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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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with a deafening bang. We all burst out laughing
– and not for the last time during that expedition.
We needed a
more impressive weapon. Eli had an old pistol from some army or other. We
rendered it useless by removing the hammer. It was a way of proving, if
anything went wrong, that we meant no harm.
Serge bought a pair of
handcuffs that we expected to use on Lischka. Then we all met at the Avis
Rent-a-Car office. Thus, the night before we were to leave for Cologne, Serge
became an involuntary spectator to a scene straight out of a Grade B movie. He
had hardly entered the office when two policemen burst in and without any
warning leaped on a young customer, who fought back wildly, all the while
trying to pull a revolver out of his belt. The staff ducked, but Serge stayed
as close to the action as he could, trying to learn how policemen get handcuffs
on an adversary.
Later the clerk explained that the man was part of a
gang that rented cars and then sold them – in Belgium or in Germany. It
occurred to Serge that he was there for no other reason than to rent a car for
an expedition to Germany via Belgium that was, to say the least, scarcely
legal.
We left Paris the evening of Saturday, March 20, with me at the
wheel. On the way we stopped at a little bistro in a small Belgian mining town.
It was there that I realized we had left France. It was a kind of dance hall,
so unusual that Eli, the photographer, was furious that we had forbidden him to
bring his camera along. We had trouble getting him out of the place; he danced
with every one of the girls. We drove all night, and reached Cologne about 3
A.M.
Cologne was very dark, and with its one-way streets and no-passing
signs, we had a hard time getting to the apartment that Beate had borrowed. We
staked out our bivouac, and tried desperately to convince ourselves that we
were really ready for anything. We kept saying over and over: "We've got to get
some sleep. We've got to be calm." But we couldn't stop laughing because all we
had to do was look at one another to realize that we looked about as much like
a commando unit as a council of bishops.
About 9 o'clock on Sunday
morning we were up and around. Beate fixed us a fine breakfast to keep up our
morale. Hence we were late in calling for the car we had reserved to take us
out of Cologne – a four door Mercedes 220, the most common type of
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 144 |
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