Elisabeth Dopazo (95) experienced how Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) were laid for her, her brother and her parents. Although persecuted as Jehovah’s Witnesses during the Nazi era, her family helped Jewish neighbors.
Otto Fickert, Elisabeth Dopazo’s father, died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on February 7, 1940, at the age of 36. Five years earlier, in March 1935, he had been imprisoned in a concentration camp for the first time, in Sachsenburg concentration camp, directly in his Saxon home in what is now Mittweidaer Straße in the Frankenberg district of Sachsenburg.
Of the thousands of men who were imprisoned in the Sachsenburg concentration camp near Chemnitz between 1933 and 1937, the hairdresser Otto Fickert was, according to current research, the prisoner whose home was closest to this early concentration camp. As a pre-school child, Elisabeth had to walk just over a kilometer to bring her father food to the camp.
The town of Frankenberg emphasizes the central social importance of memorials such as Sachsenburg. They make it clear that “National Socialist terror was not an abstract, distant event, but a crime and a tragedy that could take place right on our own doorstep and affected people like us”.
According to the town of Frankenberg, the laying of the Stolperstein for the Fickert family would also underline the fact that the history of the Sachsenburg concentration camp, where Otto Fickert, among others, was imprisoned, is inextricably linked to the history of the communities of Sachsenburg and Frankenberg.”
In the presence of Frankenberg’s mayor Oliver Gerstner (CDU), four Stolpersteine were laid for the married couple Herta and Otto Fickert and their two children Elisabeth and Otto, who were born in Sachsenburg, on November 4, 2024 in Sachsenburg, a town of 500 inhabitants. “With the Stolpersteine, we not only want to make history visible, but also make a contribution to the local culture of remembrance,” said the mayor in the run-up to the event.
Elisabeth Dopazo, the daughter of Herta and Otto Fickert, who lives near Boston/USA, was also present via video transmission. The 95-year-old spoke moving words. A grandson of Herta Fickert said: “Every Stolperstein tells a story. Our task is to preserve and honor this history. Let us work together to uphold values such as tolerance, respect and humanity. May these Stolpersteine be a call to all to actively stand up against discrimination and injustice.”
Among the 50 or so people present at the Stolperstein ceremony was a daughter of Herta Fickert, born in 1946, who remarried after the death of her husband in a concentration camp. “By supporting the laying of the Stolperstein memorial, we would like to honor the memory of our fellow citizens who were persecuted by the Nazi dictatorship,” said Dr. Mykola Borovyk, who is involved in the development of the memorial in Sachsenburg on behalf of the town of Frankenberg.
The Stolpersteine are a project started in 1992 by the artist Gunter Demnig. “My concept from the beginning was that the Stolpersteine are intended for all groups of victims and that families who were separated by persecution are symbolically reunited in remembrance,” says Günter Demnig, thinking of countless Jewish families who often could not save all their children, if any of the family’s children could be brought to safety at all.
On July 19, 1997, the artist laid the first Stolpersteine with official permission. These two Stolpersteine commemorate the two Jehovah’s Witnesses Johann and Matthias Nobis. The brothers refused to do military service for reasons of conscience and were therefore executed by the Nazi regime in Berlin-Plötzensee in 1940.
Even 80 years after the end of the Second World War, it still happens that Stolpersteine – as is now the case in Sachsenburg – are laid for people who are still alive, says 76-year-old Gunter Demnig. In Rotenburg/Wümme in 2005, for example, two sisters – for whom two of the six stones there were laid – met again after 60 years, according to the artist. Gunter Demnig is moved by such stories. “Family reunions like this alone make the project worthwhile,” he says and emphasizes: “Stolpersteine are not gravestones.”
“It is our common duty to protect the Nazi crimes from being forgotten in order to prevent their repetition in the future,” explains historian Dr. Mykola Borovyk. One detail of the Fickert family’s history under National Socialism will be highlighted in the second edition of the book “Die unbekannten Judenhelfer – Wie Zeugen Jehovas im Nationalsozialismus jüdischen Mitmenschen beistanden”, which will be published in 2024.
“After her arrest, Herta Fickert was able to take her children to her parents in Lübeck under police guard. There, the Fickert siblings witnessed how their grandparents, also Jehovah’s Witnesses, helped Jewish neighbors,” reported the author Christoph Wilker. “After the book 2022 was published, several readers contacted me with further, previously unknown stories. These include the story of the Fickert family from Sachsenburg,” explained Christoph Wilker, who presented his book in Sachsenburg after the Stolperstein (stumbling stone)
For Elisabeth Dopazo, who has lived in the USA for decades and continued to visit school classes until the age of 90 to inform children and young people about the events in Hitler’s Germany in a similar way to Simone Arnold-Liebster and also to remind them of her family’s history of persecution, helping her Jewish neighbors was, in her words, the only positive experience during the Nazi era that has remained in her memory – and that has had a lasting effect on her family.
In 2020, Elisabeth Dopazo gave a long video interview to the USC Shoah Foundation as part of the “Last Chance Testimony Collection Initiative” and talked about her childhood experiences in Sachsenburg and Lübeck and the persecution of her family under National Socialism. The USC Shoah Foundation published a four-and-a-half-minute excerpt on YouTube in 2023.
At the beginning of the book launch at the Sachsenburg Concentration Camp Memorial Communication and Documentation Centre, Dresden historian Dr. Gerald Hacke from the Münchener Platz Memorial gave a keynote speech on the topic of “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Sachsenburg Concentration Camp. The function of protective custody in the persecution of a religious minority”.
At the end of October 2024, the town of Frankenberg announced that it had started the first construction phase for a dignified memorial at the site of the former concentration camp with financial support from the Saxon state government. During this phase, the historic retaining wall with the inscription, which was made by concentration camp prisoners, will be restored, the remains of the commandant’s villa will be redesigned and the infrastructure necessary for the operation of the memorial will be created.
Renovation of the former camp commandant’s building is planned for 2025, which will serve as a visitor center in the future. It will house a permanent exhibition, seminar rooms, an archive and a library. According to the town of Frankenberg, the memorial is scheduled for completion in 2027.
“It is very important to me that my father is remembered. But also my mother, who ultimately also suffered a long time in prison simply because of her faith,” says Elisabeth Dopazo, who is one of the many children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who suffered persecution during the Hitler regime. “The time under National Socialism was also very difficult for my brother and me. We didn’t have a normal childhood. We lived in constant fear as children.”
