Holocaust memorial speaker recalls ‘when they came for her’

by Enid Weiss
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

Born into Prussian aristocracy, expelled from high school for refusing to join the Hitler Youth, and imprisoned after members of her family plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller von Sell has a formidable tale to tell of her life during the Holocaust.

But for years Sibylle Augusta Sophia Baroness von Sell, as she was born, was unable to bring herself to speak about her wartime experiences. Finally, 18 years ago, friend Elie Wiesel convinced her to talk in public about what she had experienced.

“Elie made me realize how important it is to convey this information I have, my own personal experience,” said the woman now known in Jewish circles as Sarah Niemoeller.

She will talk about her experiences at the Yom Hashoah Holocaust Memorial at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20, at the Wilkins Theatre for the Performing Arts at Kean University in Union. The program is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey’s Jewish Community Relations Council and Kean’s Holocaust Resource Center.

So many people want “to sweep under the rug” what really happened during the Nazi regime, said Niemoeller, who spoke to NJ Jewish News from her home in Pennsylvania. “There’s a direct connection from what the Nazis did to 9/11: Terror is the key.”

Family pride
Niemoeller’s father, Baron Ullrich von Sell, was a financial adviser to Emperor Wilhelm II, and the family was staunchly anti-Nazi in the earliest days of the party’s rise to power.

Despite her family’s history of resisting the Nazis, Niemoeller doesn’t see herself or her family as heroic. They were, she said, merely aristocrats doing as they were taught — taking care of others.

“My dear, dear cousin who carried the bombs, he was shot that night,” she said, recalling her family’s involvement in a July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler. That cousin, Werner von Haeften, carried a briefcase containing a bomb into a meeting that Hitler attended. The bomb was detonated, killing four men — but Hitler escaped unharmed. Von Haeften and two fellow conspirators were executed for their roles in the plot.

After that incident, Sibylle and her father were arrested, interrogated, and beaten. Although she was soon released, her father was held in the Lehrter Strasse prison in Berlin during the battle of Berlin and was later kidnapped by the Soviets. He starved to death in the Jamlitz camp in Russia in November 1945.

“My family bled very heavily for that…. I’m not very proud of anything, but for my family I’m proud. It only dawned on me many, many years later how heroic it was. They did not do it to be heroic but because it was what needed to be done,” she said.

Niemoeller immigrated to the United States after the war. She eventually found work as a research associate at NBC-TV.

After her 1969 divorce from her first husband, she became reacquainted with a childhood family friend, the Rev. Martin Niemoeller, whom she married despite their 32-year age difference.

Martin Niemoeller was the founder of the Protestant “Confessing Church,” which opposed the pro-Nazi “German-Christian” church. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1937 and spent the war years in prisons and concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Dachau. After the war, he served as president of the World Council of Churches.

Martin Niemoeller is perhaps best known for his statement against silence in the face of Nazi persecution that begins, “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out,” and ends, “And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.” Sarah Niemoeller recounted the circumstances of her husband’s first utterance of the statement. “It was in 1961. He was sitting across a table from a student who asked how it happened,” she said, adding that the student “couldn’t imagine how it could happen and why no one did anything.”

Niemoeller also said her husband is often misquoted. A frequently inserted line about coming for the Catholics should be left out she said, “because they never came for the Catholics.”

She had played with Niemoeller’s children when she herself was a child. She told NJJN that when she was living in New York years later and read in the newspaper that he was going to speak in the area, she contacted him, and they arranged to meet in the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel. “I had a crush on him since I was eight years old,” she said. “The elevator door opened, and there stood a man with iron-gray hair. He said he would have recognized me anywhere.… We fell in love almost immediately.”

Drawn together by a shared suffering and prewar history, she said, they could communicate without speaking.

Niemoeller and von Sell married in 1971 in Wiesbaden and were married 17 years until his death in 1984.

After the death of her famous husband, she converted to Judaism and took the name Sarah — a meaningful gesture, she said, because it is the name that was used by the Nazis as a derogatory reference to Jewish women during the Holocaust.

Enid Weiss can be reached at enid@njjewishnews.com.