Hogan:: LeBeau, how are you on pizza?
LeBeau:: Pizza?! You would ask a Frenchman to cook a piece of cardboard with tomato sauce?
Hogan:: We swear not to tell anybody.
LeBeau: Ask me to dig a tunnel, yes. To climb a barbed wire, yes. But to make a pizza, no.
Hogan: We all have to make sacrifices.
Robert Clary passed away today at age 96. As a boy he was sent to Buchenwald. Three of his twelve siblings survived the War, all of the rest of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust, most of them at Auschwitz. He loved his role as Corporal Louis LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes, helping to make Nazis and the Third Reich look ridiculous. With his death, all the principal cast members of that show are gone beyond this Vale of Tears. I hope when he came before God for his particular judgment that the joy he gave to so many will be taken into account.
Clary, Banner and Klemperer never got the universal credit they deserved for their manner of witness to what they personally endured in the war years. My college German professor thought they minimized the horror of the Nazis, but making them look like buffoons, even though it was obviously not the case in real life, was brilliant. The devil, we are told by exorcists, cannot abide being mocked. Requiescant in pace, gentlemen.
Rest in peace!
No kidding, this hits me more than the death of the British queen. Clary had a more remarkable life story. I am amazed at Holocaust survivors who are not consumed by bitterness, as I fear I would be.
Rest in peace Robert Clary
Hogan’s Heroes was long off network TV and in syndicated reruns in the mid 1970s when I got into watching the show. I did not notice until later that, on the show, it was perpetually winter….with the trees full of green leaves in the background.
It was silly but entertaining and fun. That was nearly half a century ago. We watched on WUAB 43 (Lorain-Cleveland).
My late mother in law grew up in France during the war years (emigrated in 1950) and she was sort of a fan of his, because she remembered him as a popular singer/performer there right after the war. I don’t know whether she knew of his Holocaust background, since he did’nt publicly discuss it during his Hogan’s Heroes years. In any event he got the best “revenge“ possible against the Nazis: he outlived their thousand-year Reich by 70+ years.
Comment of the week Elaine! Take ‘er away Sam!
[…] Michael Gerson, Speechwriter Who Crafted Faith-Inspired Language for George W. Bush – C. T. Requiescat In Pace: Robert Clary – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American […]