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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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will help the ratification of the
Franco-German treaty and you will bring respect for German justice, which it
surely needs."
The verdict is to be announced Tuesday, July 9.
Meanwhile two events give a great boost to our cause. On July 7 the Knesset in
special session unanimously approves a protestation against my trial, and
blames the court for the incidents that victimized the former deportees. All
parties collaborated in rushing through the formalities, so that the debate
took place and the motion was approved the same day. Ygal Allon, the Minister
of Foreign Affair Haika Grossman, Meir Palik (Moked), and Ehud Olmerd (Free
Center) each made a speech.
Monday, July 8. There is a summit
meeting in Bonn between Schmidt, the new chancellor, and Giscard d'Estaing.
That evening Schmidt announces, to the amazement of Germany: "I have resolved
before the President of the French Republic that the agreement will be ratified
before the end of the year." The summit was expected to deal with economics; it
opened with the agreement.
The French press carries the story of my
trial on the front pages every day. An article by Maurice Delarue, chief of the
diplomatic section of Le Monde, puts great pressure on Bonn. "The
European Union is not only a matter of trade, factories, grains, and currency.
It is also a matter of men. It is not with the Germany of Lischka and the
judges of Cologne that the French wish to shape the European Union; it is with
the Germany of Willy Brandt and Beate Klarsfeld."
Monday, July
9. There are many of us at Bonn. We have come in a bus chartered by LICA.
In the morning we lay flowers on the monument to the German anti-Nazis, and we
read the text of the epistle of Thomas Mann, "To the Germans," written during
the war. Then we take flowers to the prison in Cologne where countless members
of the French Resistance were executed. M. Katzman, cantor of the Synagogue on
rue Copernic in Paris, reads the last and magnificent letter written by
Abbé Deroy, who was guillotined here in 1943.
Then at 2 P.M.
comes the verdict. To the astonishment of almost everyone, but not mine, as I
had sensed de Somoskoey's rage, the sentence is: two months in prison without
obligation to serve the time already passed in preventive jail (37 days –
16 in 1971 and 21 in 1974) and without obligation to serve immediately the time
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 320 |
Forward |
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