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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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when I telephoned! I am promptly surrounded by the
press, so again I have the opportunity to explain the meaning of my actions for
the cause of Israel.
My schedule for October-December: lectures, all
unpaid. A sampling: October 21, Geneva one hour, live, on television. October
30, Paris, the Freemasons. November 7, Geneva. November 11-15, five lectures in
Israel. November 25, Paris, the Synagogue. November 26, Pau. November 27,
Toulouse, the Jewish Agency. December 1, Cercle Bernard Lazare, Paris. December
4, Avignon. December 6, Montpellier. December 7, Aix-en-Provence. December 8,
Nîmes. December 10, Antwerp. December 13, Metz. December 17, Lycée
Chateau-Thierry. December 18, ORT, Villiers-le-Bel. December 19, B'nai-B'rith,
Vincennes.
At the conclusion of my lectures I autograph my book, whose
sales provide some of the money we need to go on working and living. The halls
are always filled. I say this not in vanity; people like to see an activist. I
often appear on radio and television. My lectures typically end up with
something like this:
In conclusion, I can only repeat what I
consider essential. Anti-Zionism today is the main branch of that same sturdy
old tree, anti-Semitism. For centuries the cry against the Jewish people during
pogroms was, "Go back to your own country." But at that time they didn't have a
country. So one day the Jews started on the road to the Land of Israel and they
rebuilt the Jewish homeland.
Later, when the Nazis undertook the
systematic destruction of the Jewish people, with many active collaborators in
most of the European nations, they forbade the Jews to return to their country,
Palestine, where their brothers awaited them. Then we saw ships, overladen with
Jews forced back from Palestine, go down at sea and go down, too, into the
bored indifference of the belligerents. This must not happen again.
And
yet today, when the Jewish people have their own land to protect them,
anti-Semitism is striving relentlessly to destroy this protection. The
anti-Semites are nostalgic for the forties. How easy it was then in the Ukraine
to club Jews to death, how easy in Lithuania to make them undress and dig mass
graves before being shot in them, how easy in Poland to make rabbis crawl on
all fours or burn their beards; how easy for the Germans to build huge gas
chambers, for the Austrians to put Jews to scrubbing the streets of Vienna with
toothbrushes; how easy it was for Vichy to "aryanize" Jewish property and
deliver to the Germans thousands of foreign Jews who had trustingly come to
France thinking the French would protect them.
Today, now that there is
an Israel, such things are impossible, and
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 327 |
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