Serge Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld was born in 1935 in Bucharest

Klarsfeld was born in Bucharest in 1935 to a Jewish family from Bessarabia that moved to France before World War II. In 1943 his father was arrested by the SS in Nice and died in Auschwitz. Serge was sheltered in a Jewish children's home, and his mother and sister also survived the war.

The family went back to Bucharest in 1946, where he studied at the French Lyceum. After the 1946 Romanian election they returned to France. In 1963 he married Beate Künzel and settled in Paris, and their son Arno was born in 1965.

With his wife, he tracked down German and Vichy officials for prosecution, including Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier. In 1974 the couple were convicted in West Germany of attempting to kidnap former Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka. In 1979 they founded the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France, and that year a car bomb exploded at their home without injuries.

In 1981 the association commissioned a memorial in Israel bearing the names of 80,000 French victims. In 1986 the couple campaigned against Kurt Waldheim. In 2012 a Stasi archive official stated that the couple had cooperated with the Stasi in the 1960s.