For decades, France's willing collaboration in the Nazi Holocaust was recognized as the most shameful chapter in the nation’s history, a story recounted in public schools and a crime for which a sitting French president formally apologized. Paris is home to one of the world’s premier Holocaust research centers, and black plaques now adorn the facades of nearly every school from which a Jewish child was known to have been deported.
But despite these displays of public memory, the unthinkable has happened. The National Front — a political party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier — has mounted a surprisingly credible bid for the French presidency.
The party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now 88, once dismissed concentration camps such as Drancy as a “detail of history,” a remark that landed him in the political wilderness for decades. Now, a very real scenario exists in which his daughter, Marine Le Pen, could win the upcoming French elections.
Has the “past that will not pass” passed after all? Or has it merely ceased to matter?
One man deeply troubled by the question is Serge Klarsfeld, the most prominent living Nazi hunter in France and also Europe.
Now 81, Klarsfeld, a child survivor of the Holocaust, has spent his entire working life tracking down former Nazis alongside his wife, Beate. Those the Klarsfelds have brought to justice include Klaus Barbie, the infamous “butcher of Lyon,” and Maurice Papon, a former civil servant who authorized the transfer of nearly 1,700 Jews from Bordeaux to Drancy. The Klarsfelds also arelargely credited with having successfully pressured subsequent administrations of the French government to acknowledge publicly the country’s complicity in the Holocaust.
In short, they deal in the “details” that the elder Le Pen would rather forget.
And yet.
Sitting in his office, a veritable memory cavern strewn with books in a multitude of languages, stray photocopies of archival sources and oversize maps of various concentration camps, Klarsfeld struggled to put the rise of the National Front into words. Eventually, he sighed.
“I regret finishing my life in a period that so resembles the 1930s,” he said.
