The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (54 page)

The public prosecutor in Munich recommended dropping the Barbie case in 1971 on the legal grounds that a German court could not prosecute cases involving Nazi crimes against France. News of this reached Serge and Beate Klarsfeld in Paris, a couple who had dedicated their lives to hunting down Nazi war criminals.

Serge Klarsfeld had lived as a child with his family in Nice during the war, where five thousand French Jews and as many as twenty thousand Jewish refugees had taken refuge under the tolerant jurisdiction of the Italians. The Rlarsfelds themselves were refugees from Romania. The fall of Mussolini and the armistice meant the withdrawal of the Italians from occupied France, as the army demobilised and fled across the border. The Nazis entered Nice and began a ruthless manhunt during which they searched hotels and Jewish homes, and stopped trains and cars leaving the city.
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On the night of 30 September 1943, the Gestapo raided the home of the Klarsfelds. The father had built a false space in the rear of a cupboard to hide the family in just such an event, and they squeezed into the airless refuge the moment they heard the Gestapo pound on the apartment door. To refuse to answer meant that the Germans would break the door down. The father let them in and explained that his wife and children were away in the country. The Gestapo searched the apartment and actually opened the door to the cupboard, but suspected nothing. The last that Serge Klarsfeld saw of his father was a hand appearing in the cupboard to take the front door keys from his wife. Their hands touched in the dark. The father was careful to lock the front door after him so that nothing would seem out of order. The Gestapo sent him to his death in Auschwitz.

Beate, a German Protestant, felt a profound need to expiate the crimes of her country, one of which was the murder of the father of the man she loved. She was enraged that known Nazis were allowed to remain free ‘because of the apathy of governments’.
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Her father had served in the Wehrmacht and she felt that her parents’ generation appeared indifferent to the crimes of the Nazis and had learned nothing from the great disaster that had overcome them.

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld launched a relentless publicity campaign against Klaus Barbie that gathered increasing momentum over time. Beate organised a successful demonstration outside the court house in Munich to get the case reopened. The couple researched the assumed name that Barbie lived under and obtained photos of him. Two taken in 1943, and another in La Paz in 1968, were given to anthropometric experts - scientists who determine similarities in people by minute analysis of facial features. Once it had been established that Klaus Altmann was definitely Barbie, the next step was to persuade the French government to demand extradition. The Klarsfelds released the photos to the press to put pressure on the bureaucracy in France to make a move. As a result, journalists in South America swarmed around Barbie, who protested, ‘I am not Klaus Barbie but Klaus Altmann, a former lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. I’ve never heard of Klaus Barbie and I’ve never changed my identity.’

Beate Klarsfeld travelled to La Paz to publicise the case, which became an international issue. Barbie was paid two thousand dollars to appear on French television, where he changed his previous story and admitted to being a member of the Waffen-SS who had served in Holland, Bussia and France. He said he had been in Lyon, but not as Klaus Barbie. He claimed not to be able to speak French, but then said fluently in the language, ‘I am not a murderer, I am not a torturer.’

A change of government in Bolivia removed Barbie’s protection, and France finally demanded his extradition. This was problematical as there was no formal extradition agreement between the countries, besides which Barbie was not French. But Beate travelled once more to La Paz to keep the issue alive, accompanied by a woman who had lost a husband and three children as a result of Barbie. The women chained themselves to a bench outside his office.

The Bolivians arrested Barbie on charges that he had defaulted on a contract with the state-owned mining corporation, owing ten thousand dollars. He was hustled on to a Bolivian military jet and flown to French Guiana, and transferred at dawn under tight security to a French military transport plane. He was flown directly to Lyon and taken to Monluc, the prison where he had incarcerated and tortured so many of his victims. He remained unrepentant. ‘I did my duty. I have forgotten. If they have not forgotten, that is their business.’
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While Barbie sat in jail awaiting trial in Lyon, an extraordinary report of his dealings with US intelligence was delivered to the US attorney general. It was the result of a highly unusual six-month investigation triggered by Barbie’s abrupt expulsion from Bolivia. ‘As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the US government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in 1950; he spent thirty-three years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.’ The US issued an unprecedented formal diplomatic apology to France.

