The Jewish couple Serge and Beate Klarsfeld have stirred the political pot on numerous occasions in their careers as activists. One of their most famous moments happened on stage at the party congress of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in 1968 when Beate slapped then-Chancellor of West Germany, Kurt Kiesinger, in the face for having been a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
“We tried coming up with more conspicuous actions to wake up the public. The CDU congress in Berlin seemed like the perfect opportunity. I prepared for it a week ahead of time, even with a journalist who told me where I would enter the stage. The fact that a young German woman would literally slap the Nazi generation was supposed to be symbolic”, Beate explained in conversation with RTL.
At the time, she was not prosecuted in Western Berlin given that she held French citizenship. In her own country, she received a four-month suspended prison sentence.
Over the following years, the couple’s hunt for former Nazis continued. Among others, they managed to track down Gestapo head Klaus Barbie, the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’, who went into hiding in Bolivia and was then extradited to France. Serge commented: “The biggest success was that so many people were brought to justice for their behaviour during the war. It was also about educating people about the ‘final solution’ and what happened to Jews in France.”
After extensive research, the couple also published a book with a list of 76,000 Jews deported in France. In 1994, they released a memorial with the names and pictures of close to 11,000 children who were sentence to death under the Nazi regime.
For years, Serge and Beate have been touring the world. They are currently worried about a perceived move back toward the political right. According to Beate, the affiliation of young people is particularly concerning: “You have to explain that the radical right has never brought anything good to people. On the contrary, many of them are barbarians. People that want to bring more harm to the world. I was born in 1939, I lived through the war and the post-war era. We are doing better than ever, which is why the right should not have a place in Europe.”
When asked about the unfolding conflict in Israel and Gaza, Serge noted that it is bringing back terrible memories: “What happens here is the return of the Shoah on Israeli soil. It is evident that Israel cannot refrain from reacting to an enemy that is holding the Palestinian population in Gaza as hostages while simultaneously refuting the existence of an Israeli state.”
The Jewish couple pleaded for peace amidst the uncertainty, stressing that the loss of loved ones is a terrible feeling.
