ON AUGUST 30, 1967, the Youth Office fired me. I immediately phoned Serge. My throat was tight, my voice barely audible. Serge made me repeat what I’d said:
“The manager just gave me a letter from the Youth Office’s general secretary informing me that they’re opening disciplinary procedures against me.”
“For turning up late?”
“No, for political reasons. Listen to what he wrote: ‘Your article published in the newspaper Combat on July 21, 1967, constitutes a serious violation of the obligations attending Youth Office employees … It contravenes article three, paragraph two, of the Youth Office staff regulations, according to which all employees, in their declarations, activities, and publications, must abstain from any act incompatible with their duties and obligations toward the Youth Office or likely to cause moral or material damage to the Youth Office…’”
“Come to my office now,” Serge said. “We’ll talk about it here.”
That letter devastated me. To be fired without any warning or compensation made me feel as if I had committed a shameful crime.
I walked quickly. I needed to calm down. It was only a few hundred yards from my office to the Continental Grain building. Serge’s jaw was tense; I shared his rage, but my emotions do not show so clearly in my face.
Some of Serge’s colleagues tried to calm us down, to talk us out of doing anything hasty. “You don’t want to take this to court,” one of them advised us. “It’ll be complex and messy. You’ll lose the case, and you’ll be out of work.” Others chimed in, too, but I didn’t want to listen to them.
Serge took me to a nearby café where we sat face-to-face, in silence. Was it possible to just give up, to accept this humiliation? I tried to be strong. I had to confront this injustice. So I thought about the people who were on our side in this battle. Surely they couldn’t accept the idea that, twenty years after the torture they underwent, a Nazi should regain power?
* * *
AS I SIT in that café, horrific images flash through my mind. The little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, eyes tragic and terrified, his hands raised as a German soldier aims a gun at him. He looks like my son. He is my son. No, I can’t keep quiet about this. Serge talks about his father and says, “How could I just let you be fired for telling the truth about a Nazi?”
He kisses my hand. I think about that photograph of a young couple lying in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounded by other Jews, who will, moments after the picture is taken, be massacred. The man and the woman huddle against one another, holding hands. They are not protecting each other—the time for protection is over—but their love survives. They are seconds from death, and yet you can see in their eyes and on their lips an indestructible emotion: the love they feel for one another.
This image fills my mind for only a second or two. This is the turning point of our lives. Our decision is made. We are going to fight, and this battle will be our priority. We have decided on all this without hesitation, almost without a word. We will fight not to clear our conscience but to win. And we know that, from this moment, the fight will be everything. Serge’s career, our family, financial security … all of these matters will become secondary.
* * *
THE ÉLYSÉE PALACE was very close to Serge’s office. I went there right away and asked to see the secretary-general, Bernard Tricot. I’m not sure how it happened—good luck? a mistake?—but I was shown directly to his office. Mr. Tricot was surprised to see me, but he heard me out anyway.
On September 13, he wrote to me: “I must inform you that I do not believe the office of the president of the Republic should intervene in this affair … It is not for us to interfere in a political process that has already begun.” So the highest authority in France washed its hands of the situation. And yet I was French now and had been for four years.
I wrote to one of the most famous names of the French Resistance, Henri Frenay, who had founded the Combat movement. On September 21, I received his response. I opened the letter, heart pounding, expecting encouragement, moral support. My eyes blurred with bitter tears as I read what he had written to me. “Madame,” he wrote, “after careful consideration of the matter, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot share your feeling, nor approve of your attitude, publicly expressed when you were a member of the Franco-German Youth Office. Nothing you have written publicly or told me in your letter suggests that the chancellor of the Federal Republic was ever an important member of the National Socialist Party, invested with serious responsibilities. Following your logic, then, all Germans who have ever had an NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] membership card in their pocket must be condemned. You know as well as I do that this would mean excluding from public life almost the entire male population of Germany aged forty or older … I understand your feelings in this matter, but I cannot share them in any way whatsoever.”
If he had been German, I couldn’t help thinking, would he have resisted Hitler?
Thankfully, Henri Frenay’s reserve was opposed by the actions of Jean Pierre-Bloch, the president of LICA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), who wrote a vehement article in Le Juvénal.
