MY FATHER WAS a tall, strong man, with an independent spirit. A selfish man, too, no doubt, but, above all, independent. He had a magnetic personality and looked like the actor Victor Mature, who played Samson in the movies.
Born in 1905 in Braila, a port on the Danube, my father lived his life as if he knew he would die young. He enjoyed the present without worrying about the future. He began traveling at a young age; I believe he even spent a year on a German freighter. Why was he named Arno? Because his parents had gone on vacation to Florence and loved it so much that they decided, if their next child was a girl, to call her Florence and, if it was a boy, to name him after the city’s famous river.
Wolf, Arno’s grandfather, was from Stryj in Poland and was born in 1840. A diamond merchant, he moved to Bucharest with his wife and died there in 1912. His son—my grandfather Salomon—was born in 1862. He married Sophie Abramoff and moved to Braila, where he became an important shipowner, with a fleet of a hundred boats and an export business that operated as far abroad as China.
Braila was a cosmopolitan city, and Arno—the youngest of six children—spoke seven languages. The list of places where those six siblings died gives a snapshot of the Jewish diaspora in the twentieth century: Rachel died in Quito in 1970, Myriam in Bucharest in 1940, Moreno in Paris in 1985, Ernestine in São Paulo in 1982, Édouard in Paris in 1977, and Arno in Auschwitz in 1944.
In the nineteenth century, the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to give up their Hebraic family names in favor of ones that were more Germanic sounding: a pale field made the name “Klarsfeld,” just as a golden mountain created “Goldenberg” or a silver stone “Silberstein.”
My generation of the family was poorer than my grandfather’s. His fortune was lost in 1930; his son Moreno built another fortune as a shipowner and a salesman for a large cereal-exporting firm but lost it in 1948 when the Communist government arrested him and sent him to a labor camp. My grandfather’s grandchildren became a materials engineer in Saint-Gobain, an impresario, hoteliers in Brazil, a physicist in Orsay, a Russian professor (my sister), a lawyer (me), a businessman in Guatemala, and an agri-food producer in Ecuador.
About sixty miles from Braila, on the other side of the Prut River in Bessarabia, is the small town of Cahul. This was where my mother was born in 1904. Arno and Raïssa met at a dance in the Latin Quarter of Paris. My mother had arrived with a boyfriend, my father with a girlfriend; they left together. Raïssa came from a wealthy family of pharmacists and, when she met my father, she was studying pharmaceutical science in Paris.
She was twenty-four, and so was he. It was love at first sight. Raïssa asked her mother’s second husband for his opinion of the match; after researching the Klarsfeld family and discovering its wealth (all of which would be lost one year later in the financial crisis following the Wall Street crash), he sent her a telegram urging “Marry him!” The wedding took place in February 1929, just one month after their first meeting.
My sister was born in Paris, on November 2, 1931. In tribute to Clemenceau, my father named her Georgette, which she grew to hate. She chose the name “Tania.” During the war, however, “Georgette” was perfect, as it sounded so French.
The first year of my life was spent in Cahul, which is now part of Moldavia, where my mother had moved back in with her parents. I don’t know if my father came to visit us; back then, my parents were always fighting. But they always made up afterward, because my mother made excuses for my father’s infidelities. “Women were always chasing him,” she said, and it was true; my father’s contemporaries have told me the same thing. In the 1960s, one of the oldest waiters at La Coupole confided, “When your father walked in the door, the women only had eyes for him.”
Raïssa always forgave Arno his flings, and she told us that the year before his arrest had been the happiest of their marriage. “He saved our lives and sacrificed himself for us,” she often said.
