A Knighthood for a Jewish Girl: Hannah Lessing

Hannah Lessing Profile  in Three Episodes

Yom HaShoah Thoughts

Every Yom HaShoah, we are getting into the atmosphere created by the wave of yet another stories, facts, discoveries, revelations , all this messaging us directly from inside the abyss into which our people were thrown over 80 years ago. That throw itself and that abyss were so unspeakably horrific, in all and  every sense, that the trauma it has caused is still felt as open, three generations thereafter. There are not that many events in the history of humankind with such a powerful imprint. 

There are people who are re-entering our common Shoah memory domain from time to time,  prompted by some events, or commemorative dates, or newly appeared  films or books. And there are those who are living inside that dimension and dealing with the big and small Shoah-related events, facts, lives, people, memories 24/7 for years and decades. This is a special way of life, very demanding one on several levels: emotional, motivational, behavioral. No perks of any kind can ‘make it up’ to those people who chose this path,  to balance the exhaustion of their inner energy, emotions, nerves, and a life source in general. It is a very consuming choice to make. 

Those who did it, made it following their own conviction, and in hope to recuperate to some degree that catastrophic damage caused to the victims of the Shoah, to the Holocaust survivors, and to humanity in general. 

Hannah Lessing is one of those people. I wrote about one of Hannah’s most special contributions in our common memory a couple of years ago. Her vision, will and effort in making the project of the Wall of Memory in Vienna , the long overdue commemoration of men, women and children of Austria murdered in the Holocaust, to be realised in the capital of the country with such a crushing story of their talented and meaningful Jewry, is admirable and highly important. Among many Hannah’s energetic efforts to help and to memorise during over thirty years of her work at her demanding position, this one had filled me and many other descendants of the Holocaust victims and survivors from all over the world with ever continuing deep gratitude for her willingness to remember, not only for all of us, but primarily important, for all of them.

Ceremony in Paris

In the beginning of March 2025, a special, nice and warm ceremony took place in Paris, in the newly renovated National Library of France, a superb institution of world importance. At the ceremony, the Director-General of the Austrian National Fund for Victims of National Socialism  Hannah Lessing was sworn a Knight of the Légionnaire de Chevalier, the highest recognition of France. A Jewish girl, who tirelessly worked for more than half of her life for making the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust a real, became a Knight, the recipient of one of the highest honours world-wide. 

Awarding Ceremony of the Chevalier de Legionnaire de Honore to Director-General of the Austrian National Fund for Victims of National Socialism Dr Hannah Lessing by Deputy Minister for Remembrance Culture and War Veterans Affairs Mme Patricia Miralles . March 2025. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

It was Hannah’s good colleague and friend , well-known French historian Gilles Pecout, who was previously working very successfully as the French Ambassador to Austria, and who now leads the renovated National Library of France, the gem of the French heritage and world culture, who did invite Hannah to have the ceremony of receiving her Chevalier de Legion de Honor in that absolutely special place in Paris. 

For Hannah, who lived and studied in France for long time in the 1980s, and for whom France is the part of herself, everything in that ceremony was special: the meaning of becoming a knight for a Jewish girl, the meaning of being awarded with the highest reward of France and one of the most prestigious honours in the world, the joining the rank with such people like Elie and Marion Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal ( and, actually, there are not that many people awarded with the highest honour of France for their work on behalf of the victims of the Shoah in general), to have the ceremony of the award at the beautiful and meaningful place of culture and accumulated treasures of civility in the National Library, to have her friends, both French, Austrian and some other ones, who did come to the ceremony specially travelling from afar,  to be awarded by a very nice person, Mme Patricia Miralles, who is now working in the capacity that every civilised country has to have. Mme Miralles is French current deputy Minister for Remembrance Culture and War Veterans. 

” What a wonderful thing it is to have such a ministry in the first place” – Hannah told to the Mme Minister and later to me. Indeed. We do know how important  the culture of remembrance is. But there is one thing to say, and totally different to set up the institution which would function in this direction, on the state level. If more countries would have the Ministry of the Remembrance Culture, the world would be much more merciful today. 

Not only Hannah lived and studied in France for a long time to feel it as a part of herself, but during her super-energetic and very focused work leading the National Fund of Austria for the Victims of National Socialism, and co-charing many essential for memorial process international organisations, she works very closely for years with all major French organisations dedicated to the Shoah memory, such as Amicale de Mauthausen, the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the CIVS Restitution Commission. With some of them I also have been cooperating for years, and I know the devotion of those people and the superb level of those people’s thinking and qualities. Many of Hannah’s French colleagues were present at her awarding ceremony in Paris, naturally. 

