The Courtroom (1987)

To those following the trial, it was crystal clear by 1987, that "the historical show trial originally desired by both the Resistance and the Jews would probably not take place."¹ Over the previous four years, the seemingly simple process of bringing Klaus Barbie to justice turned into a quagmire of legal problems. Ironically, those problems were brought about on the most part by quarrels within the prosecution rather than the usual antics of defense lawyers. There were two large obstacles for the prosecution to clear before it could formally try to convict Barbie. First was choosing the crimes for which Barbie should be tried and the second, stemming from the first, was figuring out if French law would permit Barbie to be tried for those crimes.

The problem of choosing the crimes for which Barbie was to be tried was so severe that it came close to preventing the trial from ever taking place. When Judge Christian Riss, the young magistrate whose job it was to prepare the government's case against against Barbie, asked if anyone would be willing to press personal charges against Barbie, he got plenty of responses. Too many responses, in fact. A total of forty-two different lawyers, each representing a different group with a different charge against Barbie, appeared before the judges in Lyon to file their claims. There were lawyers representing various factions of the Resistance, there were lawyers representing Jews, and there were lawyers representing the citizens of Lyon. Each group believed it had the right to see Barbie tried for his crimes against them, and each group would be sorely disappointed if Barbie were not to answer to the pain they had to live with for forty years. To address each and every complaint against Barbie, however, would require a resource neither the prosecution nor France had, time.

When Judge Riss began selecting the crimes for which he sought to prosecute Klaus Barbie, his goal was to win as quickly and as solidly as possible. For the dozens of groups and individuals who wanted Barbie brought to justice for his crimes against them, there would be disappointments. What started as disappointment soon turned to anger and, before long, the prosecution had split into two camps. There were those who wanted Barbie tried for the murders, torture, and coercion he used against the Resistance, and there were those who wanted Barbie punished for his role in the Final Solution. On one hand, many former members of the Resistance, especially those who had experienced Barbie's tortures firsthand, did not view his deportations of Jews as his real crimes. The deportations, they argued, were conducted by Barbie as part of his administrative work, and not something of own his initiative. On the other hand, the Jews argued that Barbie's acts against the Resistance were merely part of his duty as a police officer and that his real crimes were sending whole families to die in the gas chambers. As Elie Wiesel put it, there lay in the trial the potential for a crime even worse than the Holocaust, forgetting the Holocaust.² Thus, before Barbie had even entered the courtroom, he had already managed to turn his two most dangerous enemies, the Resistance and the Jews, against each other.

For a while it seemed as if the prosecution would be torn apart by the two groups, but fortunately cooler heads on both sides prevailed. They pointed out that many Jews were active résistants and that many résistants were packed in the same trains that carried the Jews to near-certain death. The two sides declared a truce, albeit uneasy, since many still quietly blamed the other side for preventing Barbie from being brought to "full" justice. For the time being, though, the desire to see Barbie punished for something substantial was enough to keep the various factions of the prosecution united. Moreover, there was the fear that Klaus Barbie, this man who had so many victims that they fought each other to decide who got to punish him, would escape all justice by dying of old age before his victims could decide on his punishment.

While Barbie's victims were bickering over how to try and punish Barbie, the prosecution was facing an even more formidable challenge, navigating the minefield of the French penal code. When he arrived in France, Barbie faced eight charges:

1. The massacre of 22 hostages in the basement of the Gestapo building during the summer of 1943.
2. The arrest and torture of 19 people during the summer of 1943.
3. The roundup of 86 people from the U.G.I.F. offices on February 9, 1943.
4. The shooting of 42 people (40 of whom were Jewish) as reprisal killings during the years of 1943 and 1944.
5. The roundup, torture, and deportation of SNCF railway workers on August 9, 1944.
6. The deportation to Auschwitz of 650 people (50% Jews, 50% résistants ) on the last train to leave Lyon.
7. The shooting of 70 Montluc prisoners at Bron on August 17, 1944 and on August 20, 1944. Two of those executed were priests.
8. The arrest and deportation of 55 Jews (52 of whom were children) from the children's refuge at Izieu.

After passing the charges through the rigors of the French legal system all but three were dropped. All charges against Barbie that could be considered "war crimes" had to be dropped under the Statute of Limitations because Barbie had been gone for more than twenty years. Another dimension of the Statute of Limitations is that it is a convenient tool by which to amnesty people. The Fourth Republic's bureaucrats used it to forget Vichy. The Resistance used it to forget Algeria. And Barbie would use it to forget Lyon. Thus, the very law the French had passed in order to amnesty their own war criminals had backfired. The result was paradoxical: not only had Klaus Barbie escaped two death sentences, he would not be punishable for the crimes for which he had been sentenced to death because of those same death sentences. The Statute of Limitations did not, however, include "crimes against humanity," and it would be for those crimes that Barbie was tried.

