Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld
464
Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld
464eBook
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Overview
2018 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD BOOK OF THE YEAR
In this dual autobiography, the Klarsfelds tell the dramatic story of fifty years devoted to bringing Nazis to justice
For more than a century, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, and exposed Nazi war criminals, tracking them down in places as far-flung as South America and the Middle East. It is they who uncovered the notorious torturer Klaus Barbie, known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” in Bolivia. It is they who outed Kurt Lischka as chief of the Gestapo in Paris, the man responsible for the largest deportation of French Jews. And it is they who, with the help of their son, Arno, brought the Vichy police chief Maurice Papon to justice.
They were born on opposite sides of the Second World War. Beate’s father was in the Wehrmacht, while Serge’s father was deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew. But when Serge and Beate met on the Paris metro, they instantly fell in love. They soon married and have since dedicated their lives to “hunting the truth”—both as world-famous Nazi hunters and as meticulous documenters of the fate of the innocent French Jewish children who were killed in the death camps.
They have been jailed and targeted by letter bombs, and their car was even blown up. Yet nothing has daunted the Klarsfelds in their pursuit of justice. Beate made worldwide headlines at age twenty-nine by slapping the high-profile ex–Nazi propagandist Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and shouting “Nazi!” Serge intentionally provoked a neo-Nazi in a German beer hall by wearing an armband with a yellow star on it, so that the press would report on the assault. When Pope John Paul II met with Austria’s then-president, Kurt Waldheim, a former Wehrmacht officer in the Balkans suspected of war crimes, the Klarsfelds’ son, dressed as a Nazi officer, stood outside the Vatican. The Klarsfelds also dedicated themselves to defeating Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and his daughter Marine Le Pen’s 2017 campaign for president in France.
Brave, urgent, and buoyed by a remarkable love story, Hunting the Truth is not only the dramatic memoir of bringing Nazis to justice, it is also the inspiring story of an unrelenting battle against prejudice and hate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374714703 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Beate and Serge Klarsfeld are renowned French activists whose work apprehending Nazi war criminals, seeking justice for victims and survivors of war crimes, and establishing the historical record of the Holocaust has brought them international recognition. Recipients of France’s Legion of Honor and Germany’s Federal Order of Merit, they were named UNESCO Ambassadors of Genocide Prevention by the United Nations in 2015 and were granted honorary Israeli citizenship by the Israeli government in recognition of their support of the Jewish cause. Beate is the recipient of the Jabotinski Prize, and both Beate and Serge have received the HIAS Liberty Award and the Raoul Wallenberg Prize.
Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue, and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning HHhH by Laurent Binet; The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal, which won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and was a finalist for the Albertine Prize; and the internationally bestselling The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.
Beate and Serge Klarsfeld are French activists, journalists, and renowned Nazi hunters whose work apprehending war criminals, seeking justice for victims and survivors of war crimes, and establishing the record of the Holocaust have brought them international recognition. Serge, born in 1935 in Romania, and Beate, born in 1939 in Germany, assisted in the capture of numerous Nazi perpetrators, including SS official Kurt Lischka, Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, and Paris police chief Maurice Papon. The recipients of France’s Legion of Honour and Germany’s Federal Order of Merit, both nations’ highest honors for civilians, they were named UNESCO ambassadors of genocide prevention by the United Nations in 2015.
Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning HHhH by Laurent Binet, and the internationally-bestselling The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A German Childhood
THREE WEEKS AFTER my birth, Hitler entered Prague. In Berlin, my father calmly put away the pencils he used in his job at an insurance company. He kissed my mother, Hélène, and his only daughter, Beate-Auguste, then left the Hohenzollerndamm — the residential district that still contained a few working-class houses, including ours — and set off on a long journey. After joining up with his regiment, Infantryman Kurt Künzel spent the summer of 1939 on maneuvers, and the following summer he was somewhere in Belgium.
