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THE WOMAN WHO SLAPPED THE CHANCELLOR
The Jerusalem Post Magazine Friday, April 5, 1974 FOUR LETTERS to Beate Klars-feld: "Dear Mrs. Klarsfeld — we are three Israeli women whose men were reported missing, believed prisoners of war in Syria. We were deeply moved to read of your going to Damascus in January, despite the danger, in order to obtain the names of our war prisoners . . . "We are touched by your readiness to leave home, husband and children for the sake of people unknown to you. It has in some way given us back the belief that, even in this cruel world there still are people who are able to instil hope in the hearts of men." Letter written in 1969 by a Jewish woman in Skokie, Illinois, and addressed to: "The woman who slapped Chancellor Kiesin-ger, Paris, France." The Paris postal authorities delivered the letter to Beate Klarsfeld. Letter from a French high-school girl: ". . . your hysterical rantings about alleged German war criminals remind me of the lies the Jews like to spread. . . how dare you foul your own nest and sling mud at your own people . .. you utterly contemptible piece of excrement. . ." Letter from a Frenchman: "... for 20 years I waited obstinately for a German man to distinguish himself by restoring to his country the honour which it lost under Hitler. . . Imagine my surprise when I discovered that 'it is a woman, not a man, who is assuming that role." Beate Klarsfeld, the woman who went to Damascus to tell the not to treat the Jews the way the Germans did; the woman who in 1968 slapped German Federal Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger; the woman who is contemptible in the eyes of some and the upholder of German honour in the eyes of others, was in Israel last week. She came here with her husband, Serge, and their seven-month-old daughter, Lida Marie-Miriam, as members of a group of French-Jewish intellectuals, formed after the Yom Kippur War and invited to Israel as guests of the World Zionist Organization and the Foreign Ministry. Sandwiched between tours of the country and meetings with Israeli leaders was a modest, 8 a.m. ceremony in Jerusalem, at which Health Minister Victor Shemtov awarded Beate Klarsfeld the Ghetto Fighters Medal, "in appreciation of your courageous fight against former Nazis." Accepting the medal, Mrs. Klarsfeld said that she was proud to be a German and that it was important not to let up in the pursuit of justice. "I plan to continue in my actions as a German beside the Jewish people and Israel," she said. The day before, Premier Golda Meir had received Beate Klarsfeld and talked with her for almost an hour. BEATE WAS BORN in Berlin in February 1939, the only child of Kurt and Helene Kuenzel. "My parents," she says, "were like many Germans, neither for nor against Nazism. They were passive, the kind of people who made it possible for Hitler to come to power." Her father, an insurance clerk, served in the German army, was taken prisoner by the British and after the war became a minor court official. Beate attended a commercial school and at the beginning of 1960, gave up an office job and went to Paris as an au pair to learn French. In her book, "Wherever They Are" ("Partout ou ils seront," Edition Speciale, 1972) she describes how she met her future husband. One day in May as she was waiting for her train at the Metro station, she felt a man's eyes on her. His opening gambit when she looked around was the innocuous: "Are you from England?" (Beate is red-haired and fair-complexioned). They fell into conversation and when they parted she gave the young man her telephone number. She was pleased when he phoned her three days later. Serge Klarsfeld was a student of history and political science. He was almost as poor as she was. She liked him right away for his serious bearing and a certain flair and imagination. Sitting on a park bench, Serge told Beate that he was Jewish and that his father had perished in Auschwitz. "I was surprised, moved, but there was also a vague feeling of recoil," she writes. "At home in Berlin I had heard hardly anything good said about the Jews. What do I need these complications for, I thought. But still, there was something warm and intense about Serge's look that enchants me to this day." Serge told Beate of his father, whose memory is a living example for him. An immigrant from Rumania, he had enlisted in the Foreign Legion in 1939 and later fought the invading Germans. Taken prisoner, he escaped and joined a resistance group in Nice, in the south of France. There he was arrested in September 1943, and sent to Auschwitz. Beate describes how Serge opened her eyes to history, art and the world of ideas. "My life expanded," she writes. "I used to need ten hours of sleep, but I learned from Serge to make do with six. Serge also introduced me to the history of my own country, and through him I encountered the terrifying reality of Nazism. Yet the idea of ever ceasing to feel a German never entered my mind. That would have been too easy. "One day, Serge told me how reading about Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, who were beheaded in 1943, together with other students, for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich, had prevented him from hating the Germans. That was the breakthrough for me. From that moment on I felt that I was a part of the Scholl family. Wonderful, courageous young, people. Your death shall not have been in vain, you will not be forgotten," she vowed. Serge and Beate continued to see each other. He wrote to her regularly while he was away serving his term in the army. Beate had noticed an anti-German prejudice among some of Serge's friends. People warned her, that "Frenchmen do not marry foreigners." Yet, at the engagement party of his sister, Tanya, Serge suddenly announced that he and Beate were also engaged. BEATE WAS apprehensive about meeting her future mother-in-law, Raissa. But at their first meeting. Raissa took her by the hand and asked her to help her make tea. They got along fine. Raissa told Beate of her arrival in Berlin from Rumania at the age of 16 to study chemistry, and how she met her future husband at the Sorbonne in Paris. She described the terrifying night in September, 1943, when her husband was arrested. When he heard the Gestapo beating a young girl in a neighbouring flat he went to try and help her. Although the Gestapo later searched their flat