SO WHAT MESSAGE can we leave, Beate and I, to our readers and our descendants? What warnings can we offer based on what happened to us during our childhood and our experiences as adults engaged in political activism? First of all, that history is unpredictable: no one can imagine or foretell the political events of the future. They arise for impenetrable reasons that can only be analyzed afterward. We advance fitfully, as if through mist, even when there are prophets among us—like Theodor Herzl, who in 1900, fearing the destruction of European Jewry, began campaigning for the creation of a Jewish state.
Having entered a new millennium, some believe that history is behind us and there is no point in looking back at the vast black page of the twentieth century. That was certainly a cruel century, the cruelest of all. The First World War gave rise to genocide—of the Armenians. Had it been halted, as the international community wanted to do for some time, perhaps that first genocide would not have been followed by another during the Second World War.
The genocide of the Jews, however, can be distinguished from other twentieth-century catastrophes in several ways.
It was a tragedy of European civilization, carried out over the entire continent essentially by police rather than soldiers.
It was a tragedy of Christian civilization, a fact often forgotten. The contempt for Jews taught by Christianity over so many years made it easier for the organizers of the Final Solution, because few of those who did not take part in it actually opposed it; instead, they looked on indifferently.
It was a tragedy of Western civilization. The genocide was conceived and organized by a Western state, one of the most advanced in the world from an economic, social, technical, military, cultural, and intellectual standpoint.
The Allies are not free of blame, either, despite their courageous battle against the Axis nations: the United Kingdom, concerned about alienating the Arab world, prevented boatloads of Jews from entering Palestine, while the United States barely cracked open its own door and, in 1938, did nothing to help the Evian Conference find a solution to the vast numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution by Nazi Germany. And neither nation took any real political or military initiative during the war to attempt to save the Jewish people.
It was a tragedy of modernity. Confronted with the technical difficulties of simultaneously putting to death thousands of human beings, the Nazis ended up designing an industrial-scale process for exterminating their victims in the most rational, rapid, cost-effective way. The gas chambers and the crematory ovens, the trains that always ran on time, the efficient organization of administrators, police, and diplomats, the use of cutting-edge communication—telexes, telegrams, dispatches, telephones—all of this modern technology was put in the service of a racist, murderous totalitarian regime.
It was a tragedy of human nature, revealing the infinite capacity of “civilized” man to do evil, an expression of the beast that crouches within. The concentration camps were the logical end of the National Socialists’ racist ideology. The parallel existence of the Soviet gulags should serve to make those who defend human rights vigilant toward all extremists. Avoid political, economic, and social crises; educate the young to have absolute respect for human dignity: these should be the first duties of all democratic leaders.
It was a genocide of the Jewish people—the very people who brought monotheism to the world and gave birth to Christianity. The moral values spread by Judaism over millennia became the moral values of Western democracies. From the pharaoh to Hitler and Stalin, totalitarian regimes have always persecuted the Jews to some degree. Revolutions—in the United States and in France, for example—have liberated the Jews; democracies have given them the chance to flower. In their culture and in their memory of past sufferings, the Jews carry within them a love of freedom and respect for each human being.
It was an immense catastrophe, which the deniers want to erase from history and whose memory must be defended. Immediately after the war, this catastrophe still had no name: “Jewish genocide” was the term used at the Nuremberg Trials. In the United States and in Israel, the first countries to grasp the full significance of what had happened, the English word “Holocaust” and the Hebrew word “Shoah” emerged. In those two countries, dissertations were written, university courses devoted to the fate of the Jews in that period. From the 1980s on, other countries began to follow suit.
The Holocaust did not take center stage at Nuremberg during the trials of the Nazi criminals because there was still no Jewish state to speak on behalf of the victims. With the advent of the Cold War, a historical and judicial silence fell over the Shoah, and it was only when the Israeli government ordered the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, and the historic trial that followed this, that the truth about the Holocaust started to come to light. Since then, the light shone on those dark events has grown ever brighter. My generation, the children of deportees and survivors—volunteers such as Father Patrick Desbois and his team—have gathered and continue to gather documents and testimonies of every kind, fulfilling a scientific and moral mission on a scale equivalent to that of the tragedy: to write the name and the story of every single victim and every single episode of the Holocaust.
The memory of the Shoah has, paradoxically, been strengthened by the attempts of the Holocaust deniers to falsify history. Horrified by this vile questioning of the truth, the survivors and their descendants have responded in the best way possible: through documentation, through testimonies, and through memorials such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the new wing devoted to the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museums in London, and the Holocaust Denkmal in Berlin, near the Reichstag. The words of Edmond Fleg, carved into the façade of the Mémorial de la Shoah, where I have been so often since 1956, promise that the memorial will “lead you to the highest peak of justice and truth.”
