WE SPENT MUCH of the four years prior to the Barbie trial in preparation for that event.
I got used to taking my lawyer’s robes with me when I traveled to Lyon for meetings with the excellent investigating judge Christian Riss. Along with my colleagues Charles Libman and Richard Zelmati, I represented more than a hundred plaintiffs. The judge met with all of them, and they told him their stories.
At the same time, I started writing a book about the children of Izieu, a crucial subject for the trial. To write it, I had to reconstruct the background of the family of each of those forty-four children. For the trial, I had to find a plaintiff for each child. This seemed an impossible task, but Beate and I managed it; we even got hold of a photograph of each child. We found our plaintiffs not only in France, but in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Israel, the United States, Brazil, and Australia. So many trips, and so many documents! Each plaintiff was heard by a judge and had to prove kinship with the child they wished to represent.
In Le Monde, we published articles about Barbie’s collaboration with the American secret services. Judge Ryan, who was director of the Office of Special Investigations, responsible for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, came to see us and left with a good haul of documents, which he used in compiling his famous report on Barbie. This report led to an official U.S. apology to France for having recruited, protected, and exfiltrated Barbie.
I was present for the confrontations between some of my plaintiffs and Barbie, an experience that made me realize just how traumatizing such face-to-face meetings could be for the victims.
Barbie expressed his desire to speak with me; I refused. No dialogue was possible between him and me. What struck me most during the investigation and the trial itself was the fact that some of the witnesses whom I knew to be the most credible were also the ones who were the least believed because they seemed fragile or unlikable, while others, who seemed less credible to me, convinced their listeners through their self-confidence and articulateness.
I remember one Holocaust survivor, a man who had lost his brother, saying that Barbie had set his dog on him, and the dog had bitten him in the thigh. Barbie responded sarcastically, “A dog! Mrs. Lagrange saw me with a cat in my arms; now it’s a dog! Apparently, I had a whole pet store at my beck and call…” I sensed that the judge was dubious, that this story of the dog seemed too clichéd. We left the prison for the judge’s office, and he showed me a dossier with an unopened seal; it had been sent from Lyon, and it concerned a woman, identified in an anonymous phone call to me, who was suspected of being Barbie’s mistress. He opened it. In fact, the woman had been the mistress of another Gestapo agent, but in the dossier she told how, during a torture session that she had attended, she had told her lover to ask Barbie to call off his dog, which was biting the prisoner. That deposition had been made in 1946. For the judge and for me, this was an important reminder that, even if the criminal can sometimes appear more credible than the victim, we must always check the facts.
Barbie was trying to put a brave face on it, but it was clear that he considered his forced return to Lyon a defeat for Nazism, to which he remained loyal even if he didn’t have the courage to proclaim that fact. As for his lawyer, Jacques Vergès, whom I knew slightly, I could foresee his strategy all too well: he was going to claim that Barbie had been abducted; he was going to denigrate the Resistance, threatening to reveal the truth about this or that Resistance member; and he was going to confuse the issue by claiming that the Izieu telex was a forgery.
Thankfully, this trial was conducted in exemplary fashion. It went exactly as we wanted, and not at all as Barbie and his lawyer would have wished. Members of our association of Sons and Daughters came to each hearing en masse to support us, and all the lawyers on our side, representing a vast number of plaintiffs, acted together with surprising coherence and efficiency.
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FOR BEATE AND MYSELF, the trial in Lyon was less important than the one in Cologne, where Hagen and Lischka, two very high-ranking organizers of the Final Solution, had been tried. Moreover, the Cologne trial resolved a major legal issue between France and Germany. For the international media, however, the Lyon trial was more sensational, because Barbie corresponded to the stereotype of the criminal who flees to the ends of the earth but cannot escape punishment.
I spent three months in Lyon, staying in a small fourth-floor apartment in a building with no elevator. All the same, the place was so ideally located—directly opposite the front entrance of the courthouse—that, to me, it was better than Vergès’s five-star hotel, even if my landlady’s cat (which I had to look after) would dig its claws into my chest every night when I lay down in bed.
During the first hearing, Barbie once again blamed all his troubles on “that woman [Beate] coming to Bolivia.” His lawyer played the kidnapping card and withdrew Barbie from the stand. The next day, most of the international media had disappeared. Only the French were left.
The other prosecution lawyers were furious that Barbie had given up on his own trial. But I wasn’t. Because it was a lot easier dealing with Vergès than with Barbie. The lawyer had a poor grasp of the dossiers and objected to only a few witnesses; he let the others talk, and they impressed the jury with their dignity and their horrific accounts of physical and psychological torture. Without Barbie there to intimidate them, they were able to express themselves freely.
I prepared my closing speech in the Café des Négociants in Lyon, and it was my son, Arno, who, reading the draft, advised me to add, after mentioning the fate of each child, a phrase that repeated the child’s first name: “Hans did not return”; “Monique did not return.” An article in Libération described the effect of this speech:
Serge Klarsfeld does not plead. He doesn’t wave his arms about or use any vocal effects; he doesn’t speak in a sad voice; he doesn’t act like a lawyer at all. No, Klarsfeld reads. And what he reads … is devastating. Klarsfeld the historian, the campaigner, the Nazi hunter, the lawmaker haunted by the memory of Izieu’s forty-four children. Klarsfeld, who simply reads out the names of those children, as if he is taking attendance at school. Forty-four names, recited in deathly silence. And their ages. And a few of the letters that they wrote to their parents prior to April 6, 1944. He reads their words. Brings them into the room. A shudder runs through us … Vergès looks tense; he takes these blows. We all do.
At the end of my speech, Vergès walked over to me and offered me his hand. I refused to shake it. He was our enemy, and I was not at the theater. I did not listen to his speech; I had no doubt that it would be so despicable that remaining silent, as I had to do out of respect for the court, would have been unbearable.
The night of the verdict, about 2:00 a.m., after Barbie had been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, I walked to Montluc Prison to gather my thoughts. At Montluc, I needed to be alone with the souls of those who had suffered there so much. I thanked the Almighty, the power of human will, and fate for having helped me get through that sixteen-year ordeal.