RELUCTANT HEROES
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Catch a glimpse of him on the Paris métro and
the chances are you would hardly bother to take a second look. Chubby,
disheveled and unlikely ever to be eligible for the best dressed man of the
year award, Serge Klarsfeld comes across as someone who might well be at ease
in the cozy world of academia, traveling around the world on his way from one
international conference to the next. But then again, as we all learned on
mother’s knee, never judge a book by its cover. For this apparently
inoffensive 62 year old Frenchman has demonstrated on countless occasions that he
has more courage and determination in his little finger that most of us are
ever like to muster in a lifetime. Having lost his father Arno in the
holocaust, Klarsfeld has dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi
war-criminals. Working together with his wife Beate, they have been
staggeringly successful, Klaus Barbie the so-called Butcher of Lyon undoubtedly
their greatest prize. But does the term ‘Nazi-hunter’ adequately sum up their
work?
"Not really", Serge asserts, from
his offices on the fifth floor of a block in the eighth arrondissement. "You
might say that I am more of a hunter of Jewish souls, because for more than 20
years we have been looking for the traces of those Jews who perished. The
victims have always been more important to me than their executioners. That
said I have gone after Nazis - after all, someone had to hunt them down. But
above all what I have tried to do is to write memorials - of France, Belgium,
Luxembourg, Italy, and so on - trying to find out as much as possible about the
victims: their photos, their names, the areas they lived in and so on."
Beate is sitting in, listening attentively.
She too looks the very epitome of respectability and ordinariness, belying her
equally audacious work as an activist which led to a nomination for the Nobel
peace prize. Not bad for a German Christian who spent her formative years
singing songs in praise of the Führer and whose father Kurt Kunzel was a
soldier in Hitler’s army. "We Germans have a special responsibility"
she interjects . "When I learned what had happened, I decided that in
order not to be ashamed of my people, and to atone for the crimes perpetrated
in their name, it was not enough to tell the victims that I merely sympathized."
A philosophy which propelled her into action in a long and daring career as an
activist which led to her imprisonment on numerous occasions. Beate and Serge
met for the first time on the Paris underground back in the 1960s - he was a
law student, she an au pair girl. By the time he alighted from his
carriage in order to attend a lecture on law, he did so with Beate’s telephone
number, calling three days later to invite her to see the film "Never on a
Sunday’, showing at a cinema on the rue du Colisée. And at the risk of sounding
unduly schmaltzy no doctorate in psychology is required to see that the
Klarsfelds remain very much in love, this the enduring strength behind one of
the most remarkable political marriages of the twentieth century.
Cast your eyes around Serge’s office. What do
you see? Organized chaos is the answer - with files strewn all over the floor,
bookshelves filled to bursting point, and a pending tray buckling under the
sheer volume of work waiting to be done. It could perhaps be any office. Then
take a closer look. There is a series of files marked Alois Brunner - the last
major war criminal still at large. And next to them at least a dozen books on
Barbie; a massive tome on the fate of Romanian Jewry, with titles such as The
Nazi Legacy, Swastika over Paris, The Outraged Conscience and hundreds of
others documenting the holocaust appearing in each and every direction. So how
on earth can any one live in such a world - let alone work?
"Well", he replies thoughtfully,
"Beate and I have always felt that we were doing something very positive
and worthwhile. To bring criminals before a court of law. To write history. To
find documents. And when someone comes along and thanks you for having brought
them some information about their family which has been destroyed - well, that
can be very satisfying. But if you are asking me whether or not there have been
moments of total and utter devastation, then the answer is yes, yes, yes. We
have both often ended up in tears in the middle of our research. In my own mind
there is this constant coming and going between the 1940s and what happens
today. When you get into the deportation lists, or when you read the letter of
a child written to his parents, you find yourself back in 1943 - and all the
pain that accompanied that period. But at the same time these are the very
moments which give us the moral strength to carry on."
Serge Klarsfeld knows all such moments only
too well. Back in the September of 1943, all that stood between him and a team
of Austrian SS men in an apartment in Nice was a thin plywood partition. Hidden
behind the false back of a cupboard put up by his father, he can still hear
them searching the apartment, and the screams of his friends the little Jewish
girls next door, who were beaten by the Gestapo to force their parents to
reveal where their eldest son was hidden. All of them, Serge’s father included,
were murdered at Auschwitz.
Which perhaps goes some way to explain why the Klarsfelds are unlikely to
settle down to a cozy retirement in the countryside, even though there are few
Nazis left to hunt. "Because I am historian", he explains, "and
I still have lots to write."
"Courage, Conviction, Compassion,
Decency, Justice and Self Sacrifice" wrote the late Golda Meir,
"these are words the spring to mind when one hears the name Beate
Klarsfeld. "With an unmatched fierceless integrity, this unusual
non-Jewess has dedicated herself to seeking out the residue of Nazism wherever
its obscene criminals still abide. The personal example of Beate Klarsfeld
serves as one woman’s personal assertion of the supremacy of Right and
Justice."
"So of course I am proud of what I have
achieved", Beate affirms. "I didn’t expect to get involved in this
work at all. For me its been a great honour to have been a kind of reference
point for speaking out against crimes against humaninty."
Mention America and the Klarsfelds’ eyes are
likely to light up. Not so when it comes to England though. And the chances are
that you won’t get away without the odd jibe or two about the largely
ineffectual role of British Jewry in supporting their work, especially during
the sixties, seventies and eighties. The most he will concede is that our track
record has improved of late, but that compared to work carried out in the United
States we Brits have been so low profile that we were in danger of never being
seen at all. He’s not shy to have a go is Serge - but you would
hardly expect otherwise from a man who was almost publicly lynched when he
tried to break up a neo-Nazi rally. Even fellow Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal
does not get off scot-free on the grounds that he seldom left his office or put
himself in situations of personal danger in his own quest to bring war
criminals to justice. "To me what counts most is that you have to get out
there and track people down - even if that means putting yourself in situations
of personal danger - and not staying put in your office in Vienna."
So this whole awful era is slowly but surely
coming to a close? Hardly. And certainly not in France, where the Maurice Papon
trial is scheduled to begin next month. Serge will be there in Bordeaux,
liaising with the press, mounting an exhibition, distributing documents. But he
points out with understandable pride that this time it will be his son, also
named Arno, who will be leading the case for the prosecution, the Klarsfelds’
brightly burning baton thus poised to be passed on to the next generation.
"Beate has helped me to become a good
Jew", Serge concludes. "And I like to think that I have helped her to
become a good German."
The main Web site of freelance writer Jeremy
Josephs is at www.jeremyjosephs.com Please check there if you might be interested in
engaging him as a writer.
Many of his articles are available online.
Please check the sitemap
for a complete list.