“POETICIZE YOUR LIFE,” Serge had written to the young German woman he met in the spring of 1960. “Raise it to the level of a transcendent experience.” Without him, without his unflagging energy, what could I have achieved? Another man would probably have demanded that I cut myself off from Germany; Serge helped me to really become a German.
A series of brief trips to Germany allowed me to complete my list of the leaders of the Nazi police machine in France. Maybe I thought I was stronger than I actually was? On my way back from one of these trips, I was blocked in Strasbourg by a general strike. At 2:00 a.m., I had to leave my sleeper carriage and stand outside in the cold for a long time, waiting for a seat on another train. Soon after returning to Paris, I lost the baby I had been carrying inside me for the last three months.
On May 10, I went to Cannes with Arno. I would give a speech, and then the two of us would spend three days relaxing. This trip proved timely in more than one way, as it allowed us to escape death.
A few hours after our departure, at 5:00 p.m., the concierge brought up a parcel that the mailman had dropped off, addressed to “Mme Beate Klarsfeld.” My mother-in-law put the parcel on the table, intrigued by the fact that the postmark (“Paris, May 9, Avenue de Wagram, 12:30”) did not match the sender’s address (“Samuel Ségal, Les Guillerettes, par 34-Gignac”). She became suspicious and decided to wait for Serge to come home. He got back at 6:30. He began by opening the first layer of kraft paper, revealing a soft cardboard box. Inside this, wrapped in tissue paper, was a package in brightly colored wrapping paper bearing the label of the confectioner “Marquis.” Serge tore off this paper and discovered a pale-orange cylindrical box with the word “Sugar” on it.
“I was surprised,” he told me that evening on the phone. “Who could be sending us sugar? When I examined the paper more closely, I saw some tiny black grains, like dust. My mother thought it might be black sugar. I put a grain on my tongue, and it tasted acidic. Then I moved a match flame over a few grains that I’d put in the sink. The flame seemed to grow bigger before dying. My suspicions were confirmed. I called the operator and asked about a Samuel Ségal in Gignac. No one was listed under that name. So I called the gendarmerie in Gignac, and one of the policemen there checked for me and reported that he could not find anyone called Ségal nor a place named Les Guillerettes. Finally, I called the confectioner Marquis: no, they did not sell boxes of sugar. I put everything in a shopping bag and took it to the police station in Auteuil. I explained to the police, who were skeptical to start with, that this might just be confectionary, but that it could also be a bomb. The police chief called the bomb squad, and they X-rayed the box in their van. When he saw that there was a detonator, the engineer ordered traffic blocked from both streets near the station for fifteen minutes. This gave them enough time to saw the box open and empty it. There were ten ounces of nails inside, plus enough explosives to kill the person who opened the box and anyone standing near them.”
A few months later, Dr. Fully, head of the medical organization in charge of all French prisons and a former Dachau deportee, received the same type of parcel and opened it. The explosion killed him and the concierge who had brought him the package.