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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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behind his wife who is pregnant and has to stay in
bed for a few weeks. Our tickets read Paris-Casablanca-Paris. The airport at
Rabat is closed because of the Arab summit meeting. We have telephoned a
half-dozen hotels in Rabat; all are filled. We decide to spend the night in
Casablanca and go by taxi tomorrow morning to Rabat. There we will get in touch
with reporters and arrange a busy place for them to come and watch my
distribution of the leaflets until my probable rapid arrest.
In Paris,
Serge, Julien, and Elisabeth have secured three Moroccan telephone numbers:
those of the Ministries of the Interior and of Information, and the Information
Desk of the Hilton Hotel where the summit is being held, and which is
practically out-of-bounds for journalists – they have just been brutally
ejected from the opening session.
Marco and I pretend to be strangers
during the flight. In Casablanca I show my French passport. The officer stamps
the Moroccan entry visa right on the same page on which six Israeli visas
interlace. They go through my baggage carefully. But it is obvious that they
are looking for guns, not tracts. The inspector puts her hand into my bag,
pulls out various objects, feels around the bottom, but doesn't take out a
single tract. Ooh! That was a close one!
We each take a room at a big
hotel. I am nervous and don't sleep well. At 7 A.M. we take a taxi. It would
have been more cautious to have taken two taxis, but in such circumstances one
feels as if one is in a whirlpool. One is drawn toward the center that is the
moment of action, and one tends to be less and less cautious as the moment of
truth approaches. As we leave the city, there is a police barrier. "Your
passports." They take down our names but do not search us. Just in case, I had
previously shoved the thick envelope of leaflets under the seat. Between Casa
and Rabat we are stopped by police at six checkpoints. In the hotels the
journalists are not yet up. I make an appointment to meet a few of them in
front of the Ministry of Information at 12 noon exactly. There, on time, I
begin handing out my leaflets. Some passers-by accept them, no doubt expecting
the familiar party line. Then there is a double take. Two women turn back to me
and say: "Slob, go do this in your own country."
Fortunately, two
officials accept my tract and hasten into the Ministry. They come back with two
guards who pull me inside the building, then come out once more to get two
photographers. A
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Back |
Page 325 |
Forward |
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