We decided to fight the case in the French courts, rather than in the Franco-German Youth Office’s arbitration committee, which was composed of two judges appointed by their respective governments. A committee of that kind would discreetly bury the affair, I knew, whereas if we were judged by the district court of the eighth arrondissement of Paris, there would be a chance of making the case public through the press.
* * *
OUR STRUGGLE HAD a serious impact on our daily lives. It was expensive. We stopped paying our taxes. We would be fined for this, but at least it allowed us to delay the moment when we would have to pay. We cut down on our food budget. We sold our old car. We dismissed our cleaning lady and kept only one au pair girl. The hours we devoted to politics bled into our family life. I had no trouble switching instantly from one to the other. I washed my family’s dirty laundry with the same professional conscientiousness that I washed my nation’s dirty laundry.
My mother-in-law feared what might happen to us; she understood that such a battle might drag us far from a normal existence. She reminded us of our responsibilities to Arno and expressed doubts about the effectiveness of our actions. We ignored her, focusing purely on our aims, and I put on a pair of mental blinkers so I would not see the peaceful shore as the wave swept me away. But, deep down, my mother-in-law approved of what we were doing. She took care of Arno while we were away and, when we needed money, it was she and my sister-in-law who helped us. As for my mother, widowed the year before, she was harshly critical of our campaign. She thought it was completely normal that I should lose my job for bad-mouthing the chancellor of Germany.
We realized the need to assemble a file on Kiesinger’s Nazi activities. Serge, who had collected a few documents at the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) in Paris, pointed out to me that the first revelations about Kiesinger in the press clearly came from the Potsdam archives in East Germany. After further research, he decided to go and see Mr. Heyne, the director of the Franco-German Friendship in East Berlin. (At that time, there were no diplomatic ties between France and East Germany.)
Serge went to the building where Mr. Heyne worked—the building that used to house Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, ironically, only about fifty yards from Hitler’s former bunker—but he could not find the director. Serge went into the room where Goebbels used to hold meetings every morning—meetings which Kiesinger frequently attended—but it was in the Volkskammer, the People’s Chamber, that he finally met Mr. Heyne. He was subsequently directed to the Ministry of the Interior, where he was eventually heard by a committee of seven or eight people. With the aid of an interpreter, he explained his plan to compile a dossier on Kiesinger’s past. He did not hide the fact that he had volunteered for the Israeli army during the Six-Day War. Their response was favorable.
For four days, Serge consulted a thick file and took notes, eventually leaving East Berlin with a huge dossier of photocopies. During the course of his research, he noted down the name of the author of a book on Hitler’s radio propaganda, Raimund Schnabel, but there was only one copy of this book in East Berlin. Its publisher, Europa-Verlag, was headquartered in Vienna. Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, also lived in Vienna. Seeing this as a sign, Serge went there immediately. Wiesenthal spoke with him but unfortunately was unable to provide him with any documents. “I’m afraid that a politician like Kiesinger is not part of my field of inquiry. I am focused on the SS, the concentration camp executioners, and the men behind the Final Solution.”
Ultimately, our documentation was supplemented by some papers found at the Wiener Library in London and thousands of microfiche bought for four hundred dollars from the archives of the U.S. German Foreign Ministry in Washington, D.C. The rapid examination of these documents allowed me to write—and have printed, at our own cost—a pamphlet entitled The Truth About Kurt Georg Kiesinger. It was ready just before Christmas.
Working methodically, poring over the microfiche every night, I was able to reconstruct the role played by Kiesinger in the Nazi Party. I also had a chance meeting in the summer of 1968 with the historian Joseph Billig at the CDJC. Billig was the author of a remarkable book, L’Hitlérisme et le système concentrationnaire (Nazism and the Concentration Camp System). He was one of the few historians to understand and describe the role played by certain German diplomats in the development of the Final Solution. Billig seemed reticent at first when I spoke to him about Kiesinger: “What did he do? That doesn’t interest me. I doubt he did very much, anyway.” All the same, he agreed to read the dossier. Soon afterward, he admitted he was convinced. And so we were able to write a more in-depth study: Kiesinger, or Subtle Fascism constituted my bill of indictment and definitively lifted the veil on Kiesinger’s true face.