I ARRIVED IN Beirut on February 20, 1986, on a tourist visa. Elie Hallak, a doctor famous for his work with the poor, had just been murdered. I read out a statement to the media assembled in the Muslim sector of the airport:
I have come here to publicly protest the murders of Lebanese Jewish hostages and to appeal to the spiritual leaders of Islam, who have not spoken about this matter yet, to condemn these anti-Jewish crimes and to demand that the surviving hostages be freed … We must try to reason with the abductors by repeating to them: your conflict with Israel must not end in the Final Solution of the last Lebanese Jews, who chose to stay in this country because it is their home and who are innocent of any hostile act toward the various factions that are tearing Lebanon to pieces.
When I got out of the taxi outside my hotel, there was incredulity that I had made it that far. I knew there was a strong risk that I would be abducted between the airport and the Hotel Cavalier. Barely had I put my suitcase in my room than I left the hotel again and went to the offices of a Muslim newspaper: it was a strange sensation, walking through streets where I knew that anything might happen. The last time I had felt like this was in the streets of Nice, when we were trying to escape the Nazi roundups.
The telephone rang early that morning. It was the French ambassador, Christian Graeff: “If you remain in this sector, you won’t make it through the day, after everything you’ve said about the Muslim killers or the Jewish hostages. Stay at the hotel, in the lobby. And be ready to leave.” I followed these instructions. Soon afterward, two armored vehicles came to a halt in front of the hotel; heavily armed French gendarmes burst in and led me outside to one of the cars. We stopped in front of a convent and ran inside, crouching down low to avoid sniper fire. The gendarmes dropped some boxes of food; we ran back to the vehicles and sped across the green line out of the Muslim section. I gave my sincere thanks to the ambassador and the military attaché, a man I had eaten lunch with, and who was killed shortly afterward.
I took a ship to Cyprus and then a plane back to Paris.
None of the hostages survived.
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WHAT LESSON CAN be drawn from this, except that, when a vast wave of anti-Semitism is approaching, the Jewish people can do only one thing: flee for their lives. How many patriotic German Jews, proud possessors of an Iron Cross, were killed by the Nazis? How many French Jews, awarded the Legion of Honor, were handed over to the Gestapo by the Vichy regime?
Raoul Mizrahi, Haim Cohen, Isaac Tarrab, Elie Hallak, Elie Srour, Henri Mann, Ibrahim Youssef, Yehouda Benesti, Isaac Sasson, Selim Jammous: these names are part of the long list of Jews put to death simply because they were Jews. Beate and I had patiently, doggedly, listed the eighty thousand names of France’s Holocaust victims; the ten names of the executed Lebanese Jewish hostages, we wrote down in our own way, by throwing ourselves into the lion’s den.
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IN 1987, AFTER the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen described the gas chambers in an interview as “a minor detail” of the Second World War, we took him to court, as did many others.
Arno wanted to confront him personally, so he went to the congress of the National Front to protest. After his comrades slipped away, he decided to go in alone. We wanted to dissuade him, but we couldn’t: we had shown him the way, after all. Arno, like Beate and I, knew perfectly well that there would be only one outcome: he would get beaten up. Under his jacket, he wore a T-shirt bearing the words LE PEN NAZI. When he jumped onto the stage as Le Pen was speaking and the crowd saw the message on his T-shirt, he was showered with blows by Le Pen’s bodyguards. The police took him to the hospital; he lost some vision in his right eye.
But he had done what he set out to do. Never would he retreat in the face of danger; never would personal risk prevent him from fulfilling what he considered to be his mission.