I have a photograph of him smiling as he stands guard outside a military headquarters. In the summer of 1941, his regiment moved east toward Russia. That winter, he was lucky enough to catch double pneumonia, meaning that he was sent back to Germany, where he became an army accountant. After the liberation in 1945, he rejoined his family in the village of Sandau, where my mother and I had reluctantly taken refuge with relatives. Here, in a barn, surrounded by terrified women, children, and old people, we witnessed the arrival of the Mongols. Polish laborers invaded our cousin's house and took our belongings. This was poetic justice, as in 1943 we spent several months living a life of ease with my godfather, a high-ranking Nazi in Lodz.
For those who believe that childhood impressions are a critical factor in decisions made later in life, I should point out that the Soviet Mongols never hurt or sexually abused us.
* * *
IN LATE 1945, we returned to Berlin, where the three of us and a kitchen worker shared a room for the next eight years. The apartment belonged to an opera singer who could now only find work singing at funerals and who was forced by the Allies — like many other German property owners — to sublet his home to refugees. This was a strange period for me as a little girl. There might seem something enjoyable about such a nomadic, unpredictable existence, but my parents' anxiety and sadness, added to the general atmosphere of confusion and bitterness, had a negative effect on my morale. My parents found it very difficult to live among strangers.
I grew older — seven, eight, nine years old — but my family's situation did not improve. Some of my friends' families were living in their own apartments by now, with a kitchen and bathroom just for them, but we remained at the mercy of our landlords' whims. Being a child, however, I found it easier to adapt to this reality than an adult or a teenager would. Without realizing it, I became hardened. Not in a bad way. I simply mean that I didn't whine or curse my misfortune or envy those who were luckier than me. I see this part of my life as formative for my character: it taught me to deal with adversity. Besides, I knew there were people worse off than me. Some of the girls I went to school with had lost their fathers during the war, while others waited endlessly for them to return from Soviet POW camps.
At the local school, I was a quiet and conscientious student. There weren't enough places, so half the students attended in the morning, the others in the afternoon. And in winter, there wasn't enough coal to heat the building, so we were completely free. My mother worked as a housecleaner, while my father salvaged bricks from the city's ruins for its reconstruction, before being employed at the courtroom in Spandau. It was in those ruins that I spent whole days with my friends, playing hide-and-seek, climbing up to the roofs of damaged houses, and — best of all — searching for buried treasure.
The school was located in an imposing building, a five-minute walk from where we lived, its white façade riddled with bullet holes. I loved going to school. Our teachers were kind and attentive, we were given chocolate and warm milk every day, and I also got to see my best friend there. Her name was Margit Mücke.
In the mornings, I would leave for school with my lunch in a mess tin. I don't remember ever going hungry. On the other hand, I do remember eating an awful lot of potatoes, rarely accompanied by any meat. Our meals became slightly more varied when my mother started bringing back gifts from the houses where she worked. There was a sort of lard, which we used instead of butter and which my mother would keep cool by storing it in the space between the double-glazed windows. But the outer pane was broken, and birds sometimes flew in. I would watch, rapt, from the other end of the room as they pecked at the lard.
Occasionally, for a treat, my father would buy me an ice cream; that was the only way my parents had of spoiling me. I remember women taking the train to the countryside and returning with bags over their shoulders containing eggs and vegetables. I remember the wooden soles on my shoes. I remember the fabric that my mother would receive in exchange for coupons that were much like ration cards and that she would use to make our clothes. I remember how the women of Berlin were able to transform a too-small coat into a dress, how they made "getting by" into an art form.
We avoided speaking about Hitler. Prior to 1945, I used to recite little poems for the Führer at my kindergarten. I lived in the ruins, but I didn't know why Berlin had been destroyed and divided into four occupied sectors. The world where I grew up was never explained to me beyond the simple formulation: "We lost a war, now we must work." My father was not very talkative, and my mother didn't say much, either, except when she was scolding my father, which was pretty often.
