Nobel Peace laureate Eli Wiesel told a packed courtroom here Tuesday that the reason for the trial of Klaus Barbie is not simply to bring to justice a Nazi war criminal who had long evaded it, but to remind a forgetful world of the Holocaust.
“This trial is important to remind us of what happened. Justice without memory is incomplete,” the 58-year-old author and Auschwitz survivor declared from the witness stand.
He said he came here, the scene of Barbie’s crimes, “to stop the killer from killing twice. The killer kills twice. First, he kills his victim, then he tries to erase the traces. We must prevent this second death. This is why I am here. This is why this trial is so important.”
He spoke with the same quiet eloquence that raised his books to the stature of classics in his own lifetime, the definitive documentaries of the Holocaust, the word he coined to apply to the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis.
The court listened in rapt attention. The three magistrates and nine jurors seemed spellbound. Prosecutor Pierre Truche shut his thick Barbie file and leaned forward, intent not to miss a word. Only an occasional sob from the public gallery broke the silence of the hushed courtroom.
HIS STORY WELL KNOWN
The entire world knows Wiesel’s history. Plucked from a Hungarian village in 1944 and put aboard a sealed train to the Auschwitz death camp with his family, he alone lives to tell the tale. He told it here again, 43 years almost to the day after his deportation and three days before his son’s 15th birthday, his own age at the time.
Wiesel confessed that more than four decades after the tragedy he fails to understand its meaning. “I still cannot understand how these people, the sons of the most educated and civilized nation in Europe at the time, could have produced these killers,” he said.
“I still fail to understand the members of the Sonderkommandos (the squads who carried out the tortures and murders) could have been doctors, lawyers, artists, music lovers who had killed by day and returned to their homes in the evening to read poetry and listen to classical music.”
The Nazis were obsessed with killing Jews, Wiesel told the court. The deportation trains carrying the victims to death camps were given priority over military trains taking troops, arms and supplies to the Eastern front where the German army was then falling back under the Soviet counter-offensive.
Wiesel spoke for 20 minutes, but his words encompassed years of horrors. “There are some things about which I cannot speak, like the death of my little sister, the suffering of my father, the death of my mother, lest I start weeping,” he said.
At that point, a lawyer present read part of his statement. Then Wiesel continued:
“We arrived at Auschwitz in the afternoon. I remember it all, the barbed wires stretching to infinity, the screams of the welcoming committee, the shots fired by the SS, the barking of their dogs and the huge flames reaching up to high heaven as if to devour it.
“I remember how in a little forest near Birkenau I saw the SS throw small, live children into the fire. In the city of Kiev, I saw a group of laughing German soldiers stop a mother and her two children. They took one of her children and killed it before her eyes. Then they took the second and killed it as well. She wanted to die, but the killers preferred her alive. I can see her today as she then picked up the two small bodies, drew them close to her chest and started dancing. How can I narrate such a scene? How can I understand the evil which hurts more than pain?
“Maybe one of the worst things which happened was to see others suffer. For a son to see his father in pain, for a father to see his son tortured. All the victims are my brethren. We bear them love and admiration,” Wiesel declared.
ALL JEWS WERE VICTIMS
He added: “All the victims were not Jewish, but all the Jews were the victims. For the first time in history an entire nation, from the oldest to the youngest, from the richest to the poorest, were sentenced to death. The aim of the enemy was to uproot them, to erase them from history, to kill their very memory. Being a Jew was a capital crime for which capital punishment was provided.”
He recalled that “Even the Germans realized the insanity of this situation. An SS man told a Jew: ‘Even if you were to survive and tell what happened, no one would believe you.'”
“This is the problem,” Wiesel said. “Who has not lived through it will never really understand it. This trial is important to remind us of what happened. Justice without memory is incomplete. The number of survivors is becoming smaller every day. It is for them, but also for the dead, for their children and for yours that this trial is important. Forgetfulness is a crime just like Auschwitz was absolute evil.”
TRIAL PRACTICALLY FINISHED
In a way, with Wiesel’s testimony, the trial of Barbie is practically over. What may be heard from now on and the verdict itself could be anti-climactic.
Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyon charged with crimes against humanity for the torture, murder and deportation of thousands of Jews and resistance fighters, will at most receive a life sentence. Capital punishment has been abolished in France. He is 73, reportedly in poor health. Under French law, which allows the defendant to be absent from his trial, Barbie has boycotted the proceedings since May 13, two days after they started.
In his brief appearances in the dock he personified the arrogant, unrepentant Nazi, claiming he was being held and tried illegally. Many feel outraged that he was not forced to be confronted by the testimonies of Wiesel and other witnesses.
VERGES REVOLTS COURT
His lawyer, Jacques Verges, jolted and revolted the court Tuesday when he resorted to an irrelevancy to challenge Wiesel. He asked the Holocaust survivor what he thought of French collaborators.
“I did not live through that period (in France),” Wiesel replied. “I knew a generous France which welcomed me after the war. The trial of that (wartime) France must take place one day. It must confront its memories, it must go through a lucid examination of its past. But not in this context, not in the context of this trial.” The purpose of Verges’ question then became apparent. “Do you think that Israel should in its turn do the same for the murder of Arab children in Deir Yassin?” the lawyer asked.
Wiesel replied, “I am fully in solidarity with Israel and I find it regrettable that the lawyer of a man accused of such horrible crimes as Barbie is should accuse the Jewish people. Is it all he has to say?”
Reprimanded by presiding Judge Andre Cerdini, who warned Verges he was “no longer dealing with the trial,” the lawyer managed to get in the last word amid angry shouts of protest from the gallery. “So it is the French alone who have to cast a lucid look at their history? What I want is that all nations be given the same treatment,” he said.
Two other witnesses followed Wiesel on the stand: Ita Halaunbrenner, whose two daughters were among the 44 Jewish children from the village of Izieu deported to Auschwitz by Barbie; and Fortunee Benguigui, whose three sons were in the same convoy.
Halaunbrenner, 86, said she waited 43 years for this moment. She had even gone to Bolivia with Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld in 1972 to try in vain to have Barbie deported. On the witness stand she was barely able to speak. She shook her fist at the empty prisoners’ dock. “The name of my misfortune is called Klaus Barbie,” she said in a trembling voice. “Justice, all I want is justice.”
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