our home.
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September, 1941:, after the Gestapo had left Simone’s house: ‘Mother told me, “It wasn’t our turn to be led into the Lion’s den. Whenever Jehovah allows our arrest, we will get the needed strenght from Him. Let’s pray together for Dad, and for us both, and beg our heavenly Father to sustain us.”
Simone doesn’t go into much detail about her Father’s arrest…just that he didn’t come home one day. There were two non-Jehovah’s Witness families who helped them..the Koels and Maria Hartmann. Eventually they came for her mother and took her away. Simone, then being without parents, was sent to a school for ‘reform’.
To flash forward to the end of the book, the coming of the Allied Armies caused the Germans to evacuate the camps where her parents had been (Ravensbruck and Ebensee). It states in the book that ‘he had been liberated from the Ebensee camp’. The Red Cross helped them all to to get home. She speaks of Johanne Hus, burned at the stake July 6, 1415 and of Marcel Sutter, a dear friend, beheaded in Torgau as a concientious objector November 5, 1943. ‘How Jehovah must love those men, I thought and my hope in the resurrection became stronger.’ They went home through Switzerland ‘Swiss people handed us coffee, soup and chocolate.’ She mentioned on getting home, that the Gestapo had claimed their apartment because they had two people to feed in prison camp!, and the school that had ‘redeucated’ her had claimed the apartment as well for HER expenses!!! Later, ‘Dad appreciated the help received by the factory and the Red Cross, and the gift packages and the clothing coming from Jehovah’s Witnesses in America…by the Watchtower Society headquarters in New York and by the regional offices in Europe.
‘Grasping my parents reasoning was one of my major problems. Dad urged me to get a better education. He was sad that my schooling was poor, that my ambitions were gone. I was satisfied to become a maid, along with my preaching activites. “First,” he said, “try to learn a good trade.” It seemed a contradiction to me.’
‘Dad often spoke about the Catholic priests in Dachau; he had many good conversations with them. …’you are in Camp because of the first commandment [love God with all heart] We priests are here because of the second.[Love your neighbor as yourself]. We gave bread to prisoners, helped some Jews, or said something against the party.’ (Brackets mine).
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I tried very hard to read this book without the interference of my own feelings. I tried to put myself in Simone’s place, and only experience what she did.
But I also cannot put aside everything I had learned in the last year about this religion. I cannot put aside what I had learned from William Schnell’s book ‘30 Years a Watchtower Slave’, or Barbara Grizutti Harrison’s book ‘Visions of Glory’. Or Ray Franz’s book, “Crisis of conscience.’ Or many many other books I had read over the last year.
But most of all, I cannot put aside the Watchtower’s own literature that stands on my shelves.
Such as the 1934 Yearbook “Up to this hour there never has been the slightest bit of money contributed to our work by Jews.” –[a blatant and flagrant lie by the way]. “It has been the commercial Jews of the British-American empire that have built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations.” And this from the 1913 Studies in the Scriptures: “…in their blindness and pride of heart they have stumbled over the humility of God’s appointed messenger of the world’s salvation;…because of it, they have been punished, and that severely. [for nearly a thousand years!]And, finding all mankind at war with them, their national pride and arrogance were by no means softened…God has permitted these afflictions and persecutions to come as a penalty for their national crime of rejection of the Gospel and crucifixtion of the Redeemer..God foreknew their pride and hardness of heart…” And from the 1975 WT: “To this day the natural, circumcised Jews are suffering the sad consequences from the works of darkness that were done within their nation nineteen hundred years ago. This illustrates what can happen to a whole nation that comes under the influence of that unseen superhuman intelligence, Satan the Devil.” (Brackets mine)
This from the book ‘Children’, published in 1941: “since 1914 Jesus Christ has been enthroned in the heavens.” With no reference made to the previous failed prophecies of the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s, where Jesus was going to come and ‘take the true believers to heaven’.
I can’t help but think how sad it is that as Jehovah’s Witnesses were being hunted and persecuted, their precious Watchtower was collaberating for their persecution and using their persecution toward their own ends, as can be shown not only by their own literature but by eyewitness testimony. (Such behavior was to be repeated in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s in Malawi and by the release of an infamous Awake magazine where children who had died because of refusal of blood were depicted on the cover as heroes; no mention is made of the expulsion and shunning they would have had to endure had they elected to choose otherwise—no exceptions made even for children.
I feel sad to think also, that many of the doctrines that Simone and her family and others had suffered and died for have been ‘refined’ since then. The blood transfusion and rape resistance issues had been added in the 1960’s; a harder stance taken on expulsion and shunning; the ‘generation’ change; the changes in neutrality; the United Nations scandal of last year; the scandal of the behavior of Bethel during and immediately after the September 11 World Trade Center horrors. And, a far cry from the reaction of Simone’s mother regarding Henrietta’s abuse, now these survivors have seen their beloved organization embroiled in a scandal wherein they are accused of attracting and harboring pedophiles and punishing their victims!!! Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered through all that horror for a prophecy that was never fulfilled; a future that hasn’t come to be; for an organization that is now resposible for deaths in the last few decades that now outnumber the deaths of Jehvoah’s Witnesses that died in the German camps.
I feel sad, too, how ‘God must have loved those two men [Johanne Hus and Marcel Sutter], but in the present Watchtower doctrine, God does not love the Catholic priests and nuns and pastors and the Amish and the Hutterites and the Russelites and on and on and on that also may have died in the camps. God does not love the Koels or Maria Hartmann, nor the Allied soldiers that helped liberate the Witnesses, nor the Red Cross members who helped them, nor the Swiss people who gave them help, nor the factory workers and the neighbors who helped them get established after the war. Simone, in her book published in 2000, expresses gratitude toward none of these. No; God only loves the Watchtowerites who practice, in the end, a degree of religious intolerance and bigotry that not only murders souls minds and hearts and bodies; but would make Hitler proud.
Some things never change…
Dungbeetle
UADNA-US (Unseen Apostate Directorate of North America-United States)