* * *
IN 1937, THE four of us were living in Paris, in a two-room apartment that my parents rented on Avenue de Versailles, in Porte de Saint-Cloud. In a photograph dated April 29, 1938, my sister and I are standing on that wide sidewalk, where I still like to go even now when I need to feel refreshed, opposite that ancient market where, on Sundays after the Liberation, I would queue for hours to buy potatoes. On April 29, 2013, my sister and I were photographed in the exact same place where the original picture had been taken seventy-five years earlier—alone, and then with my grandchildren, who also live in Porte de Saint-Cloud. Since 1972, we have lived above the bus station, and I learned only a few years ago that it was from this station that the fifty buses requisitioned by the police prefecture left for the notorious Vél’ d’Hiv raid. My sister, my daughter and her family, my nephew and his family, all live in Porte de Saint-Cloud, which has become my village, my home.
Whenever my parents suffered financial difficulties, my mother did not hesitate to ask her parents for help. And even though they disapproved of their son-in-law’s spending, they always ended up saying yes. My parents lived a carefree life. For them, Paris was a passion: they often went out at night to meet with friends in cafés and bars.
Arno and Raïssa belonged to a cosmopolitan, secular Judaism that had drifted away from God. My parents were not religious. My mother respected certain traditions—fasting on Yom Kippur, for example—but I never saw her celebrate Shabbat.
And yet, almost all of their friends were Jews, even if they were just as casual about religious traditions as were my parents. And after the war, my mother’s friends were not very devout, either. The fact of being born Jewish had brought them terrible misfortune, giving them nothing in return. With the exception of those who fought in the Resistance, the Jewish victims were not heroic. During the Inquisition, the executed Jews were heroes of the faith; they had been offered the chance to live if they converted and had refused. The Nazis did not give anyone the chance to convert. All it took to be sentenced to death was three Jewish grandparents—or two, if the person’s spouse was Jewish. Some of those who perished did not even consider themselves Jews anymore; and many of those who did feel Jewish would certainly have agreed to deny their faith in order to escape death.
I have often wondered, beyond what happened during the Holocaust, what it means to be Jewish. As a child, I learned that it meant concealing part of my identity, that there was something that singled me out, but my parents could not explain to me what it was to be a Jew. Had it not been for the war against the Jews that raged in the middle of the wider war, I would probably never have considered myself a Jew, except in terms of birth.
I have a superficial knowledge of Jewish history, but I do not speak Yiddish or Hebrew; I spent a few months studying the latter at the Maimonides School, but I have forgotten it all in the intervening years. And I am not a believer. And yet, I am a Jew. I wish to be a Jew, even if I do not want to pass on my Judaism, since I married a non-Jew. This is, first of all, a choice based on love; but it is also a choice that goes beyond love. If I had married a Jew, my children would be Jewish. But according to Jewish law, they are not, because Judaism is transmitted by the mother. Not that it matters, really, since Arno, my son, feels Jewish, in spite of the fact that he isn’t in the eyes of Orthodox Jews.
On February 14, 2001, I was decreed an Israeli citizen by the minister of the interior in recognition of my services to the Jewish people. Around that time, Arno chose to be Israeli—which was possible because his father was Israeli—and performed his military service in Israel, but his religion posed an administrative problem. Arno could not be considered a Jew because his mother was not Jewish, so he won the right to leave that box on the form unchecked, in spite of the bureaucrats who insisted he should mark down a religion. For the state of Israel, my son Arno is a “freethinker,” even though he considers himself Jewish. As for my daughter, she is a determined atheist who married a Catholic, and her children have been blessed in Rome by two popes.
* * *
IN SEPTEMBER 1939, my father volunteered for the French army “for the duration of the war,” along with his nephew Willy and thousands of other foreign Jews. He was assigned to the Twenty-Second Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion.
He was given the rank of corporal in February 1940. On May 21, the Twenty-Second Regiment fought in the Battle of the Somme. Arno took part in fighting at Villers-Carbonnel, Misery, and Marchélepot. On June 5 and 6, his regiment heroically resisted Rommel’s tanks for forty-eight hours before running out of ammunition and being decimated.