When I reached the age of ingratitude, at about fourteen, my parents grew closer again, and I became the object of their disapproval. They had neither learned nor forgotten anything from the epochal events they had sleepwalked through. They weren't Nazis, but they had voted for Hitler like everyone else, and they did not feel any responsibility for what had occurred under Nazism. When my mother and her neighbors chatted, they always ended up whining about the injustice of what had happened to them, waxing nostalgic over beloved objects they had lost amid the turmoil. There was never a word of pity or compassion for the people of other countries — least of all the Russians, whom they criticized bitterly.
Berlin echoed with the roar of airplanes bringing us supplies because it was the time of the blockade. I never asked questions, whether of others or myself. I merely walked along the path that had been prepared for me: in 1954, I was confirmed at the Evangelical Lutheran church in Hohenzollernplatz, but I had already lost my faith; even today, I do not believe in God. Back then, however, Providence finally came to our rescue. We moved to a bigger apartment, and at last I had my own bedroom.
It is difficult to describe the joy I felt. For the first time in my life, I was going to live in a normal home with my parents. Number 9 Ahrweilerstrasse was a rather plain-looking building, but to my eyes it was wonderful — a home, belonging just to us, and it was located in my beloved Wilmersdorf neighborhood. The apartment's windows looked out at both the courtyard and a quiet, tree-lined street filled with houses similar to ours.
It had a kitchen and a bathroom, hot water, and central heating; my room, like my parents', had a sofa bed, which we unfolded every night before going to sleep. It felt so luxurious to have radiators that actually heated the apartment — before this, the places we lived in had been freezing cold in winter. I remember the tiny stove we would huddle around — and we owed this dramatic improvement in our existence to Aunt Ella, who was infinitely more resourceful than my parents. I spent seven years in that apartment, remaining there until I left Berlin in 1960.
Very close to where we lived was Rüdesheimer Platz, a square where the people of the neighborhood would come with their children during the summer months to have picnics, play games, and chat with one another. I used to go for walks there with my new friend — a basset hound belonging to a Jewish woman for whom my mother worked as a cleaner. She would let me look after him when I got home from school or after I had done my homework. She lived next door at number 7 Ahrweilerstrasse and was now the only Jew in that neighborhood. Before 1933, I was told, there used to be so many of them.
At sixteen, I left the high school and enrolled in Höhere Wirtschaftsschule in Schöneberg, a technical college that I hoped to use as a springboard into working life. I had been so bored in high school. I wanted to learn a trade so I could free myself from my parents. Because life as a teenager was no fun at all. My father drank and always seemed to be sick, which only aggravated my mother's irritability. (He would die of cancer in 1966, at the age of fifty-eight.) Their daily arguments made the atmosphere tense and unbearable. Day after day, I felt like I was suffocating.
I didn't know myself and I didn't try to know myself. But simply from waiting — for what? — and seeing nothing happen, I must have felt some kind of dissatisfaction. I expressed it through a total lack of enthusiasm for the future that my mother was planning for me: a savings account, the preparation of my trousseau, and a suitable marriage like my cousin Christa's. The family called me ungrateful, but in all probability I saved myself. I held firm, and never again did I follow that "straight path" that led, from what I could see, to anything but happiness.
As soon as I turned twenty-one — on February 13, 1960 — I had only one idea in mind: to leave this city, despite the deep if inexplicable attachment I felt for it. I often traveled into East Berlin, particularly on Sundays, and for me the city did not end at the Brandenburg Gate; it continued on through Unter den Linden, which belonged to me just as much as the Tiergarten did. Politics and history did not enter my mind, only an indefinable feeling that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, Berlin was one city, not two.
In fact, I preferred the eastern zone. It was so dark and poor, but I was drawn by its unknown past. In the course of those dreamy wanderings, I belatedly forged the surprising certainty that my country was united. I was solitary, but my roots clung deeply to German soil.
CHAPTER 2
Encounter at a Metro Station
AT 7:00 A.M. on March 7, 1960, I saw Paris for the first time; the sky was gray, so was the Gare du Nord, and so was my mood. My mother had warned me of the terrible things that would happen to me. For her, I was beyond saving. My father had turned his back on me, too; in his eyes, Paris was the whorehouse of Europe, and he already imagined me working on the street. I knew only a few words of French, and I immediately joined the Alliance Française. Three days later, I was an au pair. And I would remain an au pair for more than a year.