Hannah knows all of the Shoah survivors of Austrian origin who are living in France, over 150 of them still alive today, out of over 700 those who survived initially. She works closely with them, as she does with many survivors outside Austria, in the UK, US, Canada and some other countries. Among the guests at the awarding ceremony, there was an 85-year old Frederick Rudjer,  born Fritz, who was a small child who managed to get out of Austria with his parents at the last minute over 80 years ago, and who came to Hannah’s ceremony all the way from Toulouse. “What can be more precious than these kinds of gestures? “ – Hannah shared with me being justly emotional and full of gratitude to the man who came to be there to attend her ceremony in this age and from that afar. 

Hannah Lessing and Frederick Rudjer at the ceremony in Paris. March 2025. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

I ‘ve got emotional together with my friend. There is no higher reward in this life than a shared heart. And this is what Hannah gets from many of the survivors and their families all the time, very deservingly. 

There is no surprise to me that Hannah did dedicate her Knighthood and her highest French reward to the memory of her grandmother. The one, as she said in the end of her very well sculptured accepting speech, ‘to whom I feel exceptionally close although I had no chance to to hold her hand, Margit Lessing, who was 49 when she was gassed in Auschwitz”. 

Tea in Vienna

One month on, there was another very special, and highly emotional ceremony, now in Vienna. Everybody who participated there tried their absolutely best to keep their emotions under control. We all learned to do it, with different degrees of success, during the eighteen months after October 7th, 2023. In a beautiful palace in the centre of Vienna, there was a warm and caring tea reception for the family of one of the recently released hostages, Tal Shoham, who holds Israeli-Austrian citizenship. 

Tal spent 505 days in the nightmare-like tunnels of Hamas. He was invited to visit Vienna  and Austria with his family, wife and two children, soon after he was returned home. For Hannah who took the cause of the hostages extremely close to her heart since the first minutes of the tragedy of October 7th, it was an extremely meaningful encounter indeed. 

Hannah Lessing speaking with Tal Shoham and his wife at the special reception of the Shoham family in Vienna. April 2025. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

I was watching the material of Shoham family warm reception by their Austrian hosts. I am aware of serious and consistent efforts undertaken by the Austrian government to make Tal’s release possible. Looking at it, I was thinking of that almost impossible contrast for him being transported into strikingly different reality from those cursed tunnels, where his friends are still kept. 

I saw the moments of Tal sitting in the sun-lit gilded baroque interiors in Vienna, at the gathering celebrating his release, in a warm and caring atmosphere, being at the moments reclusive and switched into a completely introverted mode, not surprisingly, but still so very painful and delicate. He was thinking of his friends who are still kept captive in inhuman conditions and for inhuman purposes, he was away from our world, and I felt so boundlessly sorry for him, and all the people who went , and are still going through the nightmare of post-October 7th crisis of humanity that we are living through. 

Hannah Lessing , who took the hostage situation extremely close to her heart and who is still completely devoted to their cause, was at the ceremony, and she was speaking with Tal and his family there. 

“ Tal was extremely nice, and his family is just wonderful. Of course, people around them here in Vienna were both attentive and warm, we all know and understand what Tal and his family went through , and obviously are still going . What was remarkable is that  in his all conversations, and public addresses too, Tal was all the time speaking about his friends, the men who spent those horrific more than 500 days with him in the Hamas tunnels, and who are stayed behind.  Two of them were so cruelly brought in the car to watch the release of Tal at that despicable propaganda release-show. I can and I cannot imagine how he must have felt all this time”, – Hannah said to me the next day after meeting Tal and speaking with him and his family at length at that  special tea encountered in Vienna in early April 2025. 

Hannah Lessing campaigning for release of the Israeli hostages. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

And there is more. “ Do you know what I noticed in Tal’s behaviour and talks? That special composure, which is of a different nature that normally people have, and that special sense of humour , quiet and a bit acerbic, and which, as well as that dignified composure, is exactly the mode of behaviour and the sense of humour among the Holocaust survivors”, – Hannah observed, and we sighed, simultaneously.

I did know what she was talking about. To think that we will live it through, to have it as a part of our life today is still probably the biggest shock that October 7th and its consequences has evoked in so many of us, both consciously and subconsciously. 

The next question is how to handle it. For Hannah Lessing, there is a little doubt about it. Hannah echoes the very poignant thoughts of one of her heroines, Simone Veil, who made a fine and precise distinction between ‘the duty to remember’ and ‘the willingness to remember’. Hannah emphasised it at her acceptance speech of the Chevalier de Legion de Honore in Paris recently, and she does it at other occasions as well, as this is one of her essential principles. 