Nuremburg distinguished between "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." Crimes designated as "crimes against humanity" were, because of the grave nature of their intent, deemed incircumventable. Consequentially, in the fifty years since the Nuremburg trials, Nazi criminals like Barbie have consistently been brought to trial once they were flushed out of their hiding places. Most, but certainly not all, of those accused of crimes against humanity were given extremely heavy sentences. Therefore, if the prosecution could prove that Barbie had the intent of following an "ideological hegemony"3 when he killed, tortured, and deported, then he could be found guilty of "crimes against humanity." Ironically, Barbie's defense team was centering its case around the same sort of crime, but in the defense's view, the perpetrator was not Barbie.

At one o'clock in the afternoon on May 11, 1987, the trial of Klaus Barbie finally began. André Cerdini, the leader of the court's three judges, or "President of the Court," as the French called him, sat down and asked for the accused to be brought forward. Below Cerdini were seated the lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense. Of the forty-five lawyers present in the court, five represented Klaus Barbie. The defense team, led by Jacques Vergès, consisted of lawyers from Third-World countries "In this trial made in the name of humanity," explained Vergès, "it was important that the defense was made of the colors of the human rainbow: black, white, brown, and yellow."⁴ Barbie probably approved of having a multi-racial defense team because he thought their presence would discredit his reputation as a diehard racist. His Asian, African, and Arab lawyers, however, had completely different reasons for being present at the trial.

The other forty lawyers represented the various parties of the prosecution. Some represented the French government, others the city of Lyon, but the largest group, including Serge Klarsfeld, represented the victims. In the benches normally reserved for the public sat the one hundred witnesses who would be called to give testimony over the next few weeks. The best seats in the house were occupied by the most important group, the fourteen jurors⁵ who would be called upon to judge Klaus Barbie, the Third Reich, and ultimately France. As one reporter pointed out, the jurors were much younger than most of the other people in the courtroom: "The jurors are fairly young men and women, the oldest being fifty-one years old, all the others being born after 1940."⁶ The age gap between the jurors and the accused was regarded by the press as one of the most significant aspects of Barbie's trial. The jurors were hand-picked and approved by both the defense and the prosecution. Vergès hoped that the young jurors, who not adults during the Occupation, would have a more objective view of Barbie's crimes and, more importantly, of what France did in the forty years that Barbie was absent. The prosecution approved of the young jurors for the same reason. Their logic was that Barbie's punishment would have even more weight if he were tried by those who never suffered at his hands. Appropriately chosen or not, Barbie's young jurors were irremovable once in place.

Next to the jury box was the witness stand and the first person to be called forth for testimony was Klaus Barbie. For weeks, the French general public had been prepared by the press for this very event. During those weeks, the daily papers had published haunting recollections of Barbie's crimes and passionate essays on the necessity of condemning Barbie. Along with almost every article about Klaus Barbie appeared another name, that of Jacques Vergès, who made no effort to hide what he planned for the upcoming trial. The French would put Barbie on trial and Vergès would put France on trial. For every crime attributed to Klaus Barbie, Vergès found a corresponding crime attributed to the French. "French society is sick," exhorted Vergès in an interview in the popular weekly, L'Evènement, "it does not want to recognize the lies on which it constructed its existence."⁷ From his tirades in the press it became evident that if Barbie were to be convicted, France would have to judge itself in the process. With Vergès, the very epitome of the history France so badly wanted to forget, as Barbie's lawyer, there was no way around it. The trial thus took on yet another dimension, not only was it going to be about Klaus Barbie, the Third Reich, and France, it would be about memory and memory's legacy, history. In the same issue in which it interviewed Vergès, L'Evènement issued a warning about the role history would play in Barbie's trial: History is not and will not ever be objective. It is and will always be a contestable reconstruction and it exists without ceasing to be modified to the demands of the circumstances..."⁸

The trial would be about the intertwining questions of morality and history. Were the French any different than Nazis? Were the Jews any different than Nazis? Was anyone any different than the Nazis? Down to his very core, Jacques Vergès believed the answer was "no." Supporting him were "Revisionist" historians who argued that the Holocaust was merely one in a long string of human catastrophes brought about by the nature of humanity and the nature of war.⁹ Thus, to get their client off the hook the defense sought to prove that his crimes were no different than the crimes of those who judged him. By that logic, all Vergès had to do was compare the crimes of Barbie, "a small criminal against humanity," with the crimes of French imperialism.¹⁰ If Vergès could convince the French that they had no right to judge a little old man just doing his job because of the corrupt nature of their society, then Klaus Barbie would walk free. If Vergès failed to convince the French that the crimes of their society were essentially no different than those of Klaus Barbie, he could provide concrete evidence for his long-held claim that French society was fundamentally corrupt.