Arno’s nephew, Willy Goldstein, was killed fighting beside him. In 1999, standing in front of the monument for Jewish volunteers at the cemetery in Bagneux, General Brothier declared, “It would take too long to make a list of all those foreigners who gave their lives around me; but, as I have said before and as I will never tire of saying, the first name on this long list is that of a young Jew, aged twenty-five, who fell heroically at the Somme, battling against Rommel’s tanks. His name was Goldstein and, as long as I have the breath of life in my body, there will be a place for Goldstein in my heart.” On May 28, 1943, Philippe Pétain posthumously awarded Wilhelm Goldstein the Médaille Militaire, even though he must have known he was Jewish, a member of that race whose newborn babies were being arrested by Pétain’s police and delivered to the SS. This is just one of the paradoxes of Vichy, for whom Jews that died in combat were heroes, while Jewish infants were potentially dangerous elements that had to be eliminated.
Another irony of fate: while the Germans were putting to death so many Jews who had never threatened their security, they respected the Geneva Convention and spared the thousands of Jewish POWs from the French army, many of whom had fought against and killed German soldiers.
Yet another irony of fate: the volunteer marching regiments were trained in the camp at Barcarès, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, from 1939 to 1940, while in that same département, in Saint-Cyprien and in Argelès, thousands of stateless Austrian and German Jews, refugees from the Third Reich, were considered enemies and treated in a degrading, inhuman way by the authorities of the Third Republic.
And one final irony of fate: the volunteer Jews left in May 1940 from Rivesaltes station, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, to spill their blood and the enemy’s on every front. Could they have suspected that, two years later, in August and September of 1942, thousands of other foreign Jews—men, women, and children—would be deported from that same station to Drancy and Auschwitz and that these Jews would be delivered to the Nazis by a French marshal?
* * *
AFTER BEING CAPTURED, Arno was sent to Cambrai, where he managed to escape. He was caught again in Villers-Cotterêts and sent to Frontstalag 131 in Cherbourg, where his presence was recorded under the name of Klarstel. Transferred to Verneuil, he escaped again in March 1941 and joined us in the free zone in Creuse.
If my father had not escaped that second time, he would have survived the war; but what would have happened to us? When we were in Creuse in 1941, an Austrian Jewish woman, Rosalie Glaser, tried to convince my mother that the Nazis were set on destroying the Jewish race. My mother, who had lived in Germany for a long time in the 1920s, refused to believe it. She thought she knew the Germans.
* * *
WE ARRIVED IN Creuse toward the end of a turbulent year. On September 2, 1939, I was among the “first casualties” of the war, sent to the Hospital Henri Dunant because my parents had reacted so vocally when they heard the declaration of war on the radio that I became frightened. I tripped and broke the bone of my right eye socket. I still have the scar.
The exodus in 1940 is one of my earliest memories: an interminable line outside the Gare d’Austerlitz; Jewish families storming the train the day before the Germans arrived in Paris; the train being bombed by planes and attacked by machine guns; the arrival in Capbreton, where the Germans caught us soon afterward. The first ones we saw were on motorcycles with sidecars; I was less scared of them than of the ocean. Rightly, perhaps, as several German soldiers went swimming there and were drowned in the Atlantic.
From occupied Capbreton, we went to Moissac, in the free zone, where lots of Jews had gathered. In Moissac, my mother, who was penniless, heard about a Jewish organization of Russian origin, the OSE (Children’s Aid Society), which helped children in need and had a center in Creuse, at the Masgelier château near Grand-Bourg, where she could send us while she found a place to live in Grand-Bourg. She followed this plan in the fall of 1940. The Masgelier château was a magnificent place, but the discipline was extremely strict, and my sister hated it. I remember having to work in the vegetable garden, which I suspect put me off gardening for life. The food was monotonous, too: chickpeas, chickpeas, and more chickpeas. Our mother walked over to see us every week. The children—about a hundred of us—were mostly German, Austrian, and Polish; they owe their lives to the OSE, which enabled some of them to emigrate to the United States in 1941, while the others were smuggled out later.
