KLARSFELD TO PROTEST OVER POWs
Nazi Hunter Beate Klarsfeld boarded a plane for Damascus last night with a message for President Hafiz al-Assad protesting the treatment of Israeli prisoners of war and the Jewish minority in Syria.
Her message, which she intends to present to Assad and his ministers, reads in part:
“Wherever Jews happen to be persecuted, it is our German duty to intervene on their side. In recent years, dreadful treatment was inflicted upon the Jewish community in Syria, and today, the most awful uncertainty is arising insofar as Israeli war prisoners are concerned—considering the fact that dozens of their comrades, after being captured in the Golan Heights, were savagely slaughtered.
“Such barbarities, together with Syria’s refusal to publish a list of the survivors, do not redound to the honor of Syria.
“Should my demarche be fruitless, let me remind you that thirty years ago, the people I belong to brought deep shame on their name by waging a total war against the Jewish people. Do not let the crimes committed by Hitler’s Germany serve as examples to the Arab people.
“Instead of dreaming over ways to annihilate a small and peaceful state … [you should] search patiently and sincerely with Israel for the routes toward a just peace for all the belligerents.”
—Jerusalem Post, January 17, 1974
JANUARY 16, 1974. My plane lands in Damascus. The situation in the Middle East is more poisonous than ever, particularly in Syria, where the Baathist regime’s long-standing support for the Palestinian cause is putting the Syrian Jewish community under increasing pressure.
I am not too worried when I get off the plane in Damascus, probably because I have, once again, obtained a visa using my maiden name. Back in France, however, my family is extremely anxious on my behalf. Only a couple of hours after settling into my hotel room, I receive a call from Serge, who is beside himself at knowing that I am alone in a country where there is very little sympathy for our struggle. He is right: I have to act quickly and resolutely.
A taxi takes me to the presidential palace, where I wish to convey my message in person to the Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad. He is busy with weightier matters, however, and one of his advisers asks me to come back a few days later.
In my hotel room, I am visited by the Palestinian correspondent of an American press agency, then the Damascus correspondents of AFP and Reuters. They are clearly hostile to my campaign in Syria.
That evening, I try to call my family to break the oppressive atmosphere of solitude and silence, but the line is dead. I am cut off from the world. It takes the intervention of the French ambassador, who comes to visit me in my hotel room, to rescue me from my state of isolation.
There is still no word from the Syrian government, in spite of the adviser’s promises. I am hoping that Colette Khoury—a Syrian writer with a bourgeois Christian background who is very close to certain circles of power—can help me in my mission. She made the first move, suggesting that we meet soon after my arrival.
We chat in my hotel room. The conversation is friendly to begin with, but she soon launches into violent anti-Israeli diatribes, and we end up with a dialogue of the deaf. On my second evening in Damascus, I am invited to meet a few officials at a dinner given by Khoury. Two visions of the world, two political interpretations of contemporary history and the tragic fate of Europe’s Jews, collide, without ever overlapping. Between them, no doubt, like an unbridgeable chasm, is the Palestinian tragedy.
Early the next day, there’s a knock at the door. Bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Interior enter my hotel bedroom and announce that their superiors believe I have tested their patience long enough. A car is waiting outside for me. My bags are loaded into it, my bill is paid by the president’s office, and I am driven to the airport.
* * *
IN MARCH OF the same year, families of prisoners held in Syria welcomed me with bouquets of flowers when I traveled to Israel with Serge. One war, two camps. I chose mine a long time before this. We met the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on March 23. Soon after that, she wrote:
Courage, Conviction, Compassion, Decency, Justice and Self-Sacrifice to the point of personal danger—these are words that come to mind when one hears the name Beate Klarsfeld. With an unmatched and fearless integrity, this young, unusual non-Jew has dedicated herself to seeking out and sweeping out the residue of Nazism wherever its obscene criminals still abide. Her passionate humanity has led her to identify herself in the most personal sense with Jews everywhere who, thirty years after the destruction of the Nazi death machine, are still victims of discrimination and persecution. To Israel and the Jewish people Mrs. Klarsfeld is a “Woman of Valor”—a title that has no peer in Jewish tradition.
In a world in which appeasement has again reared its ugly head at the expense of moral values and human dignity, the personal example of Beate Klarsfeld serves as one woman’s personal assertion of the supremacy of Right and Justice.
