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 husband and loving father. Adolphe eventually found work as an artistic designer at the well-known textile printer Schaeffer and Company. For this reason, Adolphe and his wife Emma moved with their daughter Simone to the bustling town of Mühlhausen in 1933. Adolphe made sure that his daughter was introduced to art and music. They went on hikes in the woods and spent happily ever after reading books about classic history, distant lands, and the universe.
Adolphe and Emma both had a strong sense of justice and shared a wholehearted desire to please God in what they said and did. They raised Simone to develop these values as well. After Adolphe and his family became Jehovah’s Witnesses, their values were tested to the extreme by the storm of Nazism that swept through the country. They practiced their faith in secret, risking their lives.
The Gestapo arrested Adolphe at work in September 1941 and accused him of being an enemy of the state. After initially being imprisoned in Mühlhausen prison, he endured almost four years of imprisonment in the Schirmeck, Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration camps. He was beaten by the Nazis, they performed medical experiments on him, he starved and they mocked him. The most difficult test for him came when he learned that his beloved wife and daughter had also fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. What Simone did not know at the time was that whenever she disobeyed a Nazi order that went against her conscience, the SS punished her father. Through this, however, Adolphe learned again and again that Simone was true to her faith.
At the end of the war, although Adolphe was near death, his faith and values were still strong. Only after two months did he have enough strength to return to Mühlhausen, all the while wondering if his wife and daughter had survived. In June 1945 the three were reunited, each scarred by the ordeal. Over time, her strong love and deep faith brought warmth and life back to the Arnold family.
You can find a more detailed biography here: https://alst.org/geschichte/biographien-2/adolphe-arnold-biografie-uebersicht/