There were many ways Vergès could have defended Klaus Barbie. Vergès could have tried to diminish Barbie's importance by comparing his crimes with those of higher-ranked Gestapo and S.S. officials. Barbie was only a Lieutenant, and he had certainly not thought of the Final Solution all by himself. Just as easily, Vergès could have demonstrated that Barbie was a man who obeyed orders without questioning them. Vergès could have also showed how much Barbie had changed over the past forty years, because very little evidence existed of Barbie's activities during the 50s and 60s. Vergès could have done all those things, but he did not and, in failing to do so, he revealed the true nature of his presence at the trial. The truth is that Vergès could not have cared less about the fate of his client. Thus, when Klaus Barbie was called sit in the box of the accused, Vergès did not defend, he attacked. Vergès did not attack to defend, he attacked to harm French society because he wanted to the French to answer to their past and because he wanted make people stop thinking of the Holocaust whenever they heard the word Israel.

Opposing Vergès were the victims of Barbie's actions against the Resistance and of the role he played within the greater framework of the Final Solution. Like the defense, the prosecution saw that Barbie's trial was about history and not just a lone henchman. When Barbie's victims heard what Vergès had in mind for the trial, many were outraged and scared, because just as Vergès believed he had a broader historical perspective on the trial, so did they. Vergès was an elegant speaker and many of the victims feared that he would use the occasion to make a mockery out of the French judicial system and more importantly out of Resistance and the Holocaust. An editorial in Le Nouvel Observateur entitled "Why do you menace us so, Vergès?" captured the anxiety of the victims quite well: "For the last few weeks, Jacques Vergès, whose dramatic genius must be saluted, and who takes from that one of the lead roles, has succeeded in putting France in a state of hypnosis."¹¹ A state of hypnosis, it must be kept in mind, is the product of illusion and many of the victims took solace in that. What kept victims' hope from collapsing was their belief that they had on their side the undeniable truth. It is true that Klaus Barbie shattered lives and it is true that the Holocaust happened, but it is also true that when faced with the truth, justice does not always prevail. Their hope was that nothing, not even a vengeful Jacques Vergès, could prevent the world from hearing their testimony and, in the process, recognize their pain. They figured not even Vergès' most ferocious attack could withstand their sincerity: "So, compare, denounce, dear monsieur Vergès," challenged Le Nouvel Observateur, "it will not discomfort us, well to the contrary, because you will surely find...enough men and women will want to return to the essential; to explain."¹²

The entire first day of the trial of Klaus Barbie, France, and history itself, was devoted to just one thing, reading off the list of crimes Klaus Barbie's crimes. Ordinarily, specifying the crime takes only a few minutes, but the Klaus Barbie was no ordinary criminal. For hours on end, the prosecution recited the list of all the crimes Barbie had been accused of before specifying for which ones they were seeking charges. In Plantu's political cartoon on the "Une" of the next day's Le Monde, the list of Barbie's crimes is so ludicrously long it extends beyond of the cartoon's frame, falls down the rest of the page and spills over onto the next page. Of Barbie's hundreds of crimes, including murders, torture, rape, deportation, and more, only those of the gravest nature, the crimes against humanity, would be pursued.

After the recitation of the list of crimes was finished, midway through the second day of the trial, Vergès got to his feet and demanded that his client be set free immediately. He claimed Barbie had been kidnapped illegally by France and was being tried twice for the same crimes, something not legal in the French judicial system, which he proceeded to claim was corrupt. Truche, the head prosecution attorney, fired back, "...Barbie will not be condemned for the same deeds twice...in '54, the word 'deportation' hadn't been pronounced."¹³

Vergès was ready with a disruptive response, "'Deportation?' The word is employed today with audacity. The people who left, left for Drancy, the trains left Lyon...for Paris."¹⁴ Technically, Vergès was correct, being sent from Lyon to Paris was not deportation in the strictest sense of the word, but everyone knew the eventual fate of the passengers aboard those trains. Vergès' transparent claim had been crafted to shock his audience, and it worked. In a mere thirty seconds, Vergès had established the tone for the entire trial.