The original death sentences passed upon Barbie in the 1950s were no longer valid under French law because of the statute of limitation. He was now charged with eight new counts of crimes against humanity. These included the liquidation of Jews arrested at the UGIF in Lyon on the day Michel had been present; the deportation of six hundred and fifty men, women and children on the last French transport to Auschwitz; the torture and execution of scores of Lyon’s Jews; and the deportation of fifty-two Jewish children from an orphanage in the village of Izieu.

Of all Barbie’s monstrous crimes, the murder of the orphans was the most heartless and pointless, carried out only weeks before the end of the war. Izieu, a tiny, remote village of grey stone houses and thirty inhabitants, had scarcely been affected by the war. A Jewish couple who had fled the anti-Semitism of Poland in 1939 had rented an old manor house there at the end of 1942 and converted it into an orphanage. The village initially came under the jurisdiction of the Italian zone and the orphanage was left alone throughout 1945. Most of the children had spent time in French prison camps from which their parents had been deported to their deaths. A young teacher, who came fifteen kilometres each day from the nearest town, noticed how old the children were for their years. ‘They were children who had already lived... they never talked about themselves, their families or their lives. They never said anything. They were very secretive. They were used to being distrustful. They explained nothing, they said nothing.’
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The orphans had suffered horribly, but found refuge in the shabby, rambling manor house that became their new home. In summer, they swam in the rivers and walked in the mountains, and in winter enjoyed snowball fights and tobogganing. They drew pictures for their murdered parents and wrote letters to them. The children retreated into a quiet rural life despite wartime scarcity and hardship.

The Italians left in September 1943, and when the Germans took over there was concern. A Jewish doctor from a neighbouring village was deported, but the orphanage remained untouched. Life continued its tranquil and uneventful course, although the adults lived in a state of permanent anxiety. Madame Sabin Slatin, co-founder of the orphanage with her husband Miron, left for a few days to search for safer premises, and while she was away a dozen German soldiers arrived from Lyon. They drove up in two trucks, followed by Gestapo officers and Milice in an open convertible, and pulled into the courtyard of the manor house. The children were dragged from a breakfast of hot chocolate and bread.

A local farmhand witnessed what happened next: ‘The Germans were loading the children into the trucks brutally, as if they were sacks of potatoes. Most of them were frightened and crying. The little ones who didn’t know what was going to happen were frightened by all the violence. But the older ones knew well where they were going. I knew it was finished for them.’ The children called out to the farmer, and he walked towards them, but a soldier blocked his way and slammed him in the ribs with the stock of a rifle. One of the older boys tried to jump from the back of a truck but was grabbed, beaten and kicked. ‘A German came up to me,’ the farmer said. ‘I’m sure it was Barbie. It’s simply a face one does not forget. For a moment he looked at me, spoke to another German, then said, “Get out!” I left, walking backwards.’
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The children and the adult staff from the orphanage were driven to Montluc prison. That night a telex was sent to SD HQ in Paris: ‘This morning, the Jewish children’s home Colonie d’Enfants in Izieu (Ain) was closed. Forty-one children in all, aged three to thirteen, were pulled from the nest. In addition, the arrest took place of all the Jewish personnel, that is to say ten persons, including five women. We were not able to find any money or other valuables.’ The telex was signed ‘Klaus Barbie’.
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The following day the children were put on a passenger train to Drancy. They were under guard and the older boys were manacled. Miron Slatin and two of the most senior boys were shot at the French fortress Revel. Less than a week later thirty-four of the forty-four children were deported to Auschwitz, along with three hundred other children, on a train carrying a total of fifteen hundred Jews. The journey took two days, and when they arrived they were lined up hand-in-hand on the ramp of the concentration camp in rows of five. The children were all gassed later the same day.

