Hunting the Truth by Beate Klarsfeld

Author:Beate Klarsfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISRAEL

NEWS OF MY arrest made very little impact in Israel, to begin with. Serge wrote to the Israeli embassy asking for an Israeli lawyer, but we waited in vain for a response. So Serge sent an open letter to the most important journalists in Israel, and this drew results. Several journalists came out in favor of me, the first one being Israël Noiman in Davar:

Open letter to a hardened criminal—the silence surrounding the B.K. affair is a scandal.

Dear Beate and Serge,

I had hoped that more famous and more important people than me would do something more impressive and useful for you than writing a letter. But, to my stupefaction, nothing has happened. That is why I am writing you this letter. Perhaps it will help to wake from their torpor those who ought to act and protest on your behalf? The silence here in Israel cannot be allowed to continue. It is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. There are many organizations in this country representing Holocaust survivors, but none of them have bothered to publicize the scandal of Beate being arrested for denouncing the fact that Nazi war criminals are living peaceful, comfortable lives even after being convicted of their crimes. Presumably those organizations are too busy planning ceremonies to commemorate the Holocaust and cannot find the time to deal with a matter of such insignificance.

May you be blessed, Beate, for your actions. You will not be alone in the dock of that Cologne court. We will be with you, either in person or in spirit.

[…] The state of Israel must not be absent from that courtroom in Cologne, because your trial is ours.

In May, we learned that the National Lawyers’ Guild in Israel had decided to pay for a lawyer to defend me. Serge went to Israel in order to explain all the details of the case to the union.

But first we had to pay for the flight, and we were penniless. Most of our meager budget went to our telephone bill, which was huge after the many calls to Germany. Serge went to see the director of the CRIF (Representative Council of Israelites in France), an umbrella organization of French Jewish associations, and told him, “I came because I believe it is normal that the Jewish community in France should pay for this ticket, given that Lischka is the man who organized the Final Solution in France.”

“In principle, I agree. But from a budgetary viewpoint, it’s difficult.”

“Did you know that the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department used to come frequently to this building? And I can assure you that he had great difficulties finding enough trains to deport the Jews from France, but he managed somehow. Three weeks before Paris was liberated, when German soldiers were in chaotic retreat, he was able to obtain a train to deport more than a thousand Jews, hundreds of them children.”

Very soon after that, Serge’s plane ticket was paid for.

* * *

SERGE, WHO DID several interviews for

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