Vergès would question everything, and when he could, he would accuse. As waves of distressed murmurs swept through the audience, Klaus Barbie's confidence began to build. Probably he perceived that his lawyer was trying to establish that his crimes were merely part of a soldier's duty and therefore not testable under the aegis of Nuremburg's "crimes against humanity." Barbie's confidence had built so much in the tense atmosphere Vergès had created that he chose to speak for the first time. Like his counterparts who were tried at Nuremburg thirty-seven years before, Barbie claimed that he was only taking orders. He was only a cog in the machine and why should he be punished if he was only doing his job. But before he could say anything more that could possibly incriminate him, Barbie was silenced by his own lawyer.¹⁵ Normally, a lawyer is supposed to let his client do as he pleases, but Vergès was no average lawyer, and he did not want Barbie spoiling his case. Barbie's little speech on how he was only executing orders had enormous potential to ruin Vergès' whole strategy of disruption. If Barbie incriminated himself, as he was doing whenever he spoke, then the trial would not drag on as Vergès hoped it would. Barbie was stealing his lawyer's spotlight and after all, the trial belonged to Vergès, not Barbie.

The next day, Vergès had solved the problem of the outbursts from his client. Following the interrogations on Barbie's background, in which Barbie again revealed that he was still "an honest Nazi" and emphasized that he just "doing his job" during the Occupation, Vergès handed Barbie a statement to read.¹⁶ The written statement was a surprise, even to Barbie, given that he read it silently before reading it aloud in German. As the translation came through, it appeared that Vergès' savvy had seized the day once again:

Mister prosecutor, I would like to say that I am a Bolivian citizen and that if I am present here it his because I have been deported illegally...And I ask of you, your honor, the president to take me back to the Saint Joseph's Prison. I place it fully in the hands of my lawyer to defend my honor in front of justice, despite the climate of vengeance [and] the lynching campaign set forth by the French media."¹⁷

While Vergès was waiting for the ideal time to strike, the prosecution began interviewing its witnesses. Over the next three weeks, the prosecution called forth and extensively interviewed fifty-eight different witnesses. The prosecution limited the number of witnesses, of which there were probably several hundred, because they wanted to avoid conflicting stories between witnesses. If one witness' account conflicted with any other's, then the whole trial could be thrown out. Besides being limited in numbers, the prosecution witnesses were usually victims of Barbie's lesser atrocities. The thousands who bore the full brunt of Barbie's crimes were dead and as one paper put it, each witness represented about fifty victims.¹⁸ Many witnesses were also selected because they had confronted Barbie personally at one time or another and could point their fingers at him in the courtroom.

Although they were spared death, did not mean many of the witnesses did not suffer. One witness, thirteen years old when she was interrogated by Barbie, recalled the trauma of the water torture Barbie frequently employed: " 'You'll talk,' said Barbie. In the bath, when he pulled up my head, I was thinking, 'what would happen if I didn't speak?'...It was said that you must swallow right away in order to drown yourself. I couldn't. I never recovered from the torture."¹⁹ Another women who was interrogated by Barbie at least nineteen times refused to give the court the full details of her torture session: "It was there [at Gestapo headquarters] that I had my back cut open with a stick that had on its end a ball with spikes. I excuse myself from recollecting the rest."²⁰

According to those present at the trial, the court was visibly shaken by many of the testimonies. Often the air was filled with a heavy silence as yet another witness, whose aging was accelerated by the trauma of his or her encounter with Barbie, had to stop in order to regain enough composure to continue speaking. "Her eyewitness account made the courtroom cry,"²¹ recalled one journalist after the testimony of a women who was forced to watch Barbie's men beat her father to death before she would face an even greater nightmare in the death camps.

As witness after witness recollected the horror of their encounters with Barbie, the evidence mounted against the accused. Moreover, the prosecution was still weeks away from resting its case. During the third week of the trial, the prosecution began its attack on Barbie in earnest. But before they brought forth their most powerful witnesses and most powerful accusations, the prosecution attempted to defuse Jacques Vergès by interviewing a witness who was hand-picked to give Vergès a taste of his own medicine by questioning his morals. The witness was André Frossard, a Catholic résistant who was arrested by Barbie in 1943 and who we last saw hanging over a bathtub during a "reinforced interrogation" session. When Frossard was sent to Montluc, he wound up in the "Jewish Barracks" and during his incarceration he discovered the the difference between "war crime" and "crime against humanity." Besides being an intelligent writer and a eloquent speaker, Frossard had crossed paths with Jacques Vergès before. This is where the plot thickens, for it turns out that that Vergès owed Frossard an enormous debt. Specifically, Vergès owed Frossard the life of his wife, Djamila Bouhired. When Bouhired was condemned to death in 1956 for planting two café bombs, her execution seemed imminent. Her attorney had been a young Jacques Vergès and, although Vergès proved more than able to disrupt the court, he could not prevent his client from being sentenced to death. Then, a few days after her condemnation an article entitled "No, no, no!" appeared in L'Aurore, the same paper in which Zola wrote "J'accuse."²² The author of the article was André Frossard, and he pleaded against the death penalty for the young woman and tried to fill in the gaps that her lawyer had missed while he was busy "attacking the prosecution." The article was well-received and because of the public uproar caused by it, Bouhired was spared execution and eventually released. If anyone in the courtroom had any sort of moral control over the loose cannon Vergès, it was Frossard, and perhaps, hoped the prosecution, Frossard could talk some sense into him.

