Hazkarah Ceremony 2022: speech by Béate and Serge Klarsfeld, in two voices. commemoration

Transcription of the two-part speech by Béate and Serge Klarsfeld.   

I came for the first time to the Shoah Memorial in 1953, it will soon be 70 years since the laying of the first stone of this monument then called the Unknown Jewish Martyr Memorial. I returned in 1956 at its inauguration. The crowd spread out to the Pont-Marie metro station. Orphan of the deportee how to maintain a link with his father if not by participating in commemorative ceremonies: he had fought in the 22nd Regiment of the Foreign Volunteers' March; I was at the Bagneux cemetery when the Rappoport monument was unveiled there. I had and still have the feeling of finding him where his individual and collective destiny are represented. Even today, in this year 2022 when we commemorate the terrible year 1942, with you and with the last square of the Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees from France I have already come more than 30 times before reading the names of each convoy to expose the historical context in which each convoy had been formed and the few times I was unable to do so it is our son Arno who replaced me

It is October 2nd and 80 years ago I was in Nice with my parents and with my sister. We were still the four of us and we were a happy family. The big roundup of foreign Jews from the free zone on August 26, 1942 had just spared us because we were Romanian Jews, a nationality that was not deportable but which was so from September 23 and on the 24th in Paris 1574 of them were arrested and immediately deported. In a free zone thanks to the protests of the churches and the population, the police of Laval and Pétain have stopped their raids after having delivered as agreed 10,000 Jews to the Gestapo. Then the Italians occupied the French Riviera and prevented the Vichy police from seizing the Jews. For 9 months, all the Jews were protected by the Italian military and diplomats who opposed Mussolini’s desire to deliver them to the Germans. When Mussolini was overthrown, the Germans in turn occupied the Côte d'Azur and terror fell on the Jews. On October 2, 1943, there were only 3 of us. Forty-eight hours earlier my father had sacrificed himself to save us, he had hidden us behind the wooden double bottom that he had built in a deep closet and had opened the door to the Gestapo who were searching every apartment. They did not find us: one of them entered the closet, pushed the clothes onto the rod but he did not touch the false wall. We were not breathing, my sister was 11 years old, I was 8. My father had warned us: we knew that if the Gestapo found us, it would be death for us. Our neighbor’s little girls were screaming and crying. They did not return. Nor did my father deported by the convoy of October 28, 1943, number 61. 

BEATE

In October 1943 I was 4 years old; my mother and I had left Berlin because of the bombings; our apartment had been destroyed. We went to Lodz, which was then called Litzmannstadt, where the husband of one of our aunts had found a good position. He was a Nazi and a senior civil servant. My father was a simple soldier in the Wehrmacht. He fought in the Belgian campaign. He stayed there for a long time then fell ill and returned to Germany where he was taken prisoner by the British who quickly freed him. It was the Russian cavalry that occupied the village where my mother and I were taking refuge. We were not threatened and we returned to Berlin where my father joined us in our neighborhood of Wilmersdorf..

SERGE

I met you in my metro at the Porte de St Cloud. It was May 11, 1960. I kept the date because I had put on my only complete one; a Prince of Wales, to go in the evening to my first Franco-German meeting, that of the winners of the Zellidja travel scholarships at the Cité universitaire. You had a navy blue dress tight close to the body and the light blue book of the French Alliance in hand. It was not difficult to guess that you would change to Michel Ange Molitor then to Sèvres Babylone to go to Notre Dame des Champs. I was going to Science-Po. Same itinerary, I approached you at the last moment in Molitor 'Are you ‘English? As planned, you replied to me 'No, I am German'. In Sèvres-Babylone, I had the phone number of the family where you lived and where you were an au pair. I called you. We went to see 'Never on Sunday' by Jules Dassin

BEATE

I had just arrived in Paris with my friend Ina. It was the great adventure. I was leaving Berlin, my city that I loved from east to west. I had played it in the ruins with my school friends, many of whom were orphans. I was lucky to have my parents, even though they often argued. We lived in one room. In Berlin until 1961 there was no wall. I moved freely from one sector to another and that’s how I forged my German mentality, neither from the east nor from the west, simply German. We were alive certainly but we were very poor, life was boring; studies did not excite me; I started working at 16 years old as a typist. It was even more boring than school. The boys were also boring and the future with one of them was far from exciting for me. As soon as I could legally, I left. For my parents, I was a lost girl. In Paris, I was waiting for the big moment and when I felt your gaze on me, I said to myself 'it might be him'. You were well dressed and you looked serious. We met in front of the post office of bd Murat and we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. On a bench you told me "I am a Jew and my father died in Auschwitz". I didn’t know what to respond so I took your hand and it’s still in mine after 62 years.