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FOR A LONG TIME, we did not want to write this autobiography. In 2012, we even wrote to our editor, asking to be released from the contract because of our “lack of need and desire to be known intimately by others, the conviction that it is better to be judged by posterity for what we have accomplished, rather than for what we were, our lack of interest in going back over our past, our lack of talent for storytelling, and so on.” And yet, in spite of everything, we did finally write the book. We do not regret it. This way, our grandchildren and their descendants will know, if not who we were, at least what we did.
We learned through experience that we were capable of raising ourselves higher than we ever thought possible. Our readers will see this and will, we hope, realize that they would be just as capable as we were if circumstances demanded it.
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EVEN AT THE advanced ages of eighty-two and seventy-nine respectively, Beate and I remain highly active, and we are constantly traveling. On July 16, 2015, we received an exceptional honor from Germany when the president of the Federal Republic, Joachim Gauck—my competitor in the 2012 election—bestowed upon us the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1 Klasse.
In October 2015, Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, made both of us honorary UNESCO ambassadors for teaching the history of the Holocaust with the goal of preventing genocide. Swiftly, Beate launched into action: in Burundi—the poorest nation in Africa, with a population of 85 percent Hutus and 15 percent Tutsis—the situation was critical, with an increasing number of massacres occurring all over the country.
The only visa she could manage to obtain was a tourist visa. Armed with this, she took off for Bujumbura. As soon as she arrived in Burundi, she approached government officials as well as opposition leaders. And, while the government was far from happy about her visit, they did let her act as a UNESCO ambassador. Her public appeal was spread through all the local media:
The political crisis that Burundi is going through could degenerate into a humanitarian catastrophe … The massacres that have been perpetrated in 2015 portend the worst … I appeal to the country’s young people to choose peace and dialogue so that there is no repetition of the horrors of the past that Burundi has already suffered … I call for a resumption of peace talks to allow reconciliation in the interest of national unity. We must immediately put an end to blind killings, targeted assassinations, coups, and the multiplication of ethnically motivated crimes.
Beate’s intervention was effective. The UN withdrew from Burundi and suspended its support for the country’s government; the African Union ceased its military intervention; the negotiations in Entebbe, Uganda, between representatives of the government and the opposition had failed, but a few days after Beate left, a delegation of thirty-three members of the United Nations arrived in Bujumbura, followed on February 23 by the Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon (whom Beate had met on January 27 in New York), and the situation does appear to have improved slightly, with the UN doing its best to restart negotiations, feed the starving population, and provide it with aid for sanitation.
On January 27, we were in New York, where Beate had been invited by the United Nations to give the keynote speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day in the General Assembly, in the presence of the organization’s Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Beate gave her speech in English and it perfectly encapsulates the meaning of her commitment. The speech was very well received, as is conveyed by this letter from Cristina Gallach, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information: “Thank you for your inspiring keynote speech, which helped us understand the considerable shifts Germany, and the German people, have made over the past 70 years. We admire the forceful and unique role you have played by building bridges between countries and cultures to help heal the wounds of the past, and your decades of dedication to justice and peace—whether by bringing Nazi criminals to justice or protesting those that protected them.”
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AT THE BEGINNING of the year, the German Foreign Minister asked Beate to give a speech at the Goethe Institute in Beijing, which she was happy to do. In February, in Jerusalem, the Israeli Minister of the Interior awarded her Israeli nationality in recognition of her commitment to Jewish causes—the same honor that Arno and I had received fifteen years earlier. In May we were back in Jerusalem, invited on this occasion by the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who was there on an official visit.
As a member of several scientific committees and boards of directors for Holocaust museums in France and Poland, I must often travel to attend meetings, but that does not prevent me from assuming a role in French political life: the regional elections were about to take place, and I believed that if the National Front, the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, were to control one or two regions, that could have a profound impact on the presidential election in spring 2017. I decided to throw myself into the battle. Two regions were particularly vulnerable: the North (Lille) and Provence-Côte d’Azur (Marseille and Nice). I publicly called for a Front Républicain, a union of left and right between all those who opposed the possibility of an electoral victory for the far right. On April 1, 2015, Beate and I appeared on the cover of the weekly French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, with the headline “The Klarsfelds’ warning—If Marine Le Pen wins…” In the article, we declared that we would immediately leave France to continue our struggle in exile.