As a witness at the Barbie trial, Frossard's mission was to force Jacques Vergès to spell out exactly how he viewed history and how that history related to Barbie's trial. Specifically Frossard asked Vergès to distinguish between "crime of war" and "crime against humanity." Vergès said there was no difference between the two but Frossard countered by relating his own experience as an inmate in Montluc Prison.²³ Jews, claimed Frossard, were special victims of the Occupation, but Vergès would not budge, and when the interview was over, neither man had changed. After his confrontation with Frossard, Vergès was still unfazed. If anything, the prosecution's plan of throwing Vergès off balance by forcing him to confront Frossard had backfired. During his encounter with Frossard, Vergès got the opportunity to refine his argument that Klaus Barbie's crimes were no different than those of France or Israel. From then on, Vergès would weave his way through even the most imposing evidence against his client. Consequentially, when the prosecution began to present their trump card, the "liquidation" of the children's home at Izieu, Vergès with was ready to put up a real fight.

One by one, every living witness of the events that took place in Izieu on April 22, 1944, was interviewed by the prosecution. Even before the first witness reached the stand, everyone in the court and probably most of France knew exactly what they were going to hear. Ever since the 1985 publication of "The Children of Izieu," a narrative written by the Klarsfelds about how the children hiding in Izieu were so brutally torn away from their young lives, the forty-four "martyred children" had acquired an international following. The smoking gun linking the Izieu tragedy with Klaus Barbie was a single scrap of paper, found by Serge Klarsfeld, which read:

"Forty four children, ages three to thirteen years have been captured in Izieu. In addition, the entire Jewish personnel there were arrested...The transport to Drancy will take place the 7th of April on my orders." ²⁴

The note, printed on the the bureaucratic form paper that the Gestapo used was dated April 6, 1944, and was addressed to Roem, the Gestapo head in Paris. Near the bottom of the page the note was signed "Barbie, SS-Ostuf."²⁵ Before the note could even be presented in court, however, Vergès had already claimed it was a fake. It was, according to Vergès, yet another part of the Zionist plot to justify Israel's existence and its oppression of the Palestinians by morally blackmailing the world with the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The note, claimed Vergès, was therefore a fabrication by the "Zionist..and hitman,"²⁶ Serge Klarsfeld. For its part, the prosecution did not stand by quietly as Vergès tore apart one of their primary pieces of evidence. Experts were called in. From Germany came historians and ex-Nazi bureaucrats who claimed the coding on the note matched that of similar Gestapo deportation orders. From France and the U.S. came handwriting analysts who proved that the signature at the bottom of the page belonged to Klaus Barbie because it matched his signatures on dozens of other forms. After almost a full day of testimony from the expert witnesses, the obvious had been established as true beyond the shadow of a doubt. Vergès, however, was far from giving up.

Keeping with his true purpose for defending Klaus Barbie -- to inject into the mainstream of public thought his views on French society, Israel, and the Third World -- Vergès launched a ferocious attack on the seemingly unquestionable popular account of what had happened at Izieu on April 22, 1944. According to Vergès, it was not the Nazis who were responsible for the deaths of the forty-four children, it was the Jews. Instead of blaming the deaths of the children on the Third Reich's racial policies or on Klaus Barbie's own cruelty, Vergès had placed the entire blame on the victims. The courtroom was shocked but Vergès did not stop there. It was the U.G.I.F., the agency that placed the children in the home in Izieu in the first place that should take the blame, not Klaus Barbie, said Vergès.²⁷ It was the U.G.I.F. that doomed the children by putting them in an unsafe region. It was the U.G.I.F. that kept track of all of those they hid by keeping easy-to-read files. It was the U.G.I.F. that openly collaborated with both Vichy and the Nazis to protect itself. And who ran the U.G.I.F.? The Jews.

