IT WAS MY turn to go to Damascus again. I needed a visa in someone else’s name, so I decided to make myself look like a friend of mine, Trudy Baer, who is ten years my senior. Her father was executed by the Nazis; her mother and sister were deported. So she was Jewish and German. She had no difficulty obtaining a tourist visa, whereas I would certainly have been refused had I made the same request.
On December 5, 1991, a professional makeup artist helped me to look like Trudy. Even our friend, the American journalist Peter Hellman, who was in Damascus to cover the story for New York Magazine, did not recognize me at the airport, where he was waiting for me. I passed without incident through two police checkpoints on the road to Damascus and took a room at the Cham Palace, where Serge had stayed the previous year.
That night, I wrote the banner that I would carry with me the next day: PRESIDENT ASSAD, 99.98% OF THE VOTE IS NOT ENOUGH. EXTRADITE THE NAZI CRIMINAL ALOIS BRUNNER AND FREE THE SYRIAN JEWS! I wanted to show my banner in a symbolic spot guarded by Syrian soldiers in uniform, a building with flags outside it. Unable to get near the presidential building, which was guarded by men carrying machine guns, I opted for the Ministry of the Interior, on Avenue Al Malek Farouk.
On Saturday, I walked directly toward the building’s main entrance, ignoring the soldiers who signaled me to stop, and unfolded my banner. The soldiers rushed at me, tore the banner from my hands, and shoved me in a car. Inside my purse, they found my real passport, in the name of Beate Klarsfeld. They looked for a visa inside it and, naturally, did not find it. After my interrogation, I admitted that I was staying at the Cham Palace. They took me there and locked me in my room, with a policeman for company; this was the same man who had surveilled Serge a few months before. He complained that I was not as communicative as my husband.
On Monday, heavily guarded, I was taken to the airport and sent to Paris, where the press was waiting for me. The incident provoked headlines worldwide.
* * *
ON DECEMBER 10, Serge and I met with Roland Dumas—whose father was also shot by the Nazis—and the foreign minister reaffirmed his determination to have Brunner extradited, saying he would bring the subject up during his planned meeting with Assad. The result? His official visit to Damascus was postponed at the last minute, with the insulting excuse that President Assad was too busy to see him.
On January 14, 1992, we went to Strasbourg, where a two-hundred-million-dollar financial-aid package for Syria was due to be voted on. We had prepared a list of arguments for each European deputy, with a sixty-three-page dossier on Brunner. The next day, the parliament voted in a new resolution criticizing the fact that “this country shelters and protects the Nazi criminal Alois Brunner.” When it came to the vote, Syria did not receive enough support to ratify the aid package.
As far as we knew, Brunner had died in 1992. The Syrian government became prisoners of their own lie: they could not prove that he was dead without exposing their dishonesty. So Brunner continued to live, and Syria to be criticized. In 1998, Hafiz al-Assad made an official visit to Paris, just as we were about to have Brunner tried in absentia. The dates of the visit—July 16 and 17—were the anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup. I could not believe that Jacques Chirac, who had made the moving speech three years earlier accepting France’s blame for the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup, was now planning to welcome the dictator Assad, the protector of Alois Brunner. Our association held a highly visible protest during the visit.
On March 2, 2001, Brunner’s trial in absentia began in Paris. This was notable for us as a family because it was the first and last time that Serge, Arno, and Lida all worked together on the same trial. Arno analyzed Brunner’s personality, while Lida read out extracts from the deportees’ witness statements.
That same year, Bashar al-Assad, son of Hafiz and the new Syrian president, was invited to Paris for an official visit. After Bashar’s anti-Semitic declarations, we bought a quarter-page ad in Le Monde:
France, which has done so much in recent years to repair the harm done to French Jews by the Vichy government, will lose credibility by welcoming the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad … who dared to say to the pope that Israel and the Jews wanted to “destroy all principles and all religions, in the same way that they betrayed Jesus and tried to kill the prophet Muhammad.”
Nearly eighty thousand people gathered on the Esplanade des Martyrs Juifs du Vél’ d’Hiv on June 25, 2001, to protest this visit. Two weeks before, I had placed another ad in Le Monde, directly addressed to the French president:
If Bashar’s visit is not canceled or postponed … or if, on that day, you do not publicly denounce his opinion of Jews, your handshake with Bashar al-Assad will be seen as a little Montoire.1
It was hard for me to write those words, because I did not want to hurt someone I respected and who did not realize the true nature of the man he was about to meet.
Jacques Chirac did not hold those words against me for very long. In fact, he made me an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2007. As for Bashar al-Assad, he made an official visit to Berlin on July 10 and, once again, was greeted by a passionate protest organized by our association.
Sadly, the future would show that we were right about both Bashar al-Assad and his father.