REID: In the dramatic legal format of the French state trial of Klaus Balbi, time and experience are compressed to underscore the larger meaning of the trial of the Nazis who terrorized Lyon as head of the Gestapo from 1942 to 1944.
In the dramatic legal formality of the French state trial of Klaus Balbi, time and experience are compressed to underscore the larger meaning of the trial of the Nazi who terrorized Lyon as head of the Gestapo from 1942 to 1944.
As the witnesses – Jewish and members of the French Resistance – approached the stand and gave their testimony, they seemed to enter another world: for them it was not just a matter of memory, but of reliving, in public for the first time since the war, days, months and years of anguish.
Mr. Barbie, who was the source of that suffering and, at his trial, a symbol of the German occupation, was not surprisingly found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison.
Raymonde Guillon, a young resistance member who was arrested by Barby and taken to Ravensbrück, where her husband was tortured and shot, said in a trembling voice into the microphone: “I feel like I've gone back 43 years.”
Vincent Planck, a Lyon resistance organiser who was tortured and exiled by Barby, spoke emotionally in court, saying that until that moment he had never even spoken to his children about his suffering.
Mario Boulardonnet's mission as a resistance fighter was to assassinate Mr. Barbie. He nearly succeeded, and he appeared before the SS chief in May 1944. Mr. Boulardonnet described 18 days of interrogation and torture, and his subsequent deportation to Dachau.
“I must now say something that many of the women who have testified before me have refrained from saying out of modesty,” he said, recounting his account of sexual torture, sending chills through the auditorium.
The next day, when Mr. Boulardonnet confronted Mr. Barbie for the first time since the war, he trembled before standing up to identify himself. Red with fear and rage, and ignoring the presiding judge's attempts to intervene, he pointed his finger, took a few steps towards Mr. Barbie and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Look at him! An SS man who has been robbed of his whip and machine gun! Cowardice itself!” Afterwards, Mr. Boulardonnet sat down and buried his face in his hands.
As each witness spoke, their suffering was irrevocably transmitted to the collective consciousness of the audience. The momentum of daily testimony made the trial cathartic for survivors and audience alike.
At times it was almost impossible to stay in court. Several witnesses described how newborn babies were systematically killed at Auschwitz: by injection, drowning, or throwing them into fires. What kind of world did the survivors describe?
Fortuné Benguigui was the mother of three of the 44 Jewish children deported on Balbi's orders from the Iziou shelter near Lyon. A victim of Josef Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz and left permanently disabled, Benguigui testified that at the camp she thought she saw her eldest son, 12, among a line of newly arrived children. Then he disappeared. Benguigui's voice broke. In moments like those, the gulf between victim and audience seemed deep. But in moments afterwards, we felt a connection. The courtroom became one of the most intimate places in the world.
During the afternoon break, small groups of observers and witnesses gathered to share snippets of testimony they had missed. We searched for words or simply stood together in a large, quiet space in the hall known as the “Lost Staircase Room.”
Perhaps we are beginning to understand what a crime against humanity means: the violation of a taboo that precedes all other taboos. “Where you are going is worse than death,” Barbie told his victims before their deportation.
But if the full extent of the crimes against humanity – dehumanization and genocide – is difficult to comprehend, then so is the fact that Mr. Barbie (who refused to return to the trial on the third day) and others like him remain loyal to Nazi ideology to this day.
That horrifying fact reminded us of Kurt Waldheim's mishandling of the Vatican and President Reagan's visit to the SS cemetery in Bitburg just two years earlier, and we soon became more keenly aware that political expediency can no longer be allowed to trump deep human suffering.
At the Palace of Justice in Lyon, in the absence of the millions of people murdered, witnesses and survivors spoke out, placing a terrible responsibility on us all.