Following this logic, what Klaus Barbie had committed was not an act against humanity, but merely a political act, just as Vergès claimed terrorists who blow up airplanes do so only for political reasons. In a political act, there is neither aggressor or victim, but just two (or more) struggling points of view. Following this logic further, if one views the raid at Izieu as a political act, then one can view the whole Holocaust as a political act against Zionism and nothing more. If one can view the Holocaust as a mere political act, then Israel, the land given to the victims of the Holocaust, had absolutely no moral basis. With no moral basis, Israel would become nothing more than a tool of imperialism and of the oppression of Third World peoples. That, argued Vergès, was the true nature of Israel.²⁸

There was, however, a major flaw in Vergès' argument that the Holocaust was essentially a political act; he failed to take into account both how and why the Nazis conducted their war against the Jews. Had he done so, anyone could have seen how the Final Solution transcended mere politics. Nazism was more than just politics, it was an ideology. Unlike politics, Nazism gave its followers a whole new set of morals, one in which killing "subhumans" was not only necessary but praiseworthy. Like religion, ideology relies on faith, thus even when its morals seem illogical, men like Barbie could circumvent ethical dilemmas through their faith in the Nazi ideology. Thus, it was the combination of the ideology and the Third Reich's administrative machine that caused the Holocaust to happen, not political drive. Eventually it was soul-wrenching accounts of the victims that deprived Vergès' argument of its validity. Witness after witness proved that the Holocaust was encompassed far more than just political beliefs and taking orders. It was about unprovoked brutality, cold-hearted inhumanity, and endless suffering. It was pain at its highest form and humanity at its lowest. As Sabin Slatin, the sole surviving adult of the raid in Izieu, put it, "Barbie said that he made war on the résistants and maquisards but the forty-four children of Izieu were neither résistants nor maquisards. They were innocents. Neither pardon nor forget." ²⁹ By the middle of the trial, the public knew that the Holocaust was more than a mere political crime and despite of Vergès' claims to the contrary, the papers portrayed him as a desperate buffoon rather than a voice of reason. Vergès, however, was only beginning to bring forth the full implications of what happened at Izieu.

Also to blame for the murder of the Izieu children were the French. Although the villagers in Izieu claimed they wholeheartedly supported the children, a great deal of evidence pointed to French collaboration as the source of information for the Gestapo men who actually performed the deed of arresting the children. As was evident in the popularity of groups like Action Française and the bond between anti-semitism and the conservative nationalism of the Vichy regime, there were plenty of French who did not view the deportations as entirely negative. Vergès did not hesitate to point this out and from there he began to mount another attack on the seemingly unquestionable. This time, the French bore the responsibility of the children's deaths, and if Vergès could prove to the French that they were responsible for the suffering of the children at Izieu, then he could proceed to bigger things like Indochina and Algeria. By forcing the French to take at least part of the blame for what happened at Izieu, Vergès would be prying open the door to the closet in which hid Vichy and the rest of France's forgotten history.

With national attention focused on the hearings about Izieu, Vergès had the chance to force the French to face not only the ambiguities of the Occupation but the ambiguities of their entire modern history. Thus, when the prosecution called forth its witnesses to recall what happened at Izieu and in the death camps, Vergès protested at every step of the already painful tale. Vergès did not just protest though, he put on a show. He accused, he shocked, he threatened, and he warned. And it worked. Although Vergès did not get the revolts in the streets that he wanted, there was a great deal of public response to his accusations about the role the French played in the Holocaust. In the week following the calling of the witnesses of the Izieu tragedy, gallons of ink were spilt trying to reconciled France's actual history with the myths of the past. For Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, a writer for the Lyon Figaro, a sole conclusion loomed: "The French have fear of looking the truth in the eye. That is to say collaboration, the denunciations... and all of those who permitted the Gestapo to do their 'work' so well."³⁰

The testimony of André Frossard and the evocation of Izieu had created quite an uproar, but the climax of the Barbie trial was still to come. It was not until June 2nd, during the fourth week of the trial, that the prosecution called forth its star witness, Elie Wiesel. Although Wiesel had not personally been a victim of Klaus Barbie, he had experienced Auschwitz firsthand and had lost most of family during the Holocaust. Since the war, Wiesel had become an internationally-renowned writer and a leading authority on the Holocaust. In 1982, less than a year before his appearance at Klaus Barbie's trial, Wiesel had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in enlightening the world about the Holocaust. Thus, wherever Elie Wiesel went, there was attention, and Jacques Vergès was certainly not going to miss this golden opportunity to make the most of that attention.

