On one wall, a map of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. On another, a sunny canvas of Florence. Serge and Beate Klarsfeld enjoyed vacationing in the Tuscan city when they weren't tracking down former Nazi officials. But everything in the offices they occupy on the first floor of a building in the 8th arrondissement of Paris tells the story of a life dedicated to the memory of victims of the Holocaust.
Copies of Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France ("Memorial to the Deportation of Jews from France," 1978), their monumental publication – it weighs seven kilos – stand alongside those of the other monument they created, Le Mémorial des Enfants Juifs Déportés de France ("Memorial to Jewish Children Deported From France, 1995). One was the first to list the names of the 74,182 Jews deported to concentration camps from France, the other aimed to restore humanity, by detailing the short lives of the 11,400 French Jewish children who died in the camps.
Serge Klarsfeld could have been one of them if his father, Arno, hadn't sacrificed himself by surrendering to the Gestapo, who came knocking on the door of their apartment in Nice on the night of September 30, 1943. The child was then hidden, with his mother and sister, behind the false back of a wardrobe. He was 8 years old.
In November 2023, Serge was 88 and he sat very upright in his leather armchair. His wife, Beate, 84, was going from one end of the apartment to the other, directing the heating engineer who had called in. Press clippings pinned up behind Serge Klarsfeld illustrated the couple's life starting from when they met one day in 1960 on the platform of the Porte-de-Saint-Cloud metro station; the slap inflicted by the young German activist on Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, former head of Hitler's radio propaganda, in 1968; the trial of former officials of the Third Reich in Cologne in 1979, during which the lawyer defended the civil parties; the incredible hunt in Bolivia for the "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the French courts in 1987; the many cases brought – and won – against far-right Front National (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen for anti-Semitism.
His life reads like a novel and it has been immortalized in the TV film La Traque (Manhunt, 2008), in which Yvan Attal played Klarsfeld, and the poster of which is also displayed on the wall. "Beate and I have always fought the anti-Jewish far right," recalled the octogenarian in a confident voice. On April 16, 2022, the couple signed an open letter in Libération calling for Marine Le Pen, "daughter of racism and anti-Semitism," to be blocked in the presidential election.
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