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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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my country, while the criminals I accuse with ample
documentation enjoy total impunity. It's all very well to have good morale, but
it doesn't help to be locked up with a young woman who, jealous of her
husband's love for their little daughter, whom he could "eat up," served her to
him for dinner in the form of meat balls. Or another who had mowed down her
fiancé with a scythe. Or with Hermine Braunsteiner, the
concentration-camp guard extradited from the United States, who confessed she
used to set dogs on the Jews, but whom I used to see here during recess
daintily lift earthworms off the pavement and set them down on the grass, all
the while grumbling against the American judges ("all Jews") responsible for
her extradition. Moreover, Gregorius, my lawyer from Essen, is so pessimistic
and negative that little by little my morale weakens. Gregorius is probably
influenced by Professor Kaul of East Berlin. Kaul has written Serge a violently
critical letter, blaming him for my "childish" action and declaring that France
and especially Israel will never do anything to help me. Serge sends this
letter and other news to me through friends, who keep up their struggle against
German bureaucracy and manage to get in to see me every other day in spite of
regulations an Israeli couple traveling in Germany, my mother-in-law,
Julien, the two Henris and still another Henri, Henri Hajdenberg, a young
lawyer (brother of Serge and Monique who had been arrested at Essen, and of
Elisabeth, who had demonstrated at the Bundestag), and a delegation of Israeli
journalists who are touring Germany as guests of the German government. Serge
and I decide to get rid of our two lawyers, Kaul and Gregorius, as we have lost
confidence in them.
A number of delegations of former Maquis and
deportees picket the German Embassy in Paris. The UNDIVG charters a bus for
forty-five of its members. The bus arrives in Bonn on the morning of May 2 with
Julien Aubart in charge. The resisters are all wearing their decorations, their
deportee shirts. Serge has prepared a number of posters and banners. The
delegation goes to press headquarters, near the Bundestag, trespassing on
territory supposed to be kept cleared. The journalists have been alerted; they
flock to the scene. So do the police more than two hundred, helmeted and
armed with clubs. After several ineffective warnings, the police prepare to
charge. The German reporters succeed in dissuading them, warning them of what a
disastrous impression it would make on the international press to see French
Resistance heroes beaten by German police.
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 303 |
Forward |
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