When Wiesel was called to the witness stand, Vergès was ready to pounce. After Wiesel answered several questions from the prosecution about the nature of the Holocaust and about the significance of trying Klaus Barbie, it was the defense's turn to question the witness. Vergès got straight to the point and asked Wiesel if he had done anything for the thousands of Algerian children who died in French internment camps before and during the Algerian War.³¹ Wiesel responded that he was in America at the time and had not heard about it, but had he been in Paris at the time, he would have acted. Vergès seized the opportunity and began his attack: "I conclude from it that the deaths of these children were silent, their cries did not cross the Atlantic let alone the Mediterranean...You are an American citizen, what do you think of the fate of the children of Mai Lai, of whom the murderer is today still free?"³² Vergès had at once attacked Wiesel, France, and imperialism, but Wiesel saw what Vergès was trying to do and fighting for the moral upper ground he responded, "When I see an injustice, I protest, and have done it." To quote Lyon Liberation , Vergès "applied the accelerator" and snapped back: "Have you heard talk of the massacre of children at Deir Yassin? [Palestinian village razed by the Israelis during their war of independence in 1947]"³³

At this point, Cerdini, sensing the increased tensions not only on the courtroom floor but all around the chamber, tried to intervene, but he was about forty years too late. Both Wiesel and Vergès had things to say and nothing was going to stop them from having it out if they wanted to. When calm was restored to the room, Wiesel in a calm voice replied to Vergès' accusation: "Yes, I stand with Israel. I'm proud of it. It's the only country in the world that was ready to recognize a Palestinian Arab. The Arabs did not want to. They wanted to make a war with Israel...That does not justify the brutalities. I am against such things, wherever they occur." Vergès, unlike Wiesel, was letting his fury build and continued to press his attack: "One cannot be unconditionally for Israel. I asked a question about Deir Yassin and nobody answered it!"³⁴ Wiesel had no immediate reply.

By cracking Elie Wiesel, Vergès could unravel the entire prosecution, and given Wiesel's loss of composure after that last question it looked as if he had succeeded. After a long pause, Wiesel, this time his voice trembling, had an attack of his own: "I find it especially regrettable that the lawyer of the defense dare accuse the Jewish people of the very crimes committed against them. Is that all he has to say today in 1987?"³⁵ Cerdini, seeing that the argument was going to spin out of control, and wanting to avoid national embarrassment over what might happen next, shouted, "We are getting distracted from our trial...!" But in mid-sentence the much louder voice belonging to Jacques Vergès took over, "...[our trial] that all peoples are considered the same!"³⁶

What followed was described by the papers as a "heavy silence."³⁷ The silence that followed Vergès' last outburst was not the empty stillness of shock but the pensive silence of reflection and understanding. From that moment on, the court understood. They understood what Vergès was trying to do, even if they did not agree with him. They understood the difference between a crime of war and a crime against humanity. And they understood how little the trial had to do with Klaus Barbie. For every new understanding gained from the encounter between Vergès' and Wiesel, there were also new questions. Did the French legal system have right to try a man like Klaus Barbie, let alone convict him? Could the charge of "crime against humanity" be levied against France for what it had done, both to foreigners and her own citizens, over the past fifty years? Was imperialism a crime against humanity? Was the Holocaust unique or just another "consequence" of war and human nature? Was history a victim too?

When the silence lifted several minutes later with the calling of a new witness, the trial continued with these new understandings and new questions. As the trial stretched on, a seemingly endless stream of witnesses continued to relate their experiences in France during the Occupation. As he did before, Vergès continued to attack the Collaboration and evoke images of French atrocities in Algeria and the other horrors of colonialism, but something had changed. As was reflected in the French newspapers that were printed over the next few weeks, the public had grasped what Vergès was trying to do and in that understanding shifted their focus to what they thought was the real issue, the fate of Klaus Barbie and his victims. Vergès had therefore lost in his quest to make France acknowledge the full weight of its crimes by putting them on the same level as the Holocaust, but before the trial ended he would make one last attempt to gain recognition for those who died at the hands of imperialistic oppression.

