“Freedom!” was what Hans Scholl and two fellow students painted on walls around Munich during the night of February 3, 1943. The three friends, all in their twenties, were members of the anti-Nazi movement known as the Weiße Rose or White Rose. They painted the word freehand, three feet high, using tar-based black paint that would be tough to scrub away. For their other slogans – “Down with Hitler” and “Hitler the Mass Murderer” – they used stencils. Two of them did the work while the third stood guard with a pistol.

True freedom can’t be granted to a person by a government or anyone else, but must be cultivated in one’s own life.