by Cynthia Dettelbach

The slap that Beate Klarsfeld gave to Kurt-Georg Kiesinger in 1968 was hardly the stuff to be packaged between soap powder commercials and kinky domestic feuds, however. It would become, in fact, "the slap heard around the world."

Kiesinger was then the newly elected chancellor of Germany, and Klarsfeld, 32, a German Lutheran, was married to a Jew and living in France. A few months earlier she had written some scathing articles about Kiesinger for Combat, a small French newspaper. She "deplored," she wrote, the election of a man who had been "the moving force behind the whole, huge, complex and powerful organization for broadcasting Nazi propaganda" for Hitler.

The infamous slap put Beate and her husband, Serge, on the Nazi hunting map. It was a map which they practically created themselves and would continually expand and follow in the years to come.

Who was this gutsy woman, this non Jew, who many times risked her life and that of her family and endured prison, economic hardship and endless travel to carry out her self-assigned mission? What kind of wife, together with her husband, would spend more than a decade methodically hunting down and eventually bringing to justice the infamous "Butcher of Lyons," Klaus Barbie? What kind of mother would court arrest in Warsaw and Prague to campaign against rising anti-Semitism there? Or would endure imprisonment in Syria to protest the treatment of Israeli prisoners of war?

I came a little closer to those answers when I met Beate Klarsfeld this past summer. She and Serge were in Cleveland for the Annual Meeting of Women's American ORT, where they officially opened the traveling ORTworks exhibit and were presented with the organization's coveted Tikkun Olam (Repair of the World) Award.

Thirty-one years and many anti-Nazi campaigns after the slap, Beate still retains the slim figure and finely chiseled features that mark her earlier photographs. Her dark hair, now coppery, softly frames her clear complexion. Serge, her soul mate, coworker and husband of 36 years, is more portly than in his youth (a testimony to his wife's good cooking, he says); his head of thick, dark hair has turned white and receded a bit.

Their closeness as a couple is palpable. So in tune are they with each other's thoughts that he often finishes her sentences. She doesn't protest, but neither does she finish his.

I ask Beate what started her down the groundbreaking path of Nazi hunting. She answers in measured, curiously dispassionate tones that it was a combination of many things.

Born in Berlin on the eve of World War II, daughter of a German soldier and god-daughter of a Nazi official, Beate knew virtually nothing of her country's role as perpetrator of the Holocaust. Then, at 21, she moved to Paris to work as an au pair. There she met the man who would forever change her life.

Serge Klarsfeld first saw Beate while both were waiting for a Metro one afternoon. By the time he got off at his stop he had her telephone number. Three days later he called and they began to see each other. "Serge was finishing his education, and he was almost as poor as I," Beate writes in her 1972 memoir, Wherever They May Be. "I liked him at once for his mixture of seriousness and imagination."

From Serge, an attorney as well as a historian by training, Beate learned about "the terrifying reality of Nazism." From Raissa, her soon-to-be mother-in-law, she learned how Arno, Serge's father, had been deported to Auschwitz and how Raissa, Serge and his sister were saved by hiding behind a false wall in the back of a closet. The Klarsfelds' first child would also be named Arno.