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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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Beate Klarsfeld, a young German woman, a
child of post-war Germany, of rich and self-satisfied Germany. She is the wife
of a loving and successful husband, the mother of two children, the youngest of
whom is only eight months old; a woman filled with love of life, optimism,
beauty; a woman of sturdy spirit; a woman whom nothing should have bothered;
and yet, there arose within her a fiery opposition to one man's hate for
another, a thirst for justice, morality, and humanity, a yearning to atone for
the sins of her nation.
She binds herself in chains in Prague and
Warsaw to demonstrate against anti-Semitism in these two states. She is a
Socialist in her views, she does not consider justice and injustice according
to who perpetrates it. She considers only the matter itself, and when she is
convinced that Czechoslovakia, a nation built on principles close to her own
social views, shows anti-Semitic behavior, she doesn't hesitate to denounce it.
This friend of the Jewish people endangers her life and goes to
Damascus, the center of barbarity, in an effort to ease the suffering of the
Israeli prisoners there.
And she continues untiringly to spare no
effort, in Europe and in South America, to bring Nazi criminals of war to trial
and to justice. Not out of a spirit of revenge, but, as she has told me more
than once, in order to create a balanced world that includes reward and
punishment, in order to prevent a repetition of Nazism and its effects, in
order to bring sanity back to the world.
Beate Klarsfeld carries out
all her activities in the manner of setting a personal example, and not only by
exhortation as to what should be done. She does this without any establishment
behind her, without power, with the courage of her convictions alone. And I
deliberately omit the word "passion" from this description of her belief in
order to stress the fact that there is within Beate Klarsfeld so much faith,
and so little fanaticism.
Today Beate Klarsfeld is in prison. And thus,
while the murderer Lischka roams free after his trial, Beate Klarsfeld, the
voice of morality, is in prison awaiting trial. The arrest of Beate Klarsfeld
is the personal arrest of every upright and honest person in the world. Every
lover of humanity feels as though he were in prison with Beate Klarsfeld today.
In a declaration she published before her arrest, Beate Klarsfeld
wrote: "Today once more we are forced to see how Jewish children are murdered,
this time by Palestinians. These people draw inspiration from the crimes of the
S.S., and they draw encouragement from the immunity given to these criminals.
From the time of Hitler and the mass murder, the Germans owe a special debt to
the Jewish people. It is not enough to mourn the victims or to plant trees in
Israel – we must keep up an intensive struggle against anti-Semitism in
all its forms."
Today, when we demand the immediate release of this
fighter for
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 306 |
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