History

That summer of 1944, Adolphe was put on a regular transport to the most dreaded camp in Austria: Mauthausen. The prisoner transports were more like cattle cars, and the arrival at the camp continued the dehumanizing process with shouting, threats, and humiliation by the SS guards. The painful shaving and

Emma was baptized as a Witness of Jehovah in 1938. That year, German forces invaded the Sudetenland, and Adolphe was drafted into the French army to monitor telephone communications. He returned from his duty with a troubled conscience, and having concluded that he would no longer take part in war,

In 1932, the owner of the Wesserling factory unexpectedly put up the business for sale. The resulting staff cuts created an uncertain future, even for the management staff. Adolphe’s reputation had spread beyond the town, and the largest textile printing factory in Pfastatt near Mulhouse, Schaeffer and Company, offered Adolphe

The year was 1923. Adolphe faced two challenges. First, Emma lived on a mountain farm at Bergenbach, which belonged to a neighbouring village. The young men of the village would not allow one of their virgins to be taken by an outsider from a village that they considered lower class.

Alsace was caught once again between France and Germany with the start of World War I. In German-controlled region, the army drafted all young adult males. Then the French army came through the high Thur valley and swept up all the remaining male adolescents too young to be taken, young

The Arnold family lived at the end of the Thur valley in the Vosges Mountains. In 1897 when Adolphe was born, his father, Martin, was a factory worker who barely earned enough to feed his three children. Extreme poverty had forced the family to leave the mountain farm for the

Adolphe Arnold was born in Krüth in Alsace on August 22, 1897 and grew up in a humble Alsatian family. He experienced his youth during the turbulent times before and after the First World War. His honesty, perseverance, talent and diligence made him an important artist. He was a devoted

In Buchenwald in 1995, Max Liebster found the very woodpile which he had sat behind…It is still there… As Max Liebster described it in his memoirs: I couldn’t bear to leave Fritz to face death alone. So side by side, we marched to the train tracks as ordered. The tracks terminated