too, they never discovered Raissa and the two children hidden behind a false wall in one of the rooms. "From the description of that night in 1943 I understood all the suffering that separates the Jews from the Germans," Beate writes. In 1963 Beate entered the small circle of the warmhearted, somewhat bohemian Klarsfeld family, which she enlarged two years later when her son Arno David was born. Her first public venture was the publication of a guide and manifesto on German au pair girls in France, meant to form a bridge between the two countries. She printed the book at her own expense in Paris, but later found a publisher in Germany. While working for the Franco-German youth office in Paris, she started publishing articles in the left-of-centre daily "Combat" condemning Kiesinger for his Nazi past. After the third article her office fired her, saying that she had no right to write against the Chancellor and that she was a danger to a democratic Germany. (When she phoned Serge to tell him of her dismissal, he said, "What, have they finally caught up with your coming late every morning?") Following: her dismissal she, Serge, and the group of young supporters they had gathered around them, started serious research to prove Kiesinger's Nazi past as a senior propaganda official. They published pamphlets in Germany and in France, but felt that a symoblic act was needed to penetrate the wall of silence surrounding the matter. Beate said that she would publicly slap Kiesinger - and she did so on November 7, 1968, at the congress of the Christian Democratic Union in Berlin, in front of hundreds of delegates. With this widely publicized slap she instantly became an international figure. Beate (who had fooled Kiesin-ger's guards by posing as an autograph hunter) was arrested, tried that same night and sentenced to one year's imprisonment. On appeal, her sentence was reduced to four months and she was amnestied after Willy Brandt succeeded Kiesinger as Chancellor in 1969. Before this, however, she had taken her fight to the German voters, standing as a left-wing candidate from Kiesinger's own Baden-Wurttem-berg constituency. Though she lost the election, she won innumerable newspaper headlines. AN EMBARRASSMENT to Bonn, Beate was celebrated as an anti-Fascist in Eastern Europe and was awarded a medal at the Communist-dominated World Peace Congress. But the Communists' enchantment did not last long. In 1970, she chained herself to a lamp-post on Warsaw's main street and distributed pamphlets protesting against Government inspired anti-Semitism. Police sawed her loose and had her out of the country within hours. The next year she was expelled from Prague, where she had demonstrated against re-Stalinization and anti-Semitism. Between these activities, Serge's and her research had produced documents linking West German politician Ernst Achen-bach with the arrest of French Jews during his wartime diplomatic service in France. Bonn was forced to withdraw its proposal of Achenbach as a member of the Common Market Commission in Brussels. In 1971, Beate and Serge, together with several companions, tried to kidnap Kurt Lischka, a former Gestapo chief in Paris,', while he was walking along a street in Cologne. Lischka escaped and Beate was jailed for two weeks. A trial against her and Serge is still pending in Cologne but former Nazis are no doubt aware of the harassment she can cause them, the publicity she can focus on them. Beate's biggest coup came when she located Klaus Altmann, alleged to be Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in occupied Lyon, in South America. Twice condemned to death in absentia by French courts for causing the deaths of thousands of French Jews and of underground leader Jean Moulin, Barbie disappeared from West Germany when the Government decided not to apply the statute of limitations to war criminals. HER CURRENT fight is for 1,026 former Nazi officials, many living openly in West Germany, to be prosecuted by German courts. All of these have been condemned in absentia by French courts but could not be prosecuted again in Germany until a 1971 protocol between the two countries, which still awaits ratification by the Bundestag. Serge and Beate are leading members of the International League against Racism and anti-Semitism, and Beate has lectured in all the principal towns of France to explain the anomalous situation which permits condemned war criminals to enjoy their freedom — 30 years after France's liberation from the Nazis. At her Jerusalem hotel last week Beate said that she does not work together with Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and that she concentrates chiefly on former Nazis how holding office in Germany. This was her third visit to Israel; Serge first visited the country in 1953, when he worked for a month at kibbutz Geva and was here as a volunteer during the Six Day War. He is currently completing his studies for admission to the French bar in order to be better qualified for his and Beate's legal battles. Beate, too, is working on her doctorate are German propaganda during the Hitler period. The couple stressed that their elder son, Arno David, is receiving a Jewish education and that he wants to come to Israel. Asked whether she had converted to Judaism, Beate said that there would be no point in that "I must wage my fight as a German." Serge is a committed Jew but not observant. Asked for details of her mission to Damascus, in January, Beate said that she did not know whether President Assad ever received her petition? on behalf of Israeli prisoners and Syrian Jews. She was interviewed by a Syrian journalist, but the Government apparently asked him not to publish his story. Later, the rumour was spread that she had been arrested. Syrian poetess Colette Khoury and the director of the Foreign Ministry's press section, Sallah Kabani, visited her at her hotel, she said. Kabani was evasive about the Israeli prisoners, but said that if she stayed longer, she might be able to meet some of them. He also offered to arrange for a meeting with a representative of the Damascus Jewish community. Beate said that she was under constant surveillance during her three-day stay. She emphasized that just now, when Israel is likely to be more and more isolated, it is important to show solidarity with her. "Perhaps it is good for the country to be self-critical," she added, "so that it can prepare itself for the moral fight ahead." |
