The Inspiration
My father, Steve Sr., was imprisoned by the Nazis in his hometown of Binsfeld in the tiny country of Luxembourg after departing Christmas Eve Catholic mass in 1944. Due to the resistance movement in the area organized by the Catholic Church, the Nazis had decided to round up random hostages and execute them. My father was scheduled to be executed on New Year’s Day 1945.
As the execution was unfolding, however, an empty German supply truck passed the site. The driver addressed the executioner and suggested the prisoners be loaded up and sent to Germany for slave labor.
The prisoners were thus spared the fate of execution but would be forced to endure brutal slave labor, starvation, and unspeakable conditions. Five months later, just before the end of the war, the Germans began to march my father and hundreds of other concentration camp captives to the extermination camp of Buchenwald. It was on this death march that my father escaped.
Portrait I painted of my father
Hinzert Concentration Camp drawn by my father (Steve Simon, Sr.) from memory upon returning home after his escape. He endured brutal treatment in this camp and other locations in Germany from January to May of 1945.
When I was twelve years old, I interviewed my father in a series of sessions about those dark times for a sixth grade school project. It is difficult to express just how moving those discussions were and how much of an impact they had on me.
The lessons I received from those interviews, now decades ago, provide the deep wellspring from which this collection finds its passion. Time and again throughout history countless stories such as my father’s are forced to play out as the result of senseless conflict.
I recall a particularly poignant story my father related to me in one of the interview sessions. On the evening of that fateful Christmas Eve imprisoning, my father stood in his cramped, freezing cold cell. The silence was suddenly cracked by a lone German soldier singing “Stille Nacht” or “Silent Night” in a drunken voice. My father related how ironic it was to listen to the lyrics “sleep in heavenly peace.” In that story is the kernel that gave rise to the motivation for this collection.
Ten years after escaping the camps, my father chose to immigrate to the United States. He wanted to guarantee his future family freedom, opportunity, and above all peace.
As I began to ponder ways in which I could express my gratitude for my father’s example while also expressing the universal yearning for peace, the idea for this collection was conceived.
While my father’s biography is a big influence, my own international travel has also shaped my worldview. By the age of twenty-nine, I had traveled to thirty countries and had studied and worked on four continents. I discovered so many wonderful stories of great courage across so many disparate cultures. It is my hope that this collection will appropriately honor these great people and their contributions to the pursuit of peace.
Surely if global peace is ever to be achieved, we will need to follow the Great Peacemakers’ examples. We will all need to courageously look within and find our own wellspring of faith, hope, and love to overcome our patterns of fear and mistrust.
Thank you kindly for your interest in this collection and, more importantly, your personal efforts for a more just and peaceful world!
With gratitude,
Steve Simon
My visit to the Hinzert Concentration Camp. The sculpture was created by Lucien Wercollier who was also detained in the camp as a prisoner from Luxembourg.