DURING THOSE TURBULENT years, I did my best to support Beate in her campaigns, gradually detaching myself from my professional life to engage in militant activism where time was of the essence. Beate’s dismissal from the Franco-German Youth Office had made me so angry that I felt compelled to act. I was French; my father was murdered at Auschwitz; my wife was French by marriage; she worked in Paris and had been fired from her job because she publicly denounced the fact that a former Nazi propagandist was the chancellor of Germany. If my father had had enough courage to fight back in Auschwitz, I could not simply give up. Beate was ready to fight, so I would fight with her.
In 1970, I was one of about twenty employees at Continental Grain made redundant for economic reasons. Almost immediately, I was hired by the Crédit Lyonnais. Walking through the bank’s vast lobby, however, I felt myself gripped by anxiety: if I worked here, I would not leave until my retirement. I had to save my soul, which would disintegrate in this world to which I did not belong. And so I quit after only one month in the job.
* * *
THIS WAS A turning point in our lives. We left Paris for West Berlin, where I became a volunteer correspondent for Combat, writing under the pseudonym Henri Daru.
We went back to Paris after a few months spent in a fascinating city, where we met Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and other future terrorists. I remember having a bitter argument with Beate’s former lawyer, Horst Mahler. He intended to engage in violent action, and I was trying to dissuade him, in vain. Those political militants wanted nothing less than a revolution; they had supported our actions, but they did not want Willy Brandt, the reformist whose accession to power they had helped bring about. They felt betrayed. Violence now seemed to them the only way they could impose their will. Some of them died violent deaths; others spent years in prison; a few gave up the struggle. Mahler, the group’s ideologue, was incarcerated for a long time before repositioning himself as a right-wing extremist, fanatically anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli.
Back in Paris, we moved in with my mother, who was happy to be reunited with our little family. Arno slept in her bedroom, while Beate and I shared the other room. We were poor but free—and ready for the long campaign that awaited us.
East Germany was closed to us now, as a result of Beate’s protests in Warsaw and Prague, and in the west our margin for maneuver was very narrow. The right loathed Beate and her slap; the far left was anti-Israeli; the Social Democrats were divided: they respected Beate but did not have the courage to openly state that the Franco-German legal agreement—allowing criminals condemned in absentia in France to go on trial in West Germany—should be ratified. The Christian Democrats would vote against this measure, and the FDP liberals—who were part of the coalition government with the SPD—would argue against it under the influence of Ernst Achenbach, who remained a powerful figure within the party due to his representation of big business.
In 1971, a long article on Beate in the Nouvel Observateur led the FSJU (United Jewish Welfare Fund) to offer me the position of head of its vacation centers for a six-month trial period, but only on the condition that I not publicly take part in Beate’s activities. I accepted because we needed the money, but I did wonder how I could respect that condition and also why I should. This was a large Jewish organization, and our objective was the judgment of Nazi criminals; what was the need to be discreet about it? I soon appeared in the media as Beate undertook several journeys around Bolivia, and I had to explain the situation to the written press, radio, and television. To his great regret, the director of the FSJU said he felt obliged to put an end to my trial period. The president of LICA intervened on my behalf with the FSJU, who paid me a year’s salary. Not only was this a relief, but it allowed us to become totally committed to our political activities.
* * *
IN FEBRUARY 1971, when we began our campaign to bring Lischka and Hagen to justice, and to put an end to the legal dispute between France and Germany that went back to the Second World War and had still not been resolved, we did not know that our patience would be tested so severely. It was not until February 1980 that we were finally able to conclude the case.
When we started that campaign, there were only the two of us. By the time it ended, a thousand orphans of Jewish deportees had gathered around us. From an individual initiative, we developed it into a collective movement and, in so doing, created the vehicle and the group that would help us achieve our common goals in the decades that followed.