Wherever Nazis Are
A Visit with Beate Klarsfeld

By Cynthia Dettelbach

It was, if you think about it, like a page out of the Jerry Springer Show: The "wronged" woman goes up to the prominent man who has done wrong and, in a very public setting, slaps his face. A cameraman captures the image of the astonished man holding his bruised cheek and the beautiful young woman, in her red skirt and white turtleneck, being led away by a guard.

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.

When the Nazi propagandist Kiesinger was elected to the highest office in the land, Beate says, "having a son, I felt, as a German, I should act." The older German generation might not change, but "the young German generation cannot tolerate this," she reasoned. Her hope was to "make a revolution in Germany so Germany could get rid of" Kiesinger.

But before the drama could play out, the painstaking groundwork had to be laid. Serge collected documents about Kiesinger's wartime role from East Berlin, London and Washington. Beate, meanwhile, toured German universities telling students, "How could you stand to have this man as head of the German government?" That she was very attractive, articulate and not much older than the students themselves helped her cause, she says. But not enough.

"The German youth didn't think I should single out Kiesinger alone because there were Nazis all over," in the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the courts, she says. So she decided to attempt a direct confrontation with Kiesinger. Her thought was "to create a small scandal [the slap] to create a bigger one [the ousting of the chancellor]."

To execute her plan, Beate traveled once again to Germany and enlisted the help of some media people to ensure that the intended act would generate sufficient publicity. After two aborted attempts in other venues, she was finally able to inveigle her way into the Christian-Democratic Convention where Chancellor Kiesinger and other political dignitaries were meeting.

Posing as a reporter with a notebook in hand, Beate maneuvered herself behind her intended target. She then slapped the chancellor, shouting, "Nazi, Nazi," before being forcibly removed from the hall.

"The symbolism of that slap," says Beate, was "my generation of German youth [rebelling] against the Nazi father." It "plagued Kiesinger psychologically and in the court of public opinion." When he took part in subsequent conventions, a small party of student leftists would keep shouting, "Nazi, Nazi," and Kiesinger was often unable to speak as a result.

Eleven months after the slap, during which time she constantly traveled and lectured in Germany trying to raise political awareness, Beate's efforts finally bore fruit. Kiesinger was defeated in the September 1969 elections.

But the Klarsfelds' dogged Nazi pursuits cost money, which they didn't have. The campaign against Kiesinger "was so expensive that we had to stop paying taxes," she writes in Wherever They May Be. "We reduced our food budget and sold our old car. ... The hours I devoted to politics conflicted with the housework, but I had no trouble switching from one to the other. I was washing my own dirty linen and Germany's at one and the same time."

Years earlier, Serge's mother, Raissa, "seeing the person more than the nationality" had made her peace with the fact that her only son had married a German Lutheran. Now she was worried about what would happen to Beate and Serge if they continued pursuing Nazis. "But deep in her heart she approved" of the work they were doing, adds Beate.

More than giving her approval, Raissa gave a hand in caring for young Arno. "Without Raissa's help, I'd have been unable to do what I did," she says.

While Kiesinger lost his high office, the Klarfelds' work was far from done. There were other Nazis to seek out, demonstrate against and lecture about. More research. More travel. More threatening letters against them. More abusive phone calls. And at least two attempts on their lives.

In July of 1979, their 6-year-old Renault was blown apart by a bomb. The neo-Nazi group claiming credit for the act said that unless the Klarsfelds ceased their Nazi hunting, they would be next. The violence scared but didn't stop them.

Through it all, living with Raissa in two rooms, the couple raised two children, Arno and daughter, Lida. Both are lawyers now and work out of their father's Paris office. Arno, 33, was lead attorney in the prosecution of Nazi criminals Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier, the otherwise reserved Beate recounts with unabashed pride. It's a calling for which he prepared almost his whole life, having accompanied Beate, even as a toddler, to demonstrations and meetings.

"We were ready to die for our priorities, [exposing Nazis], but at the same time we took great interest in our children," says Beate. She often writes in her memoir, for instance, about the guilt she felt in leaving a child sick with the flu or measles to give yet another speech or attend another demonstration. "Family life was always very important to us."

Both Klarsfeld children received a Jewish education. They attended Jewish camps in the U.S. and in the middle and late '70s lived with their parents for a month each summer on an Israeli kibbutz. The kibbutz family holiday was a gift from the Israeli government to thank Beate for the dangerous journey she made to Damascus in '74 to urge, as a German, the release of Syrian and Israeli Jews held in Syrian prisons.

The Klarsfelds' many passions and projects also extend to animals. "We cannot live without dogs or cats," admits Beate, who that morning in Cleveland had called Paris to find out from her daughter, the designated "pet sitter," how their two cats and one dog were faring. The couple had been away from home barely 24 hours.

The Klarsfelds say they have no regrets about the way they have lived their lives. "We don't look behind," says Beate, and Serge adds, "Each time we do something we try to do it with all our strength. If we don't succeed it's [because] things were stronger than we were."

Most of their Nazi-hunting years, though, are behind them. "You can't pursue ghosts," says Serge. "Thirty years ago we were pursuing Klaus Barbie. Today we have a memorial in Izieu" for the 44 children whom Barbie, as chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, had deported. "Thirty years after [Adolph] Eichmann, you have the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Instead of holding trials we build memorials."

The only major Nazi criminal still to be brought to justice, say the Klarsfelds, is the aging Alois Brunner. A deputy of Eichmann and "one of two supreme managers of the Final Solution in France," his job was to "speed up arrests and deportations." Brunner, protected by President Hafez Assad of Syria, will be tried in absentia in Paris next year.

In the next millennium, predicts Beate, "the documentation [of Nazis] will continue, but the personal experience will be diminished because the survivors [will be dead] and their children will [age and] die." Memory of the Holocaust will be perpetuated instead by "the Everest of books and documents" explaining Nazi crimes.

Meanwhile, the Klarsfelds continue the painstaking work of adding to that mountain. They publish books about the Holocaust and reprint articles written about them and their work in the newsletters of the nonprofit Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, with offices in New York and Paris. Serge also continues to document the fate of Jews in France during the Holocaust.

"We want to do for all the people what we did for the children of France," he says. He's referring to his highly acclaimed 1997 book, French Children of the Holocaust, a Memorial. The book includes photographs of 2,500 of the children, along with their last home addresses and the date and number of the convoy on which each was deported.

As the century draws to a close, the Klarsfelds remain dedicated foot soldiers in the fight that they vowed early on "would take priority over everything else." They prepare for demonstrations and interventions and send out informative letters. Their most recent campaign is on behalf of 13 imprisoned Iranian Jews. Pawns in internal political struggles that have nothing to do with them, the 13 are accused of spying for Israel, a crime punishable by death.

On a more encouraging millennial note, the Klarsfelds point to the advances already in place that will continue into 2000 and beyond: the establishment of the International Tribunal in the Hague, laws that allow European governments to pursue people for anti-Semitic activities and commemoration of Holocaust events.

Looking back on her own career Beate says, "It would have been easier for me to accept my responsibility as a German in words rather than actions. ... But I couldn't accept the easy way of redemption. "

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