AANSPRAAK DECEMBER 2012 Selected articles in English translation © Sociale Verzekeringsbank & Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad - Aanspraak, December 2012 1 Contents The page numbers refer to the original Dutch edition Page 3 Speaking for your benefit Page 4-9 Beate Klarsfeld and her battle against anti-Semitism. Beate Klarsfeld will be the guest speaker at the Auschwitz Never Again Lecture on 24 January 2013. Page 9-12 ‘Steal a pencil for me’. Loveletters in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. Page 12-15 A place for the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’. Page 15 The Netherlands Information Office in Israel moves to a new address. Page 16-20 Christmas in the camp Page 22 Question & Answer No rights may be derived from this text. Translation: SVB, Amstelveen. © Sociale Verzekeringsbank & Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad - Aanspraak, December 2012 2 Page 3 Speaking for your benefit My mother, a Jewish lady, survived the war together with my father − unlike many members of the family, who were murdered. In the spring of 1943, my mother took my sister and me to the station in Rotterdam, walking hand in hand with two toddlers, girls of two and three. She passed us on to a man from the resistance, and left the station. She told me this story again and again, always asking the question, “Do you know what I did when I came out of the station?” Then she tells me how she bought two punnets of strawberries from a grocery store and went home to make strawberry jam. “That way, I still had something in both hands.” After the war, my parents built up a good life. Energetic, determined and active, but wounded inside. My mother is now a very old lady of 96. She lives independently in an apartment at a Jewish care home. She feels safe there, together with other people who have experienced “it”, who understand without words. Nowadays, the memories are becoming more and more intrusive. The world around her is shrinking, but the war wounds are getting bigger. An older friend of mine put it like this: “Soon after the war, I thought the pain and grief would fade, but you know, it’s the opposite; it’s getting worse and worse for me.” Hans Dresden Chair of The Pension and Benefit Board (Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad) © Sociale Verzekeringsbank & Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad - Aanspraak, December 2012 3 Page 4-9 Beate Klarsfeld and her battle against anti-Semitism Beate Klarsfeld will be the guest speaker at the Auschwitz Never Again Lecture on 24 January 2013 In 1960 Beate Künzel, who is German, was working as an au pair in Paris, where she met the French Jew Serge Klarsfeld, a political science student, at a metro station. He told her his life story. As a child, Serge had been caught up in a raid and barely managed to escape. His father was murdered in Auschwitz. This was the first time Beate had ever heard about her country’s Nazi history. Right away the two decided to work actively to find Nazis who had gone unpunished and bring them to justice. One of her successes was travelling to Bolivia to expose Klaus Barbie. Beate Klarsfeld will be talking further about their work during the Auschwitz Never Again Lecture, which she will give on Thursday 24 January 2013 at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. Each year, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee, the Sociale Verzekeringsbank and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies organise a lecture prior to Holocaust Memorial Day. Beate Klarsfeld will receive the Annetje Fels Kupferschmidt award, named after the Dutch Auschwitz Committee’s founding member. This interview is an introduction to activist Beate Klarsfeld and to her lecture. Two minds, a single thought Do you remember anything about the war? I was born in Berlin on 13 February 1939. My parents were not Nazis, but my father did serve in the infantry of the German army. Because he repeatedly caught pneumonia he was assigned to work as an accountant, until he was captured by the British in 1945 as a prisoner of war. When our house was bombed we went to stay with family in the countryside. I remember seeing the Cossacks ride into the village on horseback and searching the house for jewellery. After the war we moved in with another family in Berlin. Later, we did not talk about the war at home or at school; we were more interested in the Cold War. There was one Jewish boy who had returned to school from England, but no one dared to ask him anything. Why did you want to go to Paris? In 1960 a friend asked me to go to Paris with her as an au pair. I thought, ‘Why not?’ and since I was over 21 I did not need my parents’ permission. I wrote an information leaflet about my experiences as a German au pair in Paris which sold well. When the father of the family I worked for started to become interested in me I looked for another job and became a secretary at the Agency for French and German Youth Work in Paris. © Sociale Verzekeringsbank & Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad - Aanspraak, December 2012 4 How did you meet your husband? I was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française and often found myself in the same metro as Serge, who studied political science. He spoke to me on the platform in 1960, asking, ‘Are you English?’ ‘No, German,’ I answered. We started talking and soon became inseparable, then married in 1963. He was born in Bucharest in 1935. What he told me about his experiences in the war was all completely new to me. By 1943 his family had fled to the security of the Italian sector of Nice, which had not seen raids up to then. But on the night of 30 September 1943 the Gestapo appeared at the door. Serge’s brave father surrendered himself, hoping that they would not search further. Serge, his mother and sister hid behind a wardrobe. They survived the war; Serge’s father was murdered in Auschwitz. Who or what inspires you? Serge gave me a piece of advice: ‘Transform your life into poetry – raise it to a level that makes it an inspiring experience.’ He told me about the German resistance group ‘Die Weiße Rose’ who fought the Nazis in Munich. Their pamphlets urged people to resist the subjugation of minorities and nip it in the bud. It was their fight against anti-Semitism that Serge and I wanted to carry on. As a German I felt a moral obligation to do so, and Serge supported me in everything I did. We are two minds with a single thought. Kiesinger Never Again Why did you specifically choose to take action against German Chancellor Konrad Georg Kiesinger? Kiesinger, a member of the CDU party, was chosen as Chancellor in 1966. This was unbelievable given his Nazi past. In the French paper Combat I wrote that it was impossible that a former NSDAP member such as Kiesinger should represent our country, since he had been responsible for Nazi propaganda on the radio, explicitly agitating for hate and the persecution of the Jews, and that Willy Brandt, who had been active in the resistance to the Nazis, was a better candidate. When the article was published I was immediately fired, since the board of directors included former Nazis. Serge and I decided not to let the matter rest. In the German parliament we sat in the public galleries and shouted ‘Nazi, Nazi!’, but unfortunately that did not generate much attention. I needed to do something drastic. On 7 November 1968, I slapped Kiesinger in the face during a CDU party political gathering, shouting ‘Nazi, Nazi, step down !’. By slapping him I wanted to demonstrate that the younger generation of Germans also disapproved of his Nazi past. Our press photographer’s pictures were published around the world. After I slapped him I was taken away to a police cell. Although the armed police guards at the conference could just as well have shot me dead, I was not afraid. Just as Serge had predicted, the authorities were concerned about tensions arising between France and Germany because I was a French national. The judge gave me a suspended sentence of one year, but this was shortened to four months. When Willy Brandt became Chancellor he granted me amnesty. © Sociale Verzekeringsbank & Pensioen- en Uitkeringsraad - Aanspraak, December 2012 5 Did that slap achieve the intended effect? It did, and our aim was immediately clear all over the globe. The writer Heinrich Böll sent me a bunch of red roses. He then engaged in a battle of words with Günther Grass, who disapproved of what I had done but did want Kiesinger to go. I received many letters of support from victims of war around the world. The German press and the CDU called it scandalous, but I didn’t care. We tried to block his re-election and were successful. We and our supporters followed him wherever he went to speak, always calling out ‘Kiesinger Never Again!’ and ‘Nazi, Nazi, step down!’ When socialist politician Willy Brandt was elected in 1969, we had attained our goal. We helped Germany to change. In 2012 I was chosen as one of the two candidates for the German Presidency. Joachim Gauck was the symbol of the fight in East Germany for freedom; I was the symbol of the fight in West Germany against former Nazis. He was elected. Hunting Nazis When you located Nazis abroad, how did you get them to court without an extradition order? Finding them was not the biggest problem – that was getting the countries where they were living to extradite them.