In 1939, Serge Klarsfeld was 4 years old. This is the year when Arno, his father, of Romanian nationality, enlisted in the French army to fight the Nazis. Taken prisoner in June 1940, he escaped in 1941 and rejoined his family: Raïssa, his wife, his children, Georgette and Serge, had found refuge in Nice. On the night of September 30, 1943, the SS came to arrest them. Arno managed to hide his wife and two children in a double bottom wardrobe before giving himself up. Transferred to Drancy, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, he would die there in the heart of the summer of 1944.
Summer 1944. Serge Klarsfeld was 8 years old when, with his mother and sister, he took refuge in the Capitoline city.
Saint-Julien-Chapteuil or life regained
“We felt safe here, after being hunted down every day by the Gestapo (Nazi Germany’s political police, editor’s note) and collaborators. In Nice, we lived every day in fear of being arrested. And there, we found ourselves a little like before the arrival of the Germans in the Italian zone, in a security that seemed almost total to us. The Italians, between November 1942 and September 1943, did not stop the Jews. We were quiet in Nice until the Germans invaded the Italian zone in September 1943. Until February 1944, we lived through months of hunting. Arriving at Le Puy-en-Velay, we suddenly found ourselves in a kind of oasis; there was no hunting of Jews in Haute-Loire. And there was no Gestapo. The only Jews arrested in Haute-Loire during the Occupation were arrested by the Gestapo in Clermont-Ferrand. It was a period of relief that lasted until the Liberation. Contrary to the regulations, the administration in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil as in Puy-en-Velay did not ask us if we were Jews or not. When we talked, we said we were Orthodox, but I’m not sure people believed us,” he recalls today.
The Klarsfeld family had found refuge during the Occupation in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, in the house run by the Adhemard family. Photo Awakening
The young boy attended the school of the brothers like the other children of the village. Passionate, he was fond of history and religion lessons. “To hide our identity a bit, we went to church, which I liked because the church is very pretty. I wanted to be a choir boy like the others”, confides Serge Klarsfeld before adding: “The only period of my life when I was a believer was in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil”. The brothers, struck by his intelligence, wanted to baptize him. But her mother, Raïssa, opposed it, using the pretext of her husband’s return to decide. He will never come back. “When I returned to Paris in 1945, I went to the Maimonides school, but I was no longer a believer because my father had not returned from the camps. I finished my dialogue with God at that time”.
The little city dweller was marked by the rural life that the whole family was discovering. “I experienced the arrival of the first tractor there. The whole village was mobilized! It was impressive to see the oxen harnessed, the horses, the farrier… There was still the drum! It was life like before the war. We were happy as a family, I was always in my mother’s skirts! »
1967, a second decisive stay
Many years later Serge Klarsfeld returned with his family to Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, staying in the same house on rue Chaussade. We are in 1967, one year after the election of Kurt Georg Kiesinger, figure of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the German chancellery within a coalition with the Social Democratic Party, the SPD. The new chancellor was none other than the former deputy director of the Third Reich’s radio propaganda abroad.
During this short stay in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, Beate wrote the op-ed against Kiesinger which appeared in the newspaper Combat, leading to his dismissal from the Franco-German Youth Office in August 1967. In other words, “it’s in Saint -Julien-Chapteuil that we wrote what triggered our entry into active politics, ”continues Serge Klarsfeld modestly. 
Saint-Julien-Chapteuil. Photo Thierry Lindauer
The rest we know: Beate slapped the German Chancellor in November 1968 during a CDU congress. Arrested, she is condemned. “It was the slap of the children of the Nazis against the Nazi fathers,” she declared years later. The Klarsfeld couple’s fight against oblivion had only just begun. The couple returned several times to Haute-Loire, notably to Chambon-sur-Lignon following the creation of the memorial, always making a detour via Saint-Julien-Chapteuil.
On Saturday, the Capitol city will pay tribute to him by placing a plaque on the house where the Klarsfeld family took refuge during the Second World War. For the 87-year-old man he is today, “it’s a mutual tribute. The municipality protected us. Saint-Julien-Chapteuil welcomed several Jews. My sister keeps a landscape painted by a Dutch Jewish painter. The municipality of Saint-Julien-Chapteuil was exceptional in this context. The Jews in Haute-Loire were able to live a different existence from elsewhere thanks to French and German administrations which were not hostile to the Jews, which was exceptional in France”.
Nathalie Courtial
The testimony of Georgette tatiana klarsfeld
“I was 12 when we arrived in February 1943 in Puy-en-Velay on the advice of a friend of my mother. The latter made contact with Rabbi Poliatchek who came from Alsace and whose son was in the Jewish Resistance. He told us to go to Saint-Julien-Chapteuil because there were no Germans there.
