Was He Normal? Human?

By Elie Wiesel

The author, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was 15 years old when the Nazis entered his hometown of Sighet, Hungary, in 1944. Miraculously he managed to survive the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and at war's end he became a journalist in Paris. He would not speak out about the unspeakable for ten years. When that self-imposed vow of silence ended, he devoted his life to writing and talking, with rare eloquence and power, about the despair of the past and the concerns of the present. Now a U.S. citizen, Wiesel, 56, has written some 30 books and is widely acknowledged, in the words of the Nobel committee chairman, as a "messenger to mankind." Later this month he will testify in the case of The State of France v. Klaus Barbie.

I remember the nearsighted, balding man in his glass cage in Jerusalem. During the April-to-December trial in 1961, I listened to witnesses whose words and silences contained the tormented memory of an entire people. Yet I was not watching them. Most of the time I was watching the defendant. It was to see him that I had come to Israel, anxious to find out for myself if he was human, if there was any humanity in him. I had hoped to find myself in the presence of a disfigured creature, a monster whose unspeakable crimes would be clearly legible in his three-eyed face. I was disappointed: Adolf Eichmann seemed quite normal, a man like other men -- he slept well, ate with good appetite, deliberated coolly, expressed himself clearly and was able to smile when he had to. The architect of the Final Solution was banal, just as Hannah Arendt had said.

Will the same now be said of Klaus Barbie, who was less important but whose work was no less cruel? Barbie's trial is bound to attract worldwide attention. People are already saying this will be the last great courtroom drama to result from the Holocaust. They may be right.

For even behind bars, Barbie throws a long shadow. From the day of his capture, there were whispers that retribution could bring political catastrophe: the prisoner knows too much about too many. His lawyer is Jacques Verges, most recently the defender of the Arab terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, sentenced last February to life imprisonment by a French tribunal for complicity in the killings of two diplomats, one of them an American, and in the attempted murder of a third. With Verges' help, Barbie is quite capable of turning the tables, of forcing a trial of France under the Occupation.

But despite these fears, there will be a Judgment Day. The official examination of Klaus Barbie begins on May 11 in Lyons, France. No one knows how the story will end. But we know now how it all began.

Barbie, who grew up in Trier, a small town in Germany, and dreamed of becoming a minister, first arrived in Lyons at the age of 28. He was assigned the task of fighting the Resistance and getting rid of the Jews. The young, dedicated Nazi excelled at his job. He is accused of having executed 4,000 people and deported 7,500 Jews. His career grew so bloodstained that he was dubbed the "Butcher of Lyons." Yet only a fragment of that past will be weighed in the deliberations: the accusation is primarily concerned with the 44 Jewish children who, along with their guardians, were arrested on his orders in the village of Izieu and then sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

How can Barbie justify what was done to the children of Izieu? Here, the proofs of his crimes are beyond dispute: the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the best known of his pursuers, have turned up a striking document: "This morning, the Jewish children's home, 'Children's Colony,' at Izieu has been removed. 41 children in all, aged 3 to 13, have been captured. Beyond that, the arrest of all the Jewish personnel has taken place, namely 10 individuals, among them 5 women. It was not possible to secure any money or other valuables. Transportation to Drancy will take place on 4/7/44." The arrest order is signed in the name of Klaus Barbie.

This trial represents an extraordinary victory for Beate Klarsfeld, who, as it happens, was born and raised in Germany. A victory over the forgetfulness, the willingness to compromise, the indifference that an overly politicized world has shown for too long toward escaped SS killers. A victory too over the governments that helped Barbie. It was the Klarsfelds who picked up his trail -- he had disappeared for almost 40 years into the identity of a prosperous and peaceful businessman named Klaus Altmann living in Bolivia. They were the ones who managed to persuade Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government to act, to induce the Bolivian government to expel "Altmann" so that he could be returned to the country of his crimes.

The former head of the Gestapo at Lyons re-entered France on Feb. 5, 1983. On orders from Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, he was locked in the same Montluc prison where his own victims had been subjected to maltreatment and torture. It is said he spent his first night in the very cell Badinter's father occupied before he was deported to Auschwitz, never to return.

