Hannah M. Lessing made Knight of the Legion of Honour

On 5 March 2025, Hannah Lessing, Managing Director of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour (“chevalier de la Légion d’honneur”) in Paris. The presentation of the insignia by Patricia Mirallès, Deputy Minister for Remembrance Culture and War Veterans, took place at the invitation of the President of the French National Library, Gilles Pécout, in the National Library’s Vestibule d'honneur.

By conferring this award, President Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to Hannah Lessing’s services to Austrian Holocaust survivors in France and to 30 years of partnership in fostering the European culture of remembrance. There are Nazi survivors from Austria now living in more than 70 countries worldwide. There were once around 700 living in France; today they number around 160.

In her many years of work at the National Fund, Hannah Lessing has spearheaded Austria’s efforts to seek reconciliation with the survivors, succeeding in forging lasting and personal bonds between the survivors and their former homeland.

The work of the National Fund has long been carried out in close partnership with French institutions active in the field of remembrance, including the Amicale de Mauthausen, the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the CIVS Restitution Commission.

Holocaust survivor and contemporary eyewitness Frederic (Fritz) Rujder, originally from Gmunden, attended the ceremony with his daughter. He lived in Gmunden with his family until the late 1930s; following the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich, they managed to flee to France, where they survived the Holocaust in hiding. Frederic Rujder and his family still live in France today.

In her acceptance speech, Hannah Lessing quoted the French EU politician and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil, who died in 2017, who once said of Holocaust remembrance: “I don't like the term ‘the duty to remember’. In this context, the concept of duty is out of place. Everyone reacts according to their own feelings or emotions. The memories are there, they either push their way to the surface or they don’t. There is, if it is not kept quiet, a spontaneous type of memory: the family memory. The duty to teach, to educate, is another matter entirely. Here, there is indeed a duty.”

Hannah Lessing has also felt this duty since she began her work at the National Fund. “I will remain true to this duty in the years to come. And the insignia I have been awarded today are a symbol of this duty.”