We were staying with Mademoiselle Adhemard who ran a grocery bar on rue Chaussade. I was educated with the Sisters of Saint-Joseph where I made friends – Marie-Rose, the baker’s daughter, and Marguerite, the mayor’s daughter, with whom I remained friends until her death. We went back to Saint-Julien several times after the war and I saw my old classmates again. Saint-Julien was a part of my life that was happiest, because I was in contact with nature, I loved animals. I went to herd the cows with Rose-Marie, I made the hay, I drove the oxen… It was paradise for me!
I had the impression that we lived almost like in the Middle Ages: there were farms where animals and people were separated by a curtain!
We did not see a German except Mongols engaged in the German Army passing through.
We returned to Paris at the Liberation. I had saved a little puppy that was being drowned. Parting with Taupsy was heartbreaking! I lay down on the road because I didn’t want to leave without her. Rose-Marie promised to take care of it…
This tribute that Saint-Julien pays us touches me a lot: it will remind the Capitolians that their ancestors helped the Jews.
A life of “hunting Nazis”
Beate, daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier, and Serge Klarsfeld, son of a Romanian Jew who died in Auschwitz, tracked down Nazi dignitaries around the world. Kurt Lischka, Ernst Heinrichson, Herbert Hagen: three organizers of roundups of Jews in France; they will be condemned in 1980, to sentences going from six to twelve years of detention. They drag Klaus Barbie before the courts and play a central role in the Bousquet, Touvier, Leguay and Papon trials. The couple published their Memoirs with Fayard Flammarion in 2015.
A plaque in tribute to the Klarsfelds unveiled
For Mayor André Ferret, “it is an honor to receive the Klarsfelds”.
A year ago, one of his advisers, Guy Devidal, went to listen to the Klarsfelds who were giving a conference at Chambon-sur-Lignon. There he met Jacques Fredj, director of the Shoah Memorial, who accompanied the couple. “I knew that the Klarsfeld family had taken refuge in Saint-Julien during the war, but I was surprised by the laudatory remarks that Serge Klarsfeld made with regard to the Capitolians, their welcome and his integration. I put forward the idea of a tribute and Jacques Fredj told me that Serge Klarsfeld would be happy about it”. Back in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, the municipal councilor talks about it to his equally enthusiastic peers. “The board was very supportive of the Klarsfelds coming. They lived here for 8 months, it’s a little-known episode in the history of Saint-Julien,” explains André Ferret.
Saturday July 30, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, accompanied by his sister Georgette, will speak at 4 p.m. at the Saint-Julien-Chapteuil association space where they will give a conference on their commitment as “Nazi hunters”, and will no doubt have- they say a few words about the welcome they received in the Capitoline city. The conference will be filmed with a view to editing for schoolchildren. At 6 p.m., a plaque will be unveiled on rue Chaussade, on the facade of the house where the family lived. They lived on the second floor. The house, whose ground floor is occupied by the Bar des Sucs, has since changed hands several times.
After the mayor’s welcome speech, La Marseillaise will be sung a cappella by Lili Blanchard. Then the Klarsfelds will speak and sign their books.
1,400 refugees arrived in one night in the town, in 1944
“In one night, 1,400 refugees arrived in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil in 1944, during the Second World War. The municipal council at the time called together the population in an emergency to ask to accommodate them. They came from the North, from Alsace, from the Mediterranean coast… among them, a few Jewish families,” relates the mayor, André Ferret.
“The refugees” presented by André Ferret and Guy Devidal.
Ten years ago, the Agora association began researching this episode in the life of the commune, which gave rise to a most interesting collection, the result of a year of research, The refugees, testimonies, 1940-1945 .
There is a myriad of stories, people welcomed and Capitolians according to which we discover their daily life, between supplies, requisitions and restrictions, but also work in the fields, forbidden balls, maquis of Meygal, at Raffy and Boussoulet, or even the announcement of the Liberation of Le Puy.
” A safe haven “
We also learn that in addition to the Klarsfeld family, several Jews found refuge in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil. Among them, the parents of actor Pierre Arditi, of Bulgarian Sephardic origin, also found themselves in the Capitol city, protected. Coming from Marseille, the Arditi family then bought a house in Rivet. They were called “the Parisians”. Georges, the father, was a painter. The town keeps a dedication and a painting of their passage.
“We don’t have the same history as Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, but Saint-Julien-Chapteuil is also a land of welcome”, recalls the mayor.
Refugees, Testimonies, 1940-1945 has been reissued and will be on sale Saturday.