SERGE

I went to Auschwitz in 1965. We were going to have a son and I wanted to keep the link with my father, I sometimes saw him again in dreams. He had saved me, and as a historian by training, I owed him to reconstruct what had been his itinerary from Nice to Auschwitz. It was in the middle of the cold war, no one from the west went to Auschwitz and the Poles at Auschwitz did not visit Birkenau, the Jewish camp. I was there alone, all alone, in the freezing cold. Alone with my father as a guide not to visit Birkenau but to guide my life. I was very carefree. My father set me straight. At Birkenau I understood that I was Jewish, a Jew of a particular kind, exceptional. I had known very closely the worst threat that had befallen the Jewish people and I had seen on the spot at the Kibbutz in the early 50s the rebirth of a Jewish state after 19th centuries of political submission. I had to go to Auschwitz to realize that if I avas is not part of convoy 61, this required me to defend the memory of the victims of the Jewish genocide and to defend the existence and security of the Jewish state. To prepare for this pilgrimage, I had entered the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and I never left it. I looked up and read " ????? "

 On June 6, 1967 I left as a volunteer to Israel and with the unit that adopted me I arrived at Quneitra in Syria. My military friends created the kibbutz Meron ha Golan and it is in this kibbutz that our son Arno did his secular bar mitzvah.

In France, I encountered an image of Germany very different from that of my parents and my teachers or colleagues who wanted to know nothing or pass on the recent German past and who focused on clearing away the ruins and working intensely to restore their Germany since there were at least three: that of the west, the east and Berlin -west. I considered myself only German, I was already reunified but I didn’t ask myself any questions and contemporary history was never addressed at school. In France, I was confronted with a criminally monstrous Germany.

I did not personally feel guilty due to my age. You taught me the history of Germany and made me fairly know its two faces: the criminal and the humanist. From then on I felt responsible for the image of Germany and its future. Moreover, in Berlin I really liked the mayor of the city Willy Brandt, who had been a resistant. Since I was in Paris, I decided to make myself useful by campaigning to bring German and French youth closer together: I applied to be employed by the OFAJ and I joined its French section in Paris as a secretary. Four years later I was revoked for having published several articles in «Combat» against the new Chancellor: Kurt-Georg Kiesinger who, nazi since 1933, during the war had been deputy director of Hitler’s radio propaganda abroad and liaison man between Ribbentrop and Goebbels. How to accept this situation that seemed so acceptable for everyone? You had so often spoken to me about Hans and Sophie Scholl and their group of resistance fighters from the White Rose whose militant action and death under the axe had forced you to judge the Germans not according to the label of Germans but according to their personalities and their actions. Without the Scholls, you wouldn’t have married me. I could not disappoint the Scholls and all those in Germany who without being obliged to do so had resisted the Nazis.  I wrote a first article opposing the figure of Willy Brandt, the resistant, to that of KGK, the Nazi. In the 3rd article I was revoked from the OFAJ. I ran to your office and placed some Saussays in a small bistro we decided to fight not for honor but to bring down the Nazi chancellor.