“ I completely agree with Simone Veil. We should not speak about the duty of remembrance, as the process of remembering is a very personal, family-infused, thing for every person, and it is highly individual. One cannot ‘prescribe’ to remember to anyone else. This simply does not work. But remembrance on its own, an individual remembrance, can prompt some of us to go further, to transmit, to teach, to explain. And this is what I am fully devoted to. And yes, teaching and transmitting of our common remembrance, and our individual remembrance is a duty. It is a call”,  – says Hannah who is on this duty for over thirty years, non-stop. And who simply does not know how to live otherwise. 

Sleepless Nights in Between

The whole shock of the post-October 7th that occurred to the most of the Jewish people world-wide on many levels still reverberates. One of those levels is the Holocaust memory domain. Inevitable comparisons, many different ones, some similar aspects, the current massive ugly wave of general anti-Semitims, which gets further and over, and which tarnishes also the pre -, during, and post-Holocaust periods, rejection of Jews and Jewish history, aggressive hostility a priori to anything Jewish, would it be art, literature, manufacturing, you name it, all this has posed new challenges to all of us who are professionally dealing with Jewish education in its different aspects. 

If previously we were addressing innocent ignorance and caused natural interest towards many aspects of Jewish heritage and history among wide public, now, we are facing hostility and rejection a priori. If previously we were seeing mostly sincere compassion towards the Holocaust memory, now we are fighting the ghosts of hate returning from the 1930s, perhaps even in a more determined way. What does it tell us about? – we are asking ourselves and our friends and colleagues. Human nature? Instincts of hatred? Thorough organised seizure of power which always starts from seizure of minds? 

Hannah Lessing with her close colleague, mentor and friend Marian Turski shortly before Marian’s passing. January 2025. Poland. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

As many of my colleagues, Hannah Lessing is tormented by all these questions: what did we do wrong in our decades-on educating on the Holocaust, which now failed to keep the people’s moral compasses correct, among so many young people in particular? What did we miss? What could we do now to fix it, because it is an absolute priority for anyone working in a vast area of the Holocaust and Jewish education? 

Hannah is admitting to having a lot of sleepless nights over all those tormenting questions. But she is not the person who would be disarmed by her loss of sleep. To the contrary, she gets yet more motivated to bring the truth out, and not only that. She brings it out in a focused way, absolutely needed today – speaking directly to the doubting, or rejecting youth, which is a new challenging phenomenon not for Jews , we used to any of it, but for civility in general. 

“ So, I am going to these schools that we have in abundance here in Vienna, with the majority of classes being Arab and all other migrant teenagers . I am going there with my Magen David necklace which I never take away anywhere and under any circumstances, as you know ( I do), and I am speaking with them openly, in detail, looking them in the eye, answering any of their questions. Their faces slightly change during our uneasy conversations, from being completely hostile and arrogant to become surprised and puzzled towards the end of it. I am telling them the facts and stories, and  I am encouraging them to ask me any questions. Some of them do, and I answer them in full. And in the end of these two very difficult, very demanding , sometimes simply horrible hours, I can see that some of those young indoctrinated faces have been changed, even if slightly so. Some of them ask more questions. Some of them smile. Some get quiet and thoughtful.  I am always saying and I do believe it: even if my effort would bring the change of heart and mind of just one kid, it is worth it” – Hannah shares her inner motivation for today’s very uneasy work she does round o’clock, as among the young people, as among anyone else in her over-busy work to institute the memory of the victims and survivors of the Shoah. 

Hannah Lessing, Simon Wiesenthal’s granddaughter Racheli, and group of students next to the Memorial to the Austrian victims of the Holocaust in Vienna. (C) Hannah Lessing Archive. With kind permission.

I understand my brave and determined friend and colleague completely. Unless we will be open and pro-active, defending our common memory and dignity of the victims of the Nazi genocidal extermination of Jews ( and Roma people), their memory and our dignity will sink to the same abyss where the evil forces has put human beings so mechanically and in such well organised way so very recently. Our families do remember it in detail, in three generations by now. 

It is simply incomprehensible to risk the decency that we fought for them to be restored, to sink into the swamp of ignorant latent irrational prejudiced  hate that rules or aims to rule a serious part of societies now. 

I am always grateful to Hannah for everything she did and still does on her demanding position, in many aspects of her fulfilling job and her active public stand. Today, thinking emphatically on the Shoah inflicted tragedies and wounds which all are still open, I hope so much that those kids with whom Hannah, wearing her visible Magen David, is speaking willingly and openly, without distance and without pose, will get her message. I do hope that Hannah’s standing wish for ‘that one kid’ whom she would be able to convince to understand the history and things as they are, would result in as many of those kids as possible. 

Of many people, I am sure that the fresh Jewish Knight of the Legionnaire de Honore from Vienna, the granddaughter of Margit Lessing, gassed in Auschwitz, along so many others, members o my family including, will succeed. 

Paris – Vienna

March-April 2025