Q&A Serge Klarsfeld: the memory of the Shoah will endure

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld

For several decades, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld have fought strenuously for justice for Holocaust victims and to ensure they are remembered. They have relentlessly tracked down Nazi criminals and brought them to justice. No one could have foreseen that the daughter of a soldier of the Wehrmacht and the son of a Romanian Jew who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau would become the mythical duo of Nazi-hunters that we know today.

The Klarsfelds have just published their memoirs (Éditions Fayard-Flammarion), a double autobiography that has been on the bestseller list in France since it came out. In this highly anticipated book, these two longtime activists against all forms of racism, who prefer to define themselves as “hunters of Jewish souls that disappeared in the Holocaust,” tell of their epic fight against Nazism and the loss of memory.

The CJN interviewed Serge Klarsfeld by phone from Paris.

Is the hunt for Nazis finished for you?

Yes, since 2001, the year when the case of Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, was tried in his absence. That SS officer, the commandant at the Drancy internment camp, was responsible for the death of almost 128,000 Jews from France, Austria, Slovakia and Greece. All the decision-makers about the extermination of the Jews are dead today. The only ones still living are the subordinate executors, who are around 90 years old or more. German society, which finally has a better understanding of Nazi crimes, is taking pains to judge the Nazi criminals who are still alive. It’s very difficult, because these criminals must be physically in a condition to defend themselves, and the charges brought against them must be established, which is rare in the case of those who executed the “Final Solution to the Jewish question,” since the crimes they committed were not listed in reports or documents.

Is there a Nazi executioner you regret not having been able to bring to justice?

We greatly regret that Brunner was not arrested and judged. This abominable SS officer was the instigator in Nice of one of the most brutal roundups of Jews in western Europe during the war. We did everything we could to have him arrested and extradited from Syria, where he made his home after the war. We got extradition orders from France and from Germany. But we collided with the categorical refusal of the inflexible dictatorship of Syrian president Hafez Assad. Not wanting to confront the Assad regime head on – we still see this today, as Syria is a major piece on the geopolitical chessboard of the Middle East – the western powers preferred to bypass our request, believing it to be a minor matter.

Are you concerned about the future of the memory of the Shoah?

No. Fifty years ago, when I went into a bookstore in Paris, New York or Berlin, I could find only about 10 books on the Holocaust. Today, you can find hundreds. Every aspect of the Holocaust has been carefully studied by historians and academics. The memory of the Shoah has paradoxically been reinforced by the bizarre attacks of the deniers who are trying to destroy our memory of the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust. These falsifiers of history have failed in their vile undertaking, which is based totally on a lie.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants have retaliated with great dignity against the fallacies repeatedly spread by these falsifiers of history by collecting indisputable documentation on every aspect of the Holocaust, by collecting and recording the testimony of the last survivors and by supporting university studies in the field. Many countries, including Canada, have created centres for documenting the Holocaust and have built memorials honouring its victims. Books, publications, films have been devoted to this unspeakable tragedy.

Are you worried about Holocaust denial being spread in the Arab-Muslim world?

We lost the battle long ago against Muslim Holocaust deniers, who have many followers in the Arab-Muslim world today. You can’t do much against the insane state-sponsored anti-Semitism that’s raging in Iran, where they never stop shamelessly declaring that the Holocaust never took place and that Israel must be destroyed. It’s the disgusting propaganda of a totalitarian state. One thing is certain – the anti-Semitic raving of the Iranians and their associates will not prevent the memory and the history of the Holocaust from surviving.

You have always refused to associate the French Republic with the Vichy government and the pro-Nazi collaborators.

I am thoroughly French. I accept the entire history of France as a part of me. I have always made a distinction between Vichy France, which was anti-Semitic and segregationist, and the France of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac. Chirac was the first president of the Republic of France to have recognized, in 1995, the irrefutable responsibility of the French state in the deportation of tens of thousands of French Jews to the Nazi camps. Let’s not forget that it was the Vichy government that put in place a contemptible anti-Semitic policy whose only goal was the deportation of all the Jews of France.

Then for you Vichy was not a simple aside in the history of France?

The Vichy regime bears an enormous responsibility for that dark chapter of the history of France. One-quarter of the Jewish population of France perished in the Nazi gas chambers. But we must remember that the remaining three-quarters were saved thanks to the solidarity of very courageous French people who, at the peril of their lives, helped the persecuted Jews to escape the Nazis by finding a refuge for them. I will never forget that masterful lesson in fraternity. During World War II, France was torn apart by a civil war between two camps with two antithetical visions of the country. It was not the French Resistance that saved thousands of Jews, but brave citizens and Catholic priests who were very aware that the Jews who were arrested were doomed to die.

Does the rapid upsurge of the National Front discourage you after you have fought that party of the extreme right for so long?

If Marine Le Pen wins the presidential election in 2017 – a terrifying scenario that unfortunately is more plausible every day, because all the opinion polls predict that the head of the National Front will get to the second round of the presidential election in 2017 – Beate and I will leave France for good. We have been fighting against Jean-Marie Le Pen for 30 years. We succeeded in having him condemned in June 2013 for his pathetic declaration of 2005: “In France, at least, the German occupation was not especially inhumane.” 

A France governed by the National Front would be a vulgar insult to the republican values in which my family and I fundamentally believe. We will leave, because we are not candidates for martyrdom.

How do you see the future of the Jews of France?

Today, Jews are leaving France because they no longer accept the fact that their children may be physically attacked or humiliated at school or in the street. They are caught between an extreme right that keeps rising and the Muslim fundamentalist suicidal terrorism that has perpetrated some contemptible attacks in recent years. 

Today, a strong current of anti-Jewish hate coming from the Muslim Arab world has become firmly rooted in the volatile French suburbs, where the majority of the residents are Arabs from North Africa. Jews are also very exasperated by the unrestrained anti-Israel stance of the French media, which never cease to unjustly vilify the State of Israel. 

It’s true that today there’s a real will to leave France, but for the moment, it only involves about 10,000 Jews out of some 500,000 who still live here. A National Front victory in the 2017 presidential election would certainly strengthen the exodus of Jews from France. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity. It has been translated from the original French.