* * *
I ALMOST DIED in Masgelier. I had an undiagnosed appendicitis, and my fever rose to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. It was my good fortune that a Romanian doctor returned to the château that evening. His name was Élysée Cogan. After making the diagnosis, he took me in the middle of the night to the hospital in Guéret, where we were told that it was too late to operate. Thankfully, the surgeon opted to try to save me anyway. The operation was a success, and I spent three weeks in the hospital, hovering between life and death, with my mother at my bedside. The surgeon told her that, if I survived, it would be because she breastfed me for so long. I remember my very high bed—I was only five—and the painful daily changing of bandages, but most of all I remember my first illustrated history book, about Charlemagne and the Lombards. My vocation as a historian was born in that hospital, where I attempted to escape my boredom and suffering through the joys of reading.
* * *
IN THE SPRING of 1941, my father came to join us. You can see our happiness in a photograph that shows him in uniform, hugging my sister and me outside the Masgelier château, which we now left for Guéret.
My father had the nerve to write to Marshal Pétain; he did not receive a reply, so he wrote another letter seven weeks later. I still possess that second letter because it was returned to him, bearing the postmark “Sent by the Marshal.” In this letter, dated May 26, 1941, my father complained that his first letter had not been answered: “In that letter, I provided you with a complete account of my personal situation and did not conceal from you the great need I had to find work as quickly as possible; two weeks later, I was visited by a brigadier from the gendarmerie, who asked me for information that I willingly supplied. As I have not received anything since then, I now wonder whether it was even in connection with my letter that he came.”
The response arrived on June 9. Arno was invited to present himself at the regional employment office, where he was hired by an office of the Commission Against Unemployment. Three months later, my parents decided to leave Guéret for Nice, where my mother had lived several times before with her parents, and where she and Arno had spent their honeymoon. What a change this was for us as children: the sea, the sun, the lively city, with so many new and old friends. A large number of Jews had taken refuge in Nice, and my parents’ social life was once again as full as it had been in Paris.
Arno joined the Resistance in 1942. I do not know a great deal about his activities because his death robbed me of the chance to hear about them firsthand, but I do know from Pierre Merli, who would later become the mayor of Antibes, that they had worked together for an organization that helped repatriated POWs. It was probably here that he met one of the first Resistance fighters, Antoine Mauduit, who had created the network known as the Chain, which helped French officers escape from the stalags. The network’s headquarters, Montmaur château, was located near Gap, in the Hautes-Alpes.
We went to live nearby for a few weeks before returning to our apartment in Nice. In the basement of the chalet where we lived, not far from the château, the Resistance printed fake ID papers at night. Our mother was not aware of our family’s role as cover for this clandestine activity, and when she found out, she was mad at Arno for endangering their children. She demanded that we leave immediately. It was so cold that winter that the sheets were frozen, and one of the best memories I retain of my father is of those nights when he would persuade us to get in bed, using a variety of grimaces, mimicry, and jokes. He was always cheerful, and he loved to eat. I remember one occasion when, after we had received our sugar ration, he swallowed what he thought was a big spoonful of cocoa powder but which was actually cinnamon. He spat it out immediately, and we burst out laughing.
* * *
AFTER MY FATHER’S arrest in Nice, I felt certain that he would come back. He had promised us he would. After all, he had escaped from two POW camps already. So I suffered less than other children who suddenly learn that their father is dead. Mine died little by little; but this time he did not return. Later, in May and June 1945, at the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, where we had gone with his photograph to look for him, our hope gradually faded. In August, I was at a summer camp when my mother wrote to me that a Greek deportee had identified my father, whom he had known in August 1944 at the infirmary, where he was terribly thin but still capable of boosting the morale of his fellow patients. At that moment, I realized I would never see my father again. I fled the summer camp and went back to Paris, where I wept in my mother’s arms.
Several times in my life, I have dreamed that my father came back to us.