On the final day of the trial, when Vergès walked onto the courtroom floor to plea for his defendant, he was not alone. By his side were Nabil Bouaita, an Algerian attorney, and Jean-Martin M'Bemba, a Congolese attorney. Bouaita, an old friend of Vergès from his Algerian days, claimed he was present at the trial for only one reason, to "plea for the Arab people." Likewise, M'Bemba, an active "Third-Worldist" was present to "plea for the African people."³⁸ What was supposed to be a plea for Barbie's freedom had little or nothing to with the defendant at all. Instead, it was the moment Vergès had been waiting for all his life, the chance to "attack the prosecution" while the world listened. If anything, France was the true defendant and, with this in mind, Vergès began his "plea:"

In the name of the defense, I humble myself before the struggle of the Resistance, and nobody can contest that right because the Algerian, African, Malagasy peoples were engaged in the fighting. I humble myself before the suffering of the Jews and the martyrdom of the children of Izieu because of racism... and because of that same racism we take with us the grief of the Algerian children killed by the thousands in French 'regroupment camps.' Does crime against humanity only force emotion or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans?...Would there be in death a hierarchy that made the distinction between the dead dignified by memory and those dignified by being forgotten?³⁹

No sooner than Vergès had finished than his Congolese comrade, B'Memba, began his own "plea." B'Memba, in the name of all of those who suffered at the hands of colonialism, began to recall the "crimes against humanity" that took place in French colonial Africa. For the construction of a mere 140 kilometers of railway, said B'Memba, at least 8000 natives died at the hands of their white bosses. Why did the natives die? "Because they were black."⁴⁰ B'Memba finished by accusing France of "lagging" behind other nations in terms of addressing humans rights and racism and in the same tone asked: "Do you [the French] have a tranquil enough conscience to judge Barbie?"⁴¹

After B'Memba finished his attack on the French colonial system in Africa, the third major defense lawyer, Nabil Bouaita stepped forward to give his "plea." Just as B'Memba's mission was to condemn the French for the suffering brought about by their colonialism, Bouaita's mission was to condemn the "Zionists" for their crimes against the Arab. He began by comparing Israel's acts in Lebanon with America's aggression in Vietnam and France's war in Algeria. "The Israelis," he claimed, "were just as guilty as the Nazis."⁴² The key piece of evidence supporting Bouaita's claim was the massacre at Sebra and Chiatila where "between 3500 and 5000" Palestinian refugees were killed by a Lebanese militia who "acted under the benevolent eye of Israelis stationed only 200 meters away." Unlike Vergès or B'Memba, Bouaita did not shield his argument in any Barbie-related rhetoric, he just kept attacking Israel until Cerdini silenced him for moving off the subject. Thus ended the defense's plea. In three swift and furious attacks, the defense attorneys, led by Jacques Vergès had managed to speak publicly against all of their traditional enemies. Their argument was simple, what right did the French, or the Jews, have to judge Klaus Barbie if they themselves had committed atrocities of a similar nature? All that remained now was for the jury to decide the fate of Klaus Barbie. And of France, the Holocaust, "crimes against humanity," and history itself.

In the hours after the defense pleaded its case, the jurors would have to decide whether Klaus Barbie was guilty and if so, to what degree. What had started as a simple trial of a man who was blatantly guilty had turned into a four-year war of legal attrition and, in the process, had acquired an entirely new nature. On the night of the verdict, it seemed as if the original issue, the justice of Klaus Barbie, had been lost in a sea of unwanted questions and discomforting moral dilemmas. Vergès had created a paradox, if the French were going to punish Barbie for what the Nazis did to them, then they could not continue going on without facing their own history of inconsistencies starting with the persecution of Dreyfus and continuing through the Algerian War. In order for France to punish Barbie, it would have to permanently prop open the door to its closet full of inconsistencies, and after a century of remaining closed, that closet was bound to have more than a few skeletons in it. Thus, the price for punishing Barbie would be high; either facing the ambiguities of the past head-on or facing decades of moral discomfort. The question that remained was, would France be willing to the the price of finally facing its past in order to satisfy its craving for justice?

Ten minutes after midnight on Saturday, July 4, 1987, the jurors emerged from their chamber with a verdict. After more than six hours of deliberations the jurors found Klaus Barbie guilty of "crimes against humanity" and for that act sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in prison, France's highest punishment. Vergès immediately protested the verdict, calling the whole trial a "farce," but before he could say any more, a new, previously unheard voice, silenced him. The voice belonged to Klaus Barbie, who after hearing the verdict, addressed the court in French for the first time: "I have some words to say, in French," began Barbie, " I did not commit the raid in Izieu. I fought the Resistance and that was the war and today the war is over. Thank you." Despite Barbie's appeal, all of the evidence was against him. Vergès tried to "plea" one more time, but as one reporter put it, "he was talking only to himself" and nobody even bothered to record what he said.⁴³ The verdict stood and the trial was over, but neither the prosecution nor the defense walked away satisfied.

References for Chapter 6

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