October 2, 2022, at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
Commemoration dedicated to the memory of the unburied victims of the Shoah.
Transcription of the two-voice speech by
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 came back in 1956 at its inauguration. The crowd stretched out to the Pont-Marie metro station. Orphan of a deportee, how could he maintain a link with his father if not by participating in commemorative ceremonies: he had fought in the 22nd Regiment of the Marche des Volontaires étrangers; 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 the last section 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. Explain the historical context in which each convoy was formed, and the few times I was unable to do so, it was our son Arno who replaced me
It is October 2nd and 80 years ago I was in Nice with my parents and my sister. The four of us were still together and we were a happy family. The great roundup of foreign Jews from the free zone on 26 August 1942 had just spared us because we were Romanian Jews, a nationality that was not removable but which was removed from 23 September and on 24 in Paris 1574 among them were arrested and immediately deported. In the free zone, thanks to the protests of the churches and the population, the police from Laval and Pétain stopped their raids after having delivered 10,000 Jews to the Gestapo as agreed. Then the Italians occupied the Côte d'Azur 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 plans to hand them over 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 three of us left. Forty-eight hours earlier, my father had sacrificed himself to save us; he had hidden us behind the wooden false bottom he had built in a deep cupboard 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 on 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 our death. Our neighbor’s little girls were screaming and crying. They did not come back. Nor did my father, who was deported by the convoy of October 28, 1943, no. 61.
BEATE
In October 1943 I was 4 years old; my mother and I had left Berlin because of the bombing; our apartment had been destroyed. We went to Lodz, then called Litzmannstadt, where the husband of one of our aunts had found a good job. He was a Nazi and a senior official. My father was a simple soldier in the Wehrmacht. He fought in the Belgian campaign. He stayed there for a long time and 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 had taken refuge. We were not threatened and returned to Berlin where my father joined us in our neighborhood of Wilmersdorf.
SERGE
I met you in my subway at the Porte de St Cloud. It was May 11, 1960. I remembered the date because I had put on my only suit; 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 close to the body and the light blue book of the Alliance française in your hand. It was not difficult to guess that you would change to Michelangelo 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 expected, you replied, '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 a great adventure. I left Berlin, my city that I loved from east to west. I had played it in the ruins with my classmates, 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 formed my German mentality, not just from the east or the west. We were alive, of course, but we were very poor, life was boring; studying didn’t 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 was legally able, I ran away. To 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 thought to myself "maybe it’s 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 say 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 bond with my father; sometimes I would see him in a dream. He had saved me, and as a historian by training, I owed it to him to reconstruct what had been his itinerary from Nice to Auschwitz. It was the height of the Cold War, no one from the West went to Auschwitz and the Poles in 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 again. In Birkenau, I realized that I was a Jew, a Jew of a particular kind, exceptional. I had experienced very closely the worst threat that had befallen the Jewish people and I had witnessed on the spot at the Kibbutz in the early 1950s the rebirth of a Jewish state after 19th centuries of political submission. I had to go all the way to Auschwitz to realize that if I are 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 Unknown Jewish Martyr Memorial and I never left it. I looked up and read "?????"
In France, I encountered an image of Germany that was very different from that of my parents and teachers or colleagues who wanted to know nothing or to 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 West Berlin. As for me, I considered myself only German; I had already been reunified, but I didn’t ask myself a question and contemporary history was never discussed at school. In France I was confronted with a criminally monstrous Germany.
I didn’t feel personally guilty because of my age. You taught me about the history of Germany and made me know both sides equally: the criminal and the humanist. From then on, I felt responsible for the image of Germany and its future. Moreover, in Berlin I 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 young people closer together: I applied to be employed by the OFAJ and joined its French section in Paris as a secretary. Four years later, I was dismissed 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 told me so often about Hans and Sophie Scholl and their group of White Rose resistants whose militant action and death under the axe had forced them to judge Germans not according to the label of Germans but according to their personalities and actions. If it weren’t for the Scholls, you wouldn’t have married me. I could not disappoint the Scholls and all those in Germany who had unnecessarily resisted the Nazis.
SERGE
My German, but French by marriage, was fired from 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 Kraut," the grand cross of the Legion of Honor. I had to help Beate in her campaign against Kiesinger, which she led masterfully: by risking her life and freedom, she applied this hand forcefully to 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 a 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 Germany has traveled to become a respected democracy was also cleared by Beate, who is 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, a few 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 not done so, and ten years after Eichmann’s capture by the Jews, those from 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 of Auschwitz and children of deportees joined us. Our individual actions gradually became collective. With Henri Golub, who died in 1983, with Simon Guerchon, who died in 1986, with Annette Zaidman, who at this very moment is fighting against death in the hospital, We created the FFDJF association in 1979, a year after Serge published the Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews from France, which caused a real shock in a Jewish community that has since gathered around his memory. Having become a force, we had the main organizers of the Final Solution tried and condemned in Cologne in France; we removed the last obstacle to Franco-German reconciliation; we gave the Jews in France the opportunity to do their mourning work; with our son Arno we have started and completed the Leguay, Bousquet, Papon, Touvier affairs. With "Vichy-Auschwitz" and "The Calendar", Serge wrote historical reference works.
SERGE
All this required a will 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 this 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 repository and guarantor of our memory, who knows how to transmit it to the youth of our country and effectively fight 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 only have to look back at the 20th century to be aware of it. Antisemitism could disappear only in a world free of 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 if we are fully in solidarity with the State of Israel.
My message is clear; it flows from the evidence: A dreadful catastrophe has annihilated two-thirds of European Jews and destroyed its lifeblood in Eastern Europe; but today the Jewish people is fortunately almost totally gathered in the West where freedom and humanist values prevail and no barrier is an obstacle to the merit of a Jew.
BEATE
My message is that of a German who has always been a German with a strong sense of nationhood and who wanted in due course to rehabilitate her country, leading Germany on the path of humanity, democracy and solidarity towards the Jews and Israel.
We were two ordinary young people when we met and became an extraordinary old couple, probably 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.