* * *
AFTER MY TRIAL in Cologne, the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, invited Serge and me to bring our children for a vacation at the Dalia kibbutz. For four consecutive summers, I would spend a month in various kibbutzim.
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1974, I went to the seventh Arab League summit, which was taking place in Rabat, Morocco, where I wanted to express my exasperation with the systematically bellicose attitude toward Israel of Arab governments, both in words and in deeds. I handed out leaflets calling on the countries in that region to “let Israel live in peace”:
I came here because there has to be at least one person to protest […] against a policy whose objective is the destruction of the Israeli state. Thirty years ago, Hitler’s Germany exterminated six million Jews. As a German woman, I must fulfill my duty to tell the Arab nations: do not follow the example of which my country is guilty. Let the Jewish state live in peace. This country is a refuge for survivors of the Holocaust, for Jews expelled or oppressed by Soviet communism, and for the Jews who have had to leave Arab countries in greater numbers than the Palestinians exiled in 1948. In the Palestine of the Balfour Declaration, there is a place for the Israeli state and for a Palestinian state.
The Moroccan security services were on high alert for the summit. Marco, who took part in the aborted abduction of Kurt Lischka three years earlier, and who had lived in Morocco, came with me. Our airplane landed in Casablanca on the morning of October 26. In our bags were 250 copies of my leaflet. We rented a car and passed the numerous checkpoints on the road to Rabat without any difficulties. We were even able to park near the Ministry of Information without raising suspicion. This would not last. In the meantime, though, we were able to achieve what we had set out to do. I handed out my leaflets while Marco remained at a distance, disappearing as soon as the police finally noticed me. I was escorted into the ministry, and a high-ranking police officer began a long interrogation. He was hoping to uncover a conspiracy, propaganda printed in Morocco, accomplices waiting nearby. He examined my passport, which contained six Israeli stamps, and became visibly irritated by the slackness of the border police, who had not even spotted them at the airport. He got really mad when he found out that I had come with Marco, who had vanished. He issued an order for Marco’s arrest, while I was taken to the police headquarters for mug shots, fingerprints, and more questions.
While Marco returned to France via Tangier and Spain, I spent the night on a bench in the police station, guarded by two officers, before being put on a plane back to Paris the next morning.
Le Monde, L’Aurore, and Le Figaro ran stories about my arrest. One month later, in Jerusalem, the Israeli foreign minister Yigal Allon gave a reception in our honor, declaring that “Beate has done more than my whole ministry.”
* * *
ON JANUARY 13, 1975, we organized a press conference in Berlin to make public the new documents collected by Serge on Ernst Achenbach, who was still resolutely defending his old Nazi friends from prosecution. I gave the Achenbach dossier to five hundred German deputies. My goal was to force Achenbach to resign from his position as head of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation by revealing that one of his closest colleagues in his law firm was Horst Wagner, formerly head of the Jewish Affairs Department in the Third Reich’s Foreign Office. He had, in particular, worked with the grand mufti of Jerusalem to prevent thousands of Jewish children from being saved. Achenbach resigned soon after this.
Next I went to Cairo, for reasons similar to those that had taken me to Damascus a year earlier. I wanted Egypt, ruled by Anwar Sadat, to distance itself from Achenbach, to forge new relations with its Israeli neighbor, and to intercede with the governments of Syria and Iraq to ensure that their Jewish minorities were no longer persecuted. I left without a visa but was allowed into Egypt anyway. My intention was to travel from there to Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus in order to spread my message. Sadat’s minister of information received me in his office and appeared to listen very courteously to what I had to say, but the Syrian customs guards refused to let me enter their country, so I caught a plane to Beirut, where I was granted a forty-eight-hour visa.
In the Saint Georges Hotel there, I met up with journalists from the Associated Press and the French-speaking Lebanese newspaper Le Jour. We had not been in discussion for more than five minutes when five men from the Lebanese security services stormed into my room. The two hotel employees who accompanied them picked up all my belongings and stuffed them into my suitcase. The scene that followed—I was getting used to it by now—took place in a security services building, where a bureaucrat unexpectedly congratulated me on my Barbie campaign … before asking me to bear in mind the Israelis’ mistreatment of Lebanese people in the south of the country. After that, it was the sinister, monotonous ritual of the night in the police station, lying on a bench, and then the car to the airport, where the police did not let me out of their sight until I had boarded a flight to Rome. And from there a connection to Paris.