BY THE SPRING of 1978, our Memorial to the Jews Deported from France was ready to be printed, but we did not have enough money to do it ourselves. We needed the help of an organization or a patron in order to publish this 656-page book, structured in a format comparable to a phone directory.
The person in the best position to help us, due to her role in the Jewish community, responded that she could not take care of the book’s publication because “the Ministry of War Veterans has always spoken of 100,000 to 120,000 racial deportees, and your study contains only 76,000 deportees, 3,000 who died in camps in France, and a thousand who were summarily executed; a total of 80,000 victims.”
I replied, “You should be relieved that the number of victims is lower than imagined. The truth is indivisible: for example, the plaque at the Vélodrome d’Hiver must be corrected because it mentions the internment of 30,000 Jews on that site, yet the German and French reports that I discovered at the police headquarters indicate 13,152 arrests, with 8,160 interned at the Vél’ d’Hiv (1,129 men, 2,916 women, and 4,115 children). History must be precise and rigorous.” My argument did not convince this person, however, because she did not want to be convinced.
Beate phoned Henri Micmacher, the founder of the bridal-wear shop Pronuptia, several of whose relatives appeared on this terribly long list. We met him, and he agreed to pay the printer of his catalogs to publish five thousand copies of the Memorial.
When people first read the book at the Twelve Hours for Israel gathering in May 1978, hundreds of them broke down in tears or fainted as they read the names and exact fates of their parents, siblings, and friends. I think the creation of that book was perhaps our single most important act.
In Le Nouvel Observateur, the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote a wonderful article on the Memorial:
Serge Klarsfeld’s Memorial, perpetuating the memory of the seventy-five thousand Jews deported from France, is notable first of all for the immensity of the work that it represents, and for the pitiless, methodical, meticulous rigor that it required. But it is also notable for the enormity of the suffering evoked by these lists. Even though we knew all this, we didn’t know anything. Even though we say it over and over again, we still haven’t said anything.
Serge Klarsfeld has understood that words will always fall short of the horror, that our indignation, however natural, can never measure up to that vast massacre. So he has chosen objectivity and the terrifying precision of enumerations and statistics, knowing that precision and objectivity are in themselves the most implacable indictments.
This extremely dry work takes on an exceptional moral importance. The human being bears a name, and it is the name that makes it a human being; it is not lost in the anonymity of the species, like an abandoned dog. But those bureaucrat executioners, determined to dehumanize these “subhumans” as completely as possible, began by destroying their identity as a prelude to the incineration of their bodies. The deportee became nothing more than a number, impersonal and interchangeable … Above all, in Memorial, there is memory: benign memory. Serge and Beate, my friends, you are the knights of benign memory.
We also received many letters from readers. The most significant was from a woman named Annette Zaidman:
Thank you! Thank you a million times over for this Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, as well as for all your actions. I have spent three nights reading only part of this “book.” Through my tears, I found twenty-five people I knew from my childhood.
As a daughter, sister, niece, cousin, and friend of deportees, I would like to offer you more than my gratitude, more than my sympathy and my heartbreak.
I offer you my complete dedication. What can I do to support your actions? Please tell me. For me, this is not only a wish, but a duty.
Annette, whom I went to see with our friends Henri Golub and Simon Guerchon, was the manager of a photocopying store on the Champs-Élysées. Her machines were at our disposal for years. Her limitless devotion led her to help us create the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France (FFDJF). A new challenge was about to begin, and a new power was about to drive forward the memory of the Holocaust: the power of the orphans.
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THE IMPACT MADE by the Memorial was such that, in June 1978, when we were organizing a trip to Bavaria to protest the Nazi war criminal Ernst Heinrichsohn, we had to hire two buses with beds inside so all eighty of us could travel through the night to our destination.
In Miltenberg, to attract the locals’ attention, we gathered outside Heinrichsohn’s office, and one of us, the herculean Olivier Friedler, smashed the lawyer’s plaque from the wall with a sledgehammer. Faces appeared at windows, people spilled into the street; Beate told them about Heinrichsohn’s Nazi past; they seemed unimpressed by this. He had a reputation as a good lawyer and a good mayor. The police turned up and asked to speak to our leader. I stepped forward. The interrogation took place in their car. They received their instructions by telephone and let us leave in peace.
On November 9, for the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, we went to Cologne for a peaceful protest. Holding up large banners, we demanded that Lischka be brought to justice. It was he who organized the transfer of Jews arrested that night to concentration camps. It was freezing cold; we marched from Lischka’s home to his office, and we stood outside the synagogue where services took place. Not one of those German Jews who attended the service came out to meet us; they turned away as they walked past our banners, ashamed and upset by our presence, fearful that our protest would harm their position in the town.
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THE “COLOGNE TRIAL,” as we were already calling it, was fast approaching. That summer, the prosecutor general drafted his bill of indictment against Lischka, Hagen, and Heinrichsohn, but it still had to be approved by the president of the fifteenth criminal court in Cologne, Mr. Hutmacher. On June 6, 1979, we made one last effort: first, a protest in the courthouse in Düsseldorf, where a trial of several SS officers had been going on for months. During this trial, some of the defense lawyers had behaved very badly toward the Jewish witnesses, mocking them or verbally abusing them. Accompanied by a large group of protesters from Jewish youth movements, we went by bus from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where our protesters occupied the first floor of the courthouse. All of the judges came to witness this unprecedented scene.
On June 19, 1979, I once again went to Cologne in order to meet the judge and the prosecutor general and to give them my opinion on the bill of indictment. The trial was set for October 23.
We methodically organized more than three hundred plaintiffs, helping the German lawyer who would represent us in Cologne prepare his argument. Representation by a German lawyer was mandatory, and we had to cover his fees ourselves. Or we would have had to but for the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, who decided to pay them for us.
I was fully prepared for this legal marathon, which would, I knew, be the decisive event of my life. I could not afford to lose it. I imagined every eventuality and how I would adapt to each, every possible defense maneuver and how to block it. Of all the trials we would face, this one was the most important: the trial of the men who actually commanded the Final Solution in France.