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!”
On the fringes of ideologies, parties, and groups, they were driven to act, to give their lives, by their conscience as Catholics and Germans. Though it seemed futile in 1943, the impact of their acts had continued to grow over time, until it reached Serge, until it reached me. I saw myself in them.
* * *
IN NOVEMBER 1960, Serge started his two-year military service in Montlhéry, and we were separated once again. We wrote to each other every day. In my rudimentary French, I told him:
Your letters make my feelings for you even stronger. I don’t know myself anymore. I read and reread your letters, learn your phrases about love by heart and no longer hesitate to believe it. To start with, I still doubted a little in the truth of those words because I feared disappointment. But in the nights when you loved me, I felt reassured. I felt your love for me and I respond with all my heart. I am writing to you for the first time aware that I love you.
Every night, or just about, Serge would call me in Asnières. My boss, Mrs. Pontard—a math teacher whose daughter, Monique, was still unmarried—repeated to me, “Beate, he won’t marry you. It’s not serious. The French don’t marry foreigners.” I didn’t care! Meanwhile, Serge wrote to me from Mourmelon, where he was on maneuvers:
You must poeticize your life, Beate, re-create it, live it consciously, by living simply … by making it your own. Homer turned a small Greek expedition in Troy into the Iliad, and we all have that power—if not in art, then at least in life. A bit of courage, cheerfulness, energy, connection to humanity. A lot of poetry to transform how we live and raise it to the level of a transcendent experience.
Sweetheart, you’re probably falling asleep or smiling at this advice, but this is the best I have to offer you for your birthday, the most sincere and lasting present I could give you. This is not “the professor” writing to you, but your Serge, who loves you.
And I replied clumsily:
My darling,
It is a quarter to nine and I am starting every morning to watch the mailbox. And if I see letters, I rush to the door and pick them up, open them, read them and read them again very carefully.
Don’t complain about your life in the barracks—another four weeks and you will be in Paris again. You think I find it interesting to pick up other people’s mess? I know why I do this work, but I find it sad like a gray sky or a day without you.
At school we did exercises and I made a ton of mistakes, but foolish mistakes, because I didn’t concentrate.
You ask me what I think of you. I love you too much to be neutral.
To come back to your letter of yesterday, I wonder what ideas you are preoccupied with. Do you intend to write the story of your life in a tribute for you alone or for posterity so you are not forgotten in a hundred and fifty years?
Do you really want to be famous, to make your mark or to leave just a trace of memory? You must first think of doing something wonderful, things that help others. If you manage to do this, you will inevitably become very well known.
I understand that you want to use everything, what you have seen, your travels, what you have learned, etc. But you will be able to do that in a job like politics. I believe, my darling, that your dreams are too grandiose. I regret that I cannot say these things in a good French, to be better understood.
* * *
IN JUNE 1961, I met Tania, Serge’s sister, at the Deux Magots, and afterward they took me home to see their mother, Raïssa, a moment I had been simultaneously longing for and dreading.
Raïssa took my hand. There was something naturally distinguished about her. She was also deeply generous, with a surprisingly youthful spirit. I helped her to make tea. We quickly got along. She told me about her memories of Germany and how she arrived in Paris at the age of sixteen; how she was one of the few women at that time to take a science degree at the Sorbonne, and how afterward she married a charming Romanian. Then, finally, in her sweet Russian accent, she talked about the war. And as she told me about the night her husband was arrested, I understood the suffering that separated the Jews from the Germans.
That night, I became part of the little Klarsfeld family, where everyone cared more about one another than about themselves, where the mother had sacrificed herself for her children, who remained intimately connected with her without losing an iota of their freedom.
* * *
IN THE SUMMER OF 1962, Serge, who was still doing his military service, encouraged me to visit Romania without him. In Bucharest, I went to see his aunt Lida. She lived surrounded by cats. I loved cats, and perhaps that worked in my favor with Lida, who was extremely affectionate and generous with me. In fact, Raïssa had planned this visit: she wanted her sister to meet me, in spite of the Iron Curtain that then separated East from West. Raïssa wanted an impartial opinion about me, not in order to reinforce a feeling she already had but to extend the family circle and to help her decide if she could entrust her son to me.
In March 1963, Serge’s sister Tania became engaged to her boyfriend, Alik. In the middle of the reception, Serge stood up and announced, “While we are celebrating Tania and Alik’s engagement, Beate and I would also like to announce ours!”
We were married on November 7, 1963, at the town hall in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Serge confessed to me later that he’d had a terrible toothache that day and had not even registered for a minute the reality of our wedding.
In July 1964, after finishing first in the qualifying exams, Serge was given a job as an administrator at France’s national broadcasting agency. Meanwhile, I became a bilingual secretary at the newly formed Franco-German Youth Office, whose mission to strengthen relations between our two countries was something I was passionate about.
And so, happy on a personal and family level, each of us starting a career that genuinely interested us, we had built the foundations for an orderly, stable life similar to so many other young couples …