Going after Nazis
Will we know when the very last of World War II’s Nazis passes away? What about the ones who changed their names, escaped to distant countries or hid in plain sight, the ones who managed to live with impunity as though the past were merely something to be dusted off one’s shoulders? What does it mean to get away with a crime when the crime is committed against humanity?
“Hunting the Truth,” the exceptionally relevant memoir of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, provides an awe-inspiring account of one couple’s relentless pursuit of Nazi criminals, whether by defying national borders or refusing to accept any statute of limitations. As devoted to each other as to their very public shared cause, the Klarsfelds illuminate, in brief alternating chapters, the personal sources of their lifelong passion for justice as well as details of their inexhaustible missions. We learn early on that Serge Klarsfeld’s father punched a guard at Auschwitz, where he was eventually murdered, and that Beate’s parents had voted for Hitler — though “they did not feel any responsibility for what had occurred under Nazism.”
Serge, born in Romania in 1935, and Beate, born in Germany in 1939, fell in love upon meeting in Paris in 1960, partly out of mutual admiration for the example set by Hans and Sophie Scholl, the young White Rose organizers who had been executed for attacking Nazism in 1943. Citing the Scholls’ final leaflet, Beate writes: “Who were they writing it for? For us, for all of us: ‘Once the war is over, the guilty must be severely punished in the interests of the future, so that no one will ever want to do something like this again . ... Do not forget the bastards who run this regime! Remember their names, so that not one of them may escape! So that they cannot, at the last moment, change sides and pretend that nothing ever happened.’ ”
In 1967, married and living with Serge and their young son Arno in Paris, Beate is fired from her job for publishing an article denouncing former Nazi Party member Kurt Georg Kiesinger, chancellor of West Germany. She is haunted by a photograph of “a young couple lying in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounded by other Jews, who will, moments after the picture is taken, be massacred. ... They are not protecting each other — the time for protection is over — but their love survives.” She tells the reader that this is “the turning point of our lives. Our decision is made. We are going to fight, and this battle will be our priority.”
The point, made numerous times regarding many of their targets, is not that Kiesinger was “a sadistic executioner himself. But the man who incites the sadism of others, who defames a people whom he knows is doomed to destruction, is guilty to an exceptional degree of an exceptional crime.” An action that becomes internationally known as “the slap” (Beate’s hand against Kiesinger’s face) is followed by increasingly forceful confrontations and prosecutions of former Nazis across the globe. Perhaps the most widely publicized of their cases involves tracking down infamous torturer Klaus Barbie in Bolivia (a.k.a., the Butcher of Lyon) and attempting to kidnap former Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka in Cologne.
When the Klarsfelds ask themselves how to define a crime against humanity, the answer lies in the “degree of participation, the degree of autonomy, the knowledge of the victims’ fate.” Sometimes their success is depicted in a concise remark at the end of a chapter, regarding the death of a perpetrator in captivity. Sometimes success is expressed in the individual naming of victims, as in Serge’s book “French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial,” “elucidating and explaining their fate by reconstructing the circumstances of their arrest and deportation, restoring their faces by finding photographs of them, and making their voices heard.” Retribution might come in the form of trial and imprisonment, or in monetary reparations such as those awarded to many thousands of children orphaned by deportations in France.
Over several decades of seemingly indefatigable activism, including writing books and being arrested and risking their lives, the Klarsfelds also manage to raise two children — with the very devoted help of Serge’s mother. (Both son Arno and daughter Lida became lawyers.) A miscarriage is mentioned almost in passing. At one point Beate writes, “Whenever I go away, I am always obsessed with the problem of my men’s laundry . ... It may seem absurd that such considerations preoccupy me when I am hunting SS killers on the other side of the world, but it’s true.” Though infrequently inserted, these prosaic comments remind us that most so-called heroes also conduct so-called ordinary lives.
“There Can Be No Compromise With Historical Truth” heads one of the closing chapters in this timely as well as cautionary book. Another: “Lighthouses in the Ocean of Forgetting.” The Klarsfelds are reluctant memoirists, Serge explains, but their fidelity to accuracy and their humility regarding monumental triumphs of justice serve as urgent messages to us all. “We learned through experience that we were capable of raising ourselves higher than we ever thought possible,” writes Serge. “Our readers will see this and will, we hope, realize that they would be just as capable as we were if circumstances demanded it.”
Elizabeth Rosner is the author of “Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory.” She will speak on Holocaust remembrance at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com