It took four years of legal wrangling after Michel’s first confrontation with Barbie before the actual trial finally got under way. It was not until 11 May 1987 that the defendant stepped into the Lyon courtroom to face his accusers. Michel approached his own day in court with feelings both of fore-boding and high expectation. He dreaded the emotion and memories that Barbie would inevitably stir, but nurtured the simple hope that the trial would force France to face a dark side of its recent history. Even though Vichy was not in the dock, Michel believed that the shameful story of collaboration and betrayal could not fail to be exposed.

The actual experience in court, and the trial itself, were to prove a bitter disappointment. Michel arrived to find an empty chair instead of the defendant. ‘It was a terrible anticlimax for me. I had prepared myself both intellectually and emotionally for the confrontation with Barbie. But the whole trial was conducted with Barbie absent, which was his right under French law. He remained in his comfortable double cell.’

At first, the absence of the man himself confused and threw Michel. Then, as its significance sank in, he became enraged. ‘Where is the defendant?’ he cried out angrily. ‘I expected to confront him! But what I see is an empty chair behind bullet-proof glass. Empty! While the defendant Barbie is comfortable in his two-room apartment next door. To me this is unacceptable!’

Michel then gave a detailed account of the visit in February 1943 to the UGIF offices in Lyon and his subsequent encounter with Barbie. The single exchange Michel had with Barbie’s defence lawyer, Jacques Vergès, was when the attorney asked for the names of people arrested in the office. Michel explained that the only people he recognised were café acquaintances, and even if he had once known their names he could not remember them after almost fifty years.

‘I believed Michel’s evidence absolutely,’ Serge Klarsfeld, who was one of the prosecuting attorneys, said. ‘I knew it was true, and the police knew it was true, because when at the very beginning Michel came to us in Paris he gave us accurate details about the raid on UGIF. He could not have known them unless he was there on that day. But I feared a catastrophe when he gave his testimony in court before a jury, and there was a catastrophe. The jury wanted to see a meek, modest man with sad stories about treatment by Barbie - they wanted a victim. They did not want somebody who was aggressive and defiant and who challenged the procedure of the court. It was not a truth some of them were prepared to believe. There were some witnesses for the prosecution who were lying. But they were old, or crying, or seemed broken, so they were believed. It is a great lesson about the truth people are prepared to believe.’

In addition to his angry demand to have Barbie brought before him in court, Michel had also given his evidence in an anecdotal manner that included an account of his premonition on the stairs of the building, and hearing voices warning him of the presence of the Gestapo. ‘I was naive. I expected to be asked to show documents proving I had been with the Résistance, which I had with me, to establish my credibility. I expected to show the report, signed and stamped by Dax of the Résistance in 1944, of my arrest by the Gestapo in Lyon the previous year, and my subsequent escape. But I was asked no questions by the prosecution and was not given an opportunity to present the documents to the jury.’

Alarmed that some members of the jury did not seem to accept Michel’s account, the chief prosecutor, Pierre Truche, asked for the testimony to be recused. The prosecutor later received Michel in Paris and explained the reasons for his action. He said that as he had listened to the evidence he was reminded of the line by the seventeenth-century French poet Nicolas Boileau: ‘Le vrai peut quelquefois n’etre pas vrai semblable’ - The truth is sometimes unlikely. He explained that he was unable to base the prosecution on testimony that was unlikely, even if true. To convict Barbie, irrefutable documentary evidence was needed, linking him to the crimes.

The experience left Michel deeply wounded and caused him as much pain as anything in his life. A subsequent careless mistranslation of the English subtitles for the documentary on Barbie,
Hotel Terminus
, was yet another blow when it gave the impression that Truche had found the testimony ‘inconsistent’, a word he had never used. He had actually said Michel’s story did not gel for the jury. After the post-war attacks from Mahl and Knittel, the Barbie trial almost provided the hundredth blow of the whip, and Michel staggered beneath it. ‘Not to be believed after what I had been through! To have my integrity questioned! I felt my whole life was dismissed. It was deeply disturbing to me. I was wounded not by my enemies but by those for whom I stood up. It was immensely painful - not for days or weeks, but for ever. I wish I had never gone to the Barbie trial. A hundred times!’