FOR MORE THAN thirty years, I have dealt with the secretarial duties of our Association of Sons and Daughters; I maintain the computer files on around fifteen hundred members, as well as the paper files, just in case. I wrap the books that we keep in our cellars (I was an apprentice at Woolworth’s in Berlin in the 1950s, so I am good at wrapping) in brown paper and take them to the nearby post office in my shopping cart. I also send all our members the quarterly newsletter we produce. I must have written millions of addresses on envelopes over the years. I take care of all this between one in the afternoon and seven in the evening, and sometimes even later than that at home.
In the mornings, I look after the family and our animals, and I shop for groceries and do the housework. Every day, I go to see my daughter and my grandchildren. Our family life has always been simple: we hardly ever go out when we are in Paris, except for association meetings. We prefer to spend our evenings with our children or with the animals we have always had around us. Both Serge and I have an intense love of animals. It is impossible to feel low when we are with them.
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ARNO AND LIDA had an unusual childhood. We were frequently absent, but Raïssa often looked after them, especially Arno; she spoke Russian to him, as she’d done with Serge. She took him to see her sisters in Bucharest and Saint Petersburg (or Leningrad, as it was at the time), and every year he would go to see his other grandmother, “Omi,” in Berlin. He learned German in East Berlin. He went to see Auschwitz-Birkenau with Serge when he was twelve. He visited Italy, Australia, Japan, and particularly the United States, which always held a special appeal for him. Lida went to many of those places, too, but her favorite was Italy, and she speaks fluent Italian now. Both of them were brilliant students, and both became lawyers. As I write on paper, Lida is typing up this book on her computer.
Our friends in the Sons and Daughters generally have intense family lives, too: couples solidly bonded until death and a deep attachment between parents and children, strengthened by the tragic nature of the parents’ childhoods.
Serge and I have always traveled a great deal, sometimes together and sometimes separately. We are both opera buffs and art lovers. My taste in opera is more eclectic than Serge’s, but we are drawn to the same paintings and sculptures, perhaps because it was Serge who first introduced me to art. For both of us, the artist we admire more than any other is Michelangelo, that universal genius, so proud and yet so modest, who asked for his tomb in the Basilica di Santa Croce to be placed so that, each time the door was opened, he would be able to “admire Brunelleschi’s dome.”
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I HAVE NEVER ceased to be active, and I still give speeches occasionally. In Berlin, I usually give the speech in commemoration of the bonfire of books organized by Nazi students on May 10, 1933.
In 2012, I took as my subject the story of the Stefan Zweig book Amok, plucked, slightly singed, from the fire and given to the Göttingen University French lecturer Mr. Larrose by his best student. A few years later, in 1940, Mr. Larrose, then working as an interpreter at the Ministry of the Interior, saw that best student of his again: it was Helmut Knochen, who had in the meantime become the head of the Nazi police in occupied France, a man responsible for the deaths of seventy-five thousand deported Jews. Mr. Larrose gave me the book, and I passed it on to the Resistance Museum, La Citadelle, in Besançon.
In 2014, I spoke about Denise Bardet, a twenty-three-year-old French teacher and a lover of German literature, who was brave enough, in the middle of the war, to write in her private journal of her admiration for humanist German culture and her contempt for the National Socialists’ barbarism. She worked as a teacher in Oradour-sur-Glane, where she was burned alive in the church with her students. As her beloved Heinrich Heine wrote, “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
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THE ELECTION FOR the post of president of Germany in 2012 was almost uncontested: the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union), the social democratic SPD, the liberal FDP, and the Green Party all supported the same man, Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor who had come to prominence as a civil rights activist in Communist East Germany.
However, the left-wing party Die Linke wanted to present a symbolic candidate. Gesine Lötzsche, the party’s copresident, told the press that if she could choose a candidate, it would be a woman like Beate Klarsfeld, whose personal courage and commitment she admired. A journalist from Der Spiegel asked me if I would accept in the event that Die Linke proposed me as a candidate. Spontaneously, instinctively, I said yes. Why? Because I remembered being sentenced to a year in prison and, in a flash, I saw the path that Germany—and I—had taken since 1968. And also because I represented the determination to purge Nazism and the Nazis’ crimes from the Federal Republic of Germany, while Gauck personified the campaign for individual freedom in the German Democratic Republic. It would be the coming together of a man and a woman who each embodied an aspect of postwar German history.
On February 27, 2012, Die Linke nominated me as their candidate. And so it would be Beate Klarsfeld versus Joachim Gauck, though in truth Gauck’s victory was never in doubt, and there was never any animosity between us; on the contrary, there was a great deal of mutual respect.
The night before the election, Serge, Arno, Lida, and I, accompanied by our group of friends from the Sons and Daughters, went to Berlin for a big party organized by Die Linke. The next morning, a limousine took Serge and myself, with a police escort, to the church in Friedrichstadt, where every major politician in Germany was gathered. We were the first people greeted by Angela Merkel. Later, in the Reichstag/Bundestag, where all the deputies and Länder delegates, or those from the individual West German states, came together, there was a room reserved for our group. We savored that moment, because each one of us had been arrested in Germany at least once during the course of our protests and illegal actions, and because—with the exception of me—each one of us had lost a father or mother in Auschwitz.
For the Sons and Daughters, my candidacy was a momentous occasion. Gauck was elected with more than 900 votes, while I got only 126, but a great deal had been achieved all the same. For me, this was a moment of personal fulfillment and official sanction—if I needed that—of the path I had chosen.