My employers lived on Rue du Belvédère in Boulogne. I slept in a filthy little attic room, where I would tremble with fear because of the spiders. I went to the school twice a day to drop off and pick up the family's child. For seven hours a day, I cleaned, ironed, cooked. Naturally hardworking and in love with cleanliness, I had not yet learned to slack off, so when the time came to study French in the evenings, I was too exhausted to remember anything.
Thankfully, one day, I was fired. It was a Sunday, and as my employers were not around, I summoned the nerve to invite a couple of friends to the house. The father returned to find us watching television. His television: "You could have broken it — and you wouldn't have paid for it to be repaired, would you? You can find yourself another job ..."
Which I did, this time on Rue Darcel, near the Bois de Boulogne, with the Fallaud family. The man of the house attempted to seduce me, while Mrs. Fallaud took no interest in her family and just chatted endlessly on the phone with her friends. I was given almost sole responsibility for the two children, a four-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy. And I learned to make pasta. Always pasta. Two months after my arrival, I finally dared to start speaking French when I went grocery shopping. At the Alliance I had met only foreigners, but in the Latin Quarter I was too frightened to reply to the people who approached me.
I barely knew Paris, but already I was under its spell. It was so different from the newly constructed monotony of West Berlin. I loved walking around the old streets of the Marais, or the ones that went from the Seine to Boulevard Saint-Germain, gazing up at the buildings' unique, harmonious façades. Here, people seemed to have a lust for life, and everyone was different. Walking on the Champs-Élysées was like going to the theater. I felt, and still feel, a thrill at the idea that I was destined to be connected to this city; in Paris, I thought, I would bloom.
One day in May, I was waiting to catch the 1:15 p.m. metro, as usual, at the Porte de Saint-Cloud station, when I felt someone staring at me. I looked up. A dark-haired young man in a Prince of Wales suit, holding a briefcase, asked me, "Are you English?"
It was a ruse, of course; he would admit to me later that a German girl always says no when asked this question. After that, it is hard to remain silent. At Sèvres-Babylone, he got off to walk to Sciences Po, with my phone number in his pocket. Three days later, he called me. I was so happy. We went to see Never on Sunday at a movie theater on Rue du Colisée.
Serge completed his degree and was soon almost as poor as me. I immediately liked his seriousness, as well as his more whimsical side. On a bench in the Bois de Boulogne, I found out that he was Jewish, that he had lost his father in Auschwitz. I was surprised, and moved, but my instinctive reaction was to hold myself back. In Berlin, I had rarely heard a good word about Jews. What had I done to deserve such a complication? But the look in Serge's eyes was so warm; I had difficulty resisting him.
He told me about his father, and I sensed that his example lived on inside the son: how he had volunteered for the Foreign Legion in 1939, had been one of the few survivors in his regiment of the Battle of the Somme, had escaped from captivity, had been arrested in Nice in September 1943. How he had died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
* * *
I SPENT MY summer vacation on the Basque Coast with my new family, who lived in Asnières, in an ugly suburban house set in a yard without a single blade of grass. Serge and I wrote to each other regularly, and he often corrected my mistakes in French. At times I would grow irritated by his pedantic tone, and I would call him "professor." He became annoyed in turn and told me, "You should enrich your mind. You should read, you should draw on what the great men of the past have left for us. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal ... they didn't write for money; they wrote for themselves, and also for you, so that you can become aware of what you are." Sometimes I would complain, "I envy you. Your job isn't as mundane as mine. You don't know how lucky you are: you know where you're going in life, but what will happen to me? I need a lot of courage, and you're not there anymore to help me find it."
We saw each other again that fall on the Pont des Arts, and we didn't stop seeing each other. Serge brought Paris to life for me. He knew it so well. We talked constantly. I had been silent for too long; being with him was like a deliverance. He also brought history, art, the world of living ideas into my life. Suddenly, I needed more time than before: until then, I had been sleeping ten hours every night; now, like him, I learned to get by on six.