I wrote articles, gave speeches, and attended meetings, mostly in southeast France, since Nice was the city where I grew up. I did all I could to support Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, and—in the north—Xavier Bertrand. To the surprise of many, my candidates won their electoral battles, and I felt certain that I had been useful to them—and that I could be useful again in 2017.
All the more so since our memoirs were, at that time, receiving a lot of positive attention and selling well in bookstores. We were often interviewed in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television programs, and this media exposure enabled us to get our message across to a large audience.
During the same period, I published the two-thousand-page second volume of French Children of the Holocaust, translated into English by two volunteers at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, Nancy Fisher and Arlette Baker. I was able to gather and publish photographs of five thousand of the eleven thousand Jewish children deported from France. That book was the fruit of twenty years of research that came after the publication of the first volume, and it also led me to another project: creating a Garden for the Children of the Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup on the very spot where the entrance to the velodrome had been located before its destruction in the 1960s. The renovation of the buildings that succeeded it allowed me to consider ideas for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the roundup—July 16, 2017—and I set to work on a monument that would bear the names of the four thousand children who were arrested on that day.
In Monaco, Prince Albert II awarded me the rank of Officer of the Order of Saint-Charles. After a decade’s work, the five-man committee to which I belonged was able to shed light on the fate of the Principality’s Jews between 1940 and 1944. Our detailed report was made public; the list of victims (forty-five in 1942, arrested by the Vichy police; thirty-one in 1944, arrested by the Gestapo) was also made public; the list of victims arrested by the Vichy police was drawn up with a high degree of accuracy; a beautiful monument was raised bearing the names of these deportees, and their heirs were entitled to very fair restitution.
At last, the great challenge arrived: the presidential election. Again, I called on the Front Républicain to resist the rising tide of nationalism and racism. In the end it came down to a direct confrontation between Marine Le Pen—daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and leader of the resurgent Front National—and the centrist leader Emmanuel Macron, who had, as if by some miracle, risen from nowhere to help avoid the catastrophic scenario of the far right battling the far left for the presidency. Beate and I fought hard to support Macron. We bought entire pages in the left-wing newspaper Libération, calling on its readers to unite against the threat of the National Front. Arno accompanied Macron to the Shoah Memorial and asked him, if he was elected, to attend the memorial at the Vélodrome d’Hiver on July 16. Macron promised that he would, and he wrote me a personal letter, thanking me for my “actions of a lifetime”; he would keep his promise. Macron gained ascendancy over Le Pen with a speech on France’s responsibility for the Vél’ d’Hiv Roundup and emerged victorious from a televised debate with the National Front leader. Thanks to him, our country escaped the nightmare scenario of a Le Pen presidency, and now France is governed by a brilliant young president who can, I hope and believe, bring the country the reforms it needs and continue the fight against the undying specter of anti-Semitism.
Before the July 16 ceremony I was able—as had been the case for the speeches by Jacques Chirac and François Hollande—to have a discussion with the advisor tasked with preparing the president’s speech. It was a remarkable speech, in which Emmanuel Macron deepened the meaning given by Chirac and Hollande to the roundup: “That day France committed irreparable harm,” and “this crime was committed in France, by France.” President Macron gave even greater emphasis and clarity to this stance: “It was France that organized the roundup and then the deportation.”
He explained in detail the perspective taken by himself, Chirac, and Hollande, and how it differed from that of General de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, for whom only one France existed—the France of the Resistance. This great and unanimously praised speech was preceded by the inauguration of the Garden for the Children of the Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup, and I had the honor of guiding the President of the Republic during that visit.
In March and April 2017, Beate and I gave speeches at the University of Aix-en-Provence, in Paris, in Vienna, and at the Shoah Memorial. Beate spoke to middle-school children in Lyon, and also gave speeches in Osnabruck, Frankfurt, Kigali in Rwanda, and Roglit in Israel. For my part, I spoke in Clermont-Ferrand to high-school students and then at the university there, in a Paris synagogue, in Bucharest, Perpignan, Drancy, and Compiègne, to the students of two Parisian high schools, in Monaco, and at the Wannsee House in Berlin. This schedule—which does not take into account other meetings—gives an idea of the workload maintained by Beate and myself, even in our so-called dotage. It is true that I will be the first to weaken: my kidneys no longer function very well. Nevertheless, we continue to enjoy the delights of our little family: Lida, Carlo, and their children, Emma (8), Luigi (7), and Marco (1). Our son, Arno, is watching over us as he always has for the past twenty years.