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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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Lischka was the man who actually directed the Final
Solution in France."
The director replied: "I agree with you in
principle, but our budget won't permit it."
"Do you know," Serge said,
"that we are now in a building that the head of the Gestapo's Bureau for Jewish
Affairs used to visit frequently? I can assure you that he had a hard time
finding trains to ship Jews out of France, but he got them just the same. Just
remember that only a week before Paris was liberated, when the German soldiers
were retreating in disorder, he succeeded in getting a train for the
deportation of a thousand Jews, including hundreds of children."
The
matter of the ticket was quickly settled.
In Israel, the Association
had in mind an aged lawyer of German birth who could not be expected to mount
an energetic attack on German justice. Serge gave several interviews on
television and radio and kept insisting that an Israeli lawyer was not needed
to defend Beate but to attack Lischka. Thereupon, Shmuel Tamir, a member of the
Knesset and a former Irgun commander, volunteered and was appointed by the
Association.
Back in 1953, while still quite young, Tamir had taken on
the Kastner case. He had defended Michael Greenwald, an Austrian Jew who had
written that Rudolf Kastner, the spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Commerce
and Industry, was actually a traitor to Israel for having been an accessory to
the Final Solution in Hungary that disposed of a half million Hungarian Jews.
The whole thing seemed unlikely, for Kastner was regarded as a hero for
bravely refusing the demands of Eichmann, who had placed him at the head of the
Hungarian Jewish community. But after tireless research, Tamir collected
documents in Europe and America that proved Kastner's guilt. Kastner lost his
suit for libel. In March 1957, he was gunned down on a Tel Aviv street.
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| |
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
|
Back |
Page 203 |
Forward |
|
|