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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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with thousands of Jews from the place de la Victoire
synagogue to La Trinité, and had been at the demonstration in the place
de l'Hotel de Ville. The left was making an appeal, and I had been asked to
speak. Beside me on the platform were Jean-Paul Sartre; Professor Laurent
Schwartz; Daniel Meyer, the president of the League for Human Rights; the
writer Vercors; the historian Jacques Madaule, who was also president of
Judeo-Christian Relations; and Eli Ben Cal, who represented Israel's Mapam
Party in Europe. The many young people present gave me a long round of
applause. That truly touched me, for they were cheering me both for what I had
accomplished and for the fact that I am German. The means I had taken to bring
our two peoples together had won their approval.
In a little while Eli
Ben Gal came over to me, shook my hand, and said: "This is the first time in my
life that I have taken the hand of a German. Knowing what you have done, I not
only can do it, but I know I ought to do it."
Then he wrote on my
program: "To Beate, who has brought something unique into my life – hope
for an eventual reconciliation between our peoples and, in the meantime, true
friendship."
I had traveled a long, rough road since that summer day in
1966 when a young woman in a Galilee kibbutz told me they didn't take in
Germans.
A German reporter sent his Hamburg paper a report on the
meeting in which he expressed his feelings at seeing a German woman so warmly
welcomed by so many Jews. That part of his dispatch, however, was cut; Germans
should not be told that my appalling behavior had culminated in what other
Germans found hard to attain – respect from the Jews.
That evening
I talked with greater fervor than usual, and I could feel my words hitting
home. Perhaps it was because my battle was Soon to extend to another country of
the East: Czechoslovakia.
The expulsion from Poland of many socialist
Jews, the insidious persecution of some thousands who would not resign
themselves to leaving their country, the second-class citizenship enforced on
the majority of Soviet Jews, the obstacles that have prevented them from
becoming assimilated and even from emigrating, the Leningrad trials and their
horrifying outcome – all this was anti-Semitism. So were the venomous
attacks on the Jewish origin of former Czech leaders.
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 127 |
Forward |
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