How had Barbie eluded prosecution, not to say detection, for so long? For one thing, he had collaborated with the American Counter Intelligence Corps in postwar Europe, supplying information about Communist activities in Germany and Austria. The services of the CIC made it possible for him to flee to South America. (Most ironically, it was a young Jewish officer, 23-year-old Leo Hecht, who was ordered to provide him with his false travel documents.) For another, he had powerful friends throughout Europe. It is known that an international network existed after World War II to aid war criminals. No such escape system was ever created for their victims.

Will Barbie tell us how the network operated? Will he reveal the identity of his highly placed friends? If he does, other questions are certain to arise. The upper echelons of the CIC knew what Barbie had done; how could they reward him for it? Even in the first frosts of the cold war, was it really necessary to call upon individuals like the Butcher of Lyons? Where was honor in all this? And memory?

The French have even more to fear from the revelations or digressions of their special prisoner. Ever since Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity unreeled in Europe and America, people have stopped believing in the myth that France united to resist the occupying forces. On the contrary, France under Petain fully collaborated with Hitler's Germany. It handed its Jews over to the Nazi executioners -- 76,000 were deported, few came back. French militia competed with the Gestapo for efficiency. French police organized the roundups. Will the nation be forced to remember its sins? Or will its citizens allow themselves to be manipulated by Barbie and Verges, who will certainly try to show that even the Resistance was not blameless? That Jean Moulin, a leader of the Resistance who died under the hands of Barbie, was betrayed by his own comrades? In a different domain and on another level, there is some concern that the trial will conveniently and simplistically group the various victims together -- dump them all into the same file: Jews and Resistance fighters, Jews and anti-Nazis, Jews and political prisoners. In other words, that the specific, the unique, even ontological aspect of the Jewish tragedy will be lost.

Verges and Barbie will probably try to blur the distinctions. They may go further and remind France that the nation was itself guilty of torture and murder during the Algerian conflict. War is war, they may say. In war everything is allowed. As Barbie remarked to one journalist, "The point is to win. It doesn't matter how."

In fact, The State of France v. Klaus Barbie is not a matter of war. It is a matter of truth. In Lyons, Barbie will have to answer not for his war crimes but for his crimes against humanity. For these there is no statute of limitations. He will have to explain, for example, why he condemned the Jewish children of Izieu. Listen to the words of one of those children, eleven-year-old Liliane Gerenstein, in a letter scrawled to God before she was taken on the road that led to the gas chambers: "It is thanks to You that I enjoyed a wonderful life before, that I was spoiled, that I had lovely things, things that others do not have. God? Bring back my parents, my poor parents, protect them (even more than myself) so that I may see them again as soon as possible. Have them come back one more time. Oh! I can say that I have had such a good mother, and such a good father! I have such faith in You that I thank You in advance." Of what was this child guilty?

No, Lyons will not provide a restaging of the Eichmann trial. Barbie did not make policy. He was only a regional executioner, a local hangman -- he merely participated, did what he was told. His operations only extended to Lyons and its surroundings. Yet if Klaus Barbie was not "important," his trial is. It can serve a vital purpose, for future generations and for our own. Certain witnesses have to be heard; certain truths have to be uttered, repeated. Will they clarify the mystery of what happened? It does not seem possible. The determination of the killer to kill, the passivity of the bystander are likely to remain incomprehensible. There is something about this Event that eludes rational thought. Only those who were there know what it meant to be there. The others can, at best, come close to the gate. There they must stop. They will never see the fire. They will never witness the sight of children thrown into flames alive. They will never experience the fear of selections for the execution chambers. Knowledge can be shared; experience cannot. Surely not in matters related to Auschwitz.

Still, we must hear the testimonies, from the victims, and from Klaus Barbie himself. For in the end they may help us to understand the deeper motivations of a Nazi killer who chose to make himself the enemy of those children and who even now thinks of himself as innocent. Was he normal, like Eichmann? Human, perhaps?

Poor humanity.