After the Shoah Memorial in Paris (December 7, 2017 – April 29, 2018), the exhibition “Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the Fights of Memory (1968-1978)” is hosted at the Musée Masséna until January 27, 2019.
It was inaugurated last night by the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, in the presence of the Klarsfelds and their son Arno, authorities from the Jewish community, and a large audience.
Introduced by Christian Estrosi and Jacques Fredj, director of the Shoah Memorial, Serge Klarsfeld recounted the origin of his attachment to Nice, where he lived during the war with his parents and sister before his father’s arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 – he himself having managed to escape.
Known to the general public as the “Nazi hunters” – their activities exposed leaders of the Third Reich who had slipped away after the end of the war, notably finding and condemning Klaus Barbie – the journey of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld advocated for the victims of the Shoah and historical knowledge, against the impunity of former officials of the Final Solution and against anti-Semitism.
Thanks to them, the decade 1968-1978 marked an important turning point in the evolution of the memory of the Shoah in Europe and around the world, that of the perception of Nazism and the genocide of Jews in Germany and France. Their commitment was at the origin of the recognition by President Chirac of France’s responsibility in the roundup and deportation of French Jews to concentration camps and their death.
After the publication of their memoirs in 2015, the history and motivations behind the commitments of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld are revealed by the exhibition through numerous previously unseen documents and objects, joining those of an entire generation of which they become symbols.
The life of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld was built around struggles in service of the memory of the Shoah’s victims.
Their legacy is considerable, its posterity always to be defended, everywhere.
“The memory of the Shoah must always be defended, and its renewal in any form must be prevented by defending the values of true political and social democracy and by trying to extend it to the boundaries of our planet,” wrote Beate and Serge Klarsfeld in their Memoirs.
