Serge Klarsfeld. Collection

Serge Klarsfeld (born on 17 September 1935 in Bucharest, Romania) is a French lawyer and historian, committed to commemorating the Holocaust. His parents, Arno and Raissa Klarsfeld, were Romanian Jews who settled in France before the war. When Nazi-Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Arno Klarsfeld enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. His regiment suffered heavy losses at the Somme front in June 1940. Arno was captured by German troops, but was able to flee to the ‘Free’ Vichy Zone in southern France. The Klarsfeld family settled in Nice. Living in the French zone occupied by the Italians they were safe at first. However, in September 1943, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini was overthrown. When Italian troops withdrew from Nice, the German SS, under command of Alois Brunner, entered the city after which Jews were arrested and deported. Arno Klarsfeld also fell victim to the Nazis. He was arrested, while his wife Raissa, his son Serge and his daughter Georgette were hidden in a closet in their apartment. Arno Klarsfeld was interned in the Drancy camp and was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via transport 61 on 28 October 1943. Arno Klarsfeld did not survive slave labour in the camp. After her husband’s arrest, Raissa Klarsfeld fled Nice with her young children, settling in the Haute Loire, near the village of Le Chambon, where the three of them survived the war. Upon Liberation, the family returned to Paris. Serge Klarsfeld met Beate Kunzel, the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier. They married and committed themselves to trialling Nazi perpetrators. In 1971, the Klarsfelds intensified their efforts to track down unpunished Nazis, among them Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo in wartime Lyon. They also dedicated their research to commemorating the victims: Serge Klarsfeld published the Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, which lists each of the known victims of the Holocaust in France. Serge Klarsfeld was thus able to establish that over 75700 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres from France, and that just 2564 of those deported were still alive at the end of the war. In 1979 the Klarsfelds founded “The Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France” association which aims to end the judicial immunity of the major German and French perpetrators who organised the deportation of Jews from France, and to defend the memory of the Jewish victims. In 1982, Serge Klarsfeld and Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg published the commemorative book “Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de Belgique”, containing the names of most of the Jews deported from Belgium during the Holocaust. In 2001 Serge Klarsfeld published the calendar of the Holocaust in France, containing a day-to-day overview of the persecution and deportation of Jews in France.

On 23 April 1996, Serge Klarsfeld kindly donated the two book excerpts in this collection to the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, predecessor of Kazerne Dossin. On 14 December 2004 he added the publication on the trial against Maurice Papon, which has not been digitised.

Serge Klarsfeld, 1996 and 2004