Most newspaper accounts describe Beate and Serge Klarsfeld as Nazi-hunters, which is like calling Elie Wiesel a Holocaust chronicler. Correct, perhaps, but profoundly inadequate.
The Paris-based Klarsfelds are, in reality, unstoppable forces of nature. Unwavering and unconquerable, they are awe-inspiring figures in a no-nonsense French television documentary with the appropriately direct title of “The Klarsfelds.” It screens Saturday, Oct. 4 as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival. Beate Klarsfeld will be present for a question-and-answer session after the film.
This immensely valuable one-hour film profiles a family that sees the world in terms of moral imperatives. What truly distinguishes the Klarsfelds, though, is that they do not hold conscience as an end in itself but rather as the starting point for countless brave deeds.
Fortunately, any concerns that Beate and Serge might be humorless, self-righteous drones evaporate within seconds of their first appearance on camera. It’s a pleasure to report that they come across as warm, gracious people with a passion for life.
The Protestant daughter of a Wehrmacht flier, Beate was born in Berlin in 1939 and moved to Paris in 1960. “All my actions stemmed from my moral outrage as a German,” she explains.
Not long afterward she met Serge, a Jew who survived the Holocaust, thanks to his father’s calm courage. When the Gestapo arrived to take the family into custody for deportation, Pere Klarsfeld said his wife and children were at the baths being disinfected. In fact, they were huddled in a closet behind a fake plywood wall. The Nazis took him away, and Serge never saw him again.
Hence Serge’s lengthy and painstaking campaign to document every French Jew who died at the hands of the Nazis.
He’s written several books, and one wishes filmmaker Elisabeth Citroen provided more information about them. But her documentary plows ahead with the same determination the Klarsfelds display when they locate a war criminal.
Beate began her “career” in 1966, when former Nazi propagandist Kurt Kiesinger was elected chancellor of Germany. She assembled a dossier of his wartime activities and presented it to the French and German press, but she didn’t stop there.
She slapped Kiesinger publicly in 1968 — on her fifth wedding anniversary, incidentally — landing on the front page and earning a jail sentence. She and Serge shrewdly turned her appeal into a trial of Kiesinger. The following year, Beate campaigned against him, helping Willy Brandt win the chancellery.
Beate and Serge applied their persistence and legal cunning to ex-Nazis comfortably ensconced in German and South American society. “The Klarsfelds” devotes ample time to the convictions they obtained of Klaus Barbie, who headed the Gestapo in Lyon, and Paul Touvier, head of the Lyon militia. Interestingly, the film glosses over the numerous threats and attacks the Klarsfelds have received.
“The Klarsfelds” presents the family as an independent and uncompromising unit. Beate and Serge, plus their son Arno and daughter Lida, are so tightly bound that they share law offices and even a bank account.
“The guy puts a lot of moral pressure on you,” confides Arno, who led the Touvier trial. “You’re afraid to disappoint him,” he says, smiling shyly and pausing briefly before adding, “and afraid to disappoint yourself, too.”
After an hour with the Klarsfelds, one is eager to join them on the barricades.
“The Klarsfelds” screens at 2:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4, at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael, with Beate Klarsfeld present. Information: (925) 866-9559 or www.mvff.com.