When he realized how ignorant I was of my own country's history, Serge — who had studied history at the Sorbonne — began teaching it to me. That was how I discovered the terrifying reality of Nazism. I did not feel even remotely responsible as an individual, but, as a part of the German people, that was another matter. Was I tempted to stop being German? Serge himself never considered that. Not for a second: that would have been too easy. That was how I came to understand that it was not only difficult but thrilling to be German after Nazism. One day, Serge told me how learning about the brief lives of Hans and Sophie Scholl had prevented him from hating Germans. I felt like a member of the Scholl family.
Hans and Sophie Scholl, their fellow student Christoph Probst, their professor Kurt Huber, and a few others in the White Rose organization were responsible for writing and distributing leaflets in Munich, in February 1943, attacking Nazism for its crimes. Their words went unheeded. They were arrested and executed, accepting their fate with courage. I read what Thomas Mann told Germans on the BBC radio on June 27, 1943: "Now their eyes are open and they put their young necks on the chopping block, a testament to their faith and to the honor of Germany ... They do that after declaring to the judge in the Nazi courtroom: 'Soon, you will be where I am now,' after saying, when confronted with death: 'A new faith is born — faith in honor and freedom.' Courageous, magnificent young people! You will not die in vain! You will not be forgotten!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hunting the Truth"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Flammarion/Librairie Arthème Fayard.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Abbreviations Used in the Text,
Beate,
A German Childhood,
Encounter at a Metro Station,
Serge,
Hunted by the Gestapo,
Arno, My Father,
Raïssa and Her Children,
Return to Paris,
A German Girl Named Beate,
1965, At Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Decisive Moment,
Beate,
Typist and Activist,
Fired by the Youth Office,
The Case Against Kiesinger,
Further Discoveries,
A Reunified German,
The Slap,
The Kiesinger Campaign Diary,
Achenbach's Turn,
Serge,
Beside Beate,
Beate,
Protest in Poland,
And Now for the Czechs ...,
Serge,
No More Impunity for Nazi Criminals in France,
Beate,
Hunting Lischka,
Serge,
The Kurt Lischka Dossier,
The Herbert Hagen Dossier,
Operation Lischka,
Beate,
Who Is on Trial Here?,
Israel,
Passing the Baton,
Hunting Klaus Barbie,
Protest in Munich,
Barbie, A.K.A. Altmann,
Unmasking the Butcher of Lyon,
The Letter Bomb,
Serge,
Shooting Lischka,
The Failed Abduction of Barbie,
Beate,
Arrested in Dachau, Tried in Cologne,
Campaigning in Damascus,
Serge,
In Search of Irrefutable Proof,
Beate,
Battling Dictators in Argentina and Uruguay,
Serge,
The Document,
Targeting Bousquet and Leguay,
The Cologne Trial,
Justice and Memory,
Bringing Barbie Back to Lyon,
The Papon Affair,
Confronting Holocaust Denial,
Tracking Down Alois Brunner,
The Barbie Trial,
Beate,
Rauff in Chile,
The Hunt for Josef Mengele,
The Kurt Waldheim Affair,
The Muslim Sector of Beirut,
Serge,
In the Lion's Den,
Hunting Brunner in Damascus,
Beate,
The End of the Brunner Affair,
Serge,
Defending the Romanies in Rostock,
Dear Mr. President ...,
Touvier Arrested, Bousquet Charged,
The Touvier Trial,
Trying to Reason with War Criminals in Bosnia,
The Papon Case,
Beate,
A Presidential Candidate,
Serge,
Compensating the Orphans,
The Truth About Pétain,
There Can Be No Compromise with Historical Truth,
Battling the New Anti-Semitism,
Lighthouses in an Ocean of Forgetting,
Voices That Can Still Be Heard,
Epilogue,
Note,
Photographs,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld,
A Note About the Authors,
Copyright,