SERGE

My German wife, but French by marriage, kicked out of her job in Paris because she wrote that it is bad for Germany to have given herself an active Nazi chancellor, there was something to commit to as much as this chancellor had just received from General de Gaulle who privately called him "the Boche", the grand-cross of the Legion of Honor. I had to help Beate in her campaign against Kiesinger, which she masterfully led: by risking her life and freedom, this hand she applied with force on the chancellor’s face, it was as if the girl had slapped her father for his Nazi past and the shock went around the world. The bodyguards did not dare to shoot, the judges did not dare to keep her in prison even if they sentenced her to one year in prison. 44 years later Beate you were one of the two candidates for the presidency of Germany and even if Pastor Gauck was elected President for having resisted communism in East Germany against Beate who had eliminated the former Nazis from German public life, the path taken by Germany to become a respected democracy has been cleared up as well by Beate, now respected by all Germans. She is the German who searched in Germany, in South America, in the Middle East, and had them tried; the German who opposed the dictators, Assad, Pinochet, Stroessner, Banzer, those who attacked the last Jews in Warsaw and Prague.  

BEATE

We have experienced many adventures during this decade of the 70s; many prisons, some attacks, a long isolation before being joined by orphans of deportees who saw through the media that our commitment against the impunity of criminals corresponded to their need for justice. The judges at Nuremberg had promised to search for Nazi criminals at the end of the world; they had done nothing about it and ten years after Eichmann’s capture by the Jews, those of Israel, it was me, a German woman, who was seen campaigning in Bolivia to unmask Barbie or be imprisoned for attempting to kidnap Lischka.

Little by little, survivors from Auschwitz and the children of deportees joined us. Our individual actions gradually became collective. With Henri Golub who disappeared in 1983, with Simon Guerchon who disappeared in 1986, with Annette Zaidman who at this very moment is fighting against death in the hospital, we created the association of FFDJF in 1979 one year after the publication by Serge of the Memorial of the deportation of the Jews of France which created a real shock in a Jewish community gathered since around its wounded memory. Having become a force, we had the main organizers of the Final Solution in France tried and condemned in Cologne; we removed the last obstacle to Franco-German reconciliation; we gave the Jews in France the opportunity to do their work of mourning; with our son Arno we have initiated and successfully completed the affairs of Leguay, Bousquet, Papon, Touvier. With "Vichy-Auschwitz" and "The Calendar" Serge wrote the historical reference works. 

SERGE

All this required a willingness to obtain justice, to establish the historical truth about the fate of the Jews of France, to build and transmit a precise memory. We have always accomplished it since the beginning of our commitment in full agreement with the Shoah Memorial, that of Isaac Schneersohn, Joseph Billig and Georges Wellers and that of Eric de Rothschild, Jackie Fredj and François Heilbronn. Our family is the FFDJF and our home is the Shoah Memorial. A Memorial that is the depository and guarantor of our memory, which knows how to transmit it to the youth of our country and fight effectively against an anti-Semitism that adapts to all historical situations.

We were designated to speak, perhaps it was thought that we had a message to convey. A message is valid for the future but the future is so unpredictable; you just have to look back at the 20th century to be aware of it. Antisemitism could only disappear in a world freed from all tension. We are far from it. Other trials await us. We must be strong in a world that is becoming violent again and this is only possible by being fully supportive of the State of Israel. 

My message is clear; it flows from the obvious: A frightful catastrophe has annihilated two-thirds of European Jews and destroyed its living forces in the Eastern European region; but today the Jewish people is fortunately almost completely gathered in the West where freedom and humanist values prevail and no barrier hinders the merit of a Jew.  A Jewish state has resurrected after 19 centuries of disappearance and political submission of the Jewish people. When I first went to Israel, 700,000 Jews lived there; today almost 7 million Jews live in a militarily and technically powerful state. Certainly it is threatened; certainly in countries like France, attacks and Jewish acts are perpetrated; but if one turns to the past, who in the immediate post-war period would have predicted this extraordinary reversal of the situation when survivors of the Holocaust were hanged in Palestine, when pogroms broke out in Poland or Libya, when Jews could not leave the Eastern bloc; and when they had not yet left the Muslim countries or been expelled from them to find themselves all in this free world that we must defend.

BEATE

My message is that of a German woman who has always been marked by national sentiment and who wanted in good time to rehabilitate her country, to lead Germany on the path of humanity, democracy and solidarity towards the Jews and Israel.

We were two young ordinary people when we met and we became an extraordinary old couple no doubt because we took on our responsibilities together, me as a German and Serge as a Jew and as we often say because we have always been happy together.

Review the Hazkarah ceremony, 2022.