* * *
FROM THE CAMP in Drancy, my father managed to send us a letter, which sadly we did not keep. In the letter, he told me: “You are the head of the family now.” In Drancy, he shared a barracks with Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the head of the UGIF (General Union of Israelites in France), who was arrested by the Gestapo for protesting to the prominent Vichy leader Pierre Laval, and who refused to send his wife and four children to safety in Switzerland because he wanted his family to share in the fate of the Jews he represented. All six of them were deported on November 20, 1943.
* * *
AT 5:30 A.M. on October 28, one thousand people were woken for their departure in a convoy of twenty groups. SS captain Brunner, who had been in charge of the Drancy camp since June 1943, was a cunning man and a fanatical anti-Semite. He wanted the departures to take place in an orderly fashion so that they would cause him as few problems as possible. He had managed to convince many of the inmates that they would be taken to a camp where conditions were the same as in Drancy, which had been improved since Brunner’s arrival. Back then, the camp was run by the police prefecture. Now the French gendarmes guarded the outside of the camp, while a few Germans supervised a reign of terror inside. But the camp was actually managed by Jews. They were mostly from the eastern part of France and spoke good German. They and their families had been exempted from deportation, as long as they served Brunner’s needs. There was even a Jewish security detail at Drancy. This is the only example of forced Jewish collaboration in France during the entire occupation.
At 3:00 p.m. on October 27, the train of twenty-three freight cars and three passenger cars had been handed over to the Reich Main Security Office by the German transport minister. This was not a French train; it was German, driven to the German border on French railroad tracks by a Frenchman, probably with a German beside him.
Of the 1,000 people who made up this convoy—125 of them children, some just babies—only 50 people survived. Among them was one of my father’s friends, Samuel Stern. He testified about what happened when they arrived in Auschwitz, where 284 men and 103 women were selected for labor, and 613 others were immediately sent to be gassed: “Arno Klarsfeld was punched by the block’s Polish Kapo when he arrived. He retaliated—something that had not happened before—because he was physically big enough to do so. This produced a certain respect for our group of French prisoners. But it must have been duly noted … Later he had to leave for the Fürstengrube [subcamp] … I was told that he was taken there, worked nine months to the point of exhaustion, and was liquidated.”
* * *
WHEN I FIRST visited Auschwitz, in February 1965, I wanted to discover my father’s identification number. I was able to work it out logically. The 284 men assigned to forced labor were given the numbers 159546 to 159829. There are four unidentified numbers on a list from the Fürstengrube Kommando: 159565, 159630, 159647, and 159683. Among those whose identity is known, number 159682 was Klajn, and 159684 was Lempert; alphabetically, my father’s number must have been between these two numbers, and it is absolutely certain that he was sent to Fürstengrube; therefore, his number was 159683. On the infirmary registry, where only the patients’ numbers were recorded, I found 159683 with the note “Fürstengrube” next to a cross and the letter v (verstorben, “deceased”). In all likelihood, the cross indicated that he had been selected for the gas chambers. This likelihood was admitted by the director of the Auschwitz state museum, Kazimierz Smolen, who confirmed it to me in writing on February 20, 1965.
It was of the utmost importance to me to find out that identification number. I had to commit it to memory, as if my father were sending me a message: the Nazis wanted to dehumanize the deportees whose lives they spared for a short time in order to exploit their capacity for work. Replacing their names with numbers facilitated their task. It was also typical of the contempt they had always shown to Jews. Even before the war, the German government had designated all Jews as either “Israel” or “Sarah.” Upon the Jews’ arrival at the concentration camps, the Nazis immediately destroyed their personal papers before gassing and burning the vast majority. Those people were transformed into ashes; the others were transformed into numbers. They lost their identity, and the identification number that replaced it was not printed on paper but tattooed into their flesh. How my father must have hated that identification number! How he must have hated being only a number before vanishing into scattered ashes. But we Jews oppose the Nazis’ determination to destroy and annihilate the Jewish people with our own determination to remember, with our precise and intransigent Jewish memory.