Serge Klarsfeld, author and attorney, has
published a dozen books on the fate of French Jewry during World
War II and has been active in bringing Nazi and Vichy officials
to trial for the crimes they committed. He is president of the
organization, Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France.
He was born in Bucharest in 1935. He miraculously
escaped arrest by the Gestapo in Nice in 1943 but his father was
killed in Auschwitz.
Serge Klarsfeld is Graduate of Superior Studies in
History at the Sorbonne. He also is Graduate of the Institute of
Political Science of Paris and Docteur es Lettres and lawyer at the
Court of Appeal of Paris. He is one of the foremost historians on the
fate of the Jews in France during the Second World War.
He has worked on many legal cases against several
Nazi criminals that operated in France, namely Lischka, Barbie,
and Brunner. He led and
initiated the Bousquet, Leguay, Papon, and Touvier cases. He revealed
to the French public the crimes of Vichy and is seen as the
inspiration of President Jacques Chirac's declaration that officially
recognizes the responsibility of France during World War II.
Klarsfeld has been arrested in Germany and Syria
in his attempts to get Brunner extricated. He went to Tehran in 1979
to protest against the executions of the Lebanese Jews and he
protested against Karazdic and Mladic in the Serb Republic of Bosnia
in 1996.
