Klaus Barbie: "He took pleasure in it."

Simple historical math. This kind of trial (see below) doesn't happen any more. Most perpetrators and many and probably most victims are superannuated or gone. Yet when I watched the Klaus Barbie trial in the late 1980s, I had a ho-hum attitude about it. Read the news stories and took it all mostly for granted. Then the shock--now, going back to it--of reading even the blandest standard newspaper stories about it (bland=he had a smile as thin as a knife blade). In the spirit of being shocked in such a manner, I present the full text of a March 1987 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands

Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer

LYON, France--In 1944, when she was 13, Simone Lagrange testified yesterday, Klaus Barbie gave her a smile as thin as a knife blade, then hit her in the face as he cuddled a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.

Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking one of her vertebrae with a spiked ball.

Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie "had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."

The three women were among seven people who took the witness stand yesterday to testify against Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in [Paris] during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused of torturing Jews and members of the French Resistance and deporting them to Nazi death camps.

But he did not hear their testimony because he has refused to attend the courtroom sessions since the second day of the trial, as he may do under French law.

He has, however, denied the accusations against him and has contended that his 1983 extradition from Bolivia to France was illegal.

Several of the seven witnesses yesterday sobbed as they told of arrest, torture, rail convoys to the Drancy collection center near Paris and on to concentration camps.

They depicted Barbie as a harsh, sadistic officer ready to resort to any cruelty to extract information.

Lagrange, her voice breaking, recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed in Normandy to drive back the Germans.

Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews and Resistance fighters, Lagrange and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where a man, dressed in gray and caressing a cat, said Simone was pretty.

"I was a little girl, and wasn't afraid of him, with his little cat. And he didn't look like the typical tall, blond SS officer we were told to beware of," she said.

The man, whom she identified as Barbie, asked her terrified parents for the addresses of their two younger children.

"When we said we did not know, he pulled my hair, hit me, the first time in my life I was slapped," she said.

During the following week, the man hauled her out of a prison cell each day, beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain the information.

"He always came with his thin smile like a knife blade," she said. "Then he smashed my face. That lasted seven days."

Later that month, Simone and her mother were put aboard a sealed train for the Auschwitz concentration camp on a horror ride "which turned us into different people" and that still gave her nightmares 40 years later.

From Auschwitz, where her mother was gassed, the inmates were marched to Ravensbruck, where only 2,000 of the 25,000 people who began the march arrived alive. On the way, Simone saw her father marching in another convoy.

"A German officer told me to embrace him. As we were about to meet, they shot him in the head," she said. "It wasn't Barbie who pulled the trigger, but it was him who sent us there."

Ennat Leger, who lost her sight at Ravensbruck after her arrest, was hoisted to the witness stand in her wheelchair by four policemen.

She was a Resistance fighter nearly 50 years old when she was arrested in 1944, she said, and Barbie and his men "were savages, brutal savages, who struck, struck and struck again."

"Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens?," she quoted him as saying, in an allusion to the torture chambers.

Lise Lesevre, frail and upright despite her 86 years, described the defendant as "Barbie the savage," saying she recognized him decades later because of his "pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance group, said the Gestapo arrested her on March 13, 1944, while she was carrying a letter intended for a Resistance leader code-named Didier.

She said Barbie spent almost three weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was Didier, and if not, who was. She was interrogated for 19 days, she said, and tortured on nine of them.

First she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar by Barbie and his men. "Who is Didier, where is Didier?" were Barbie's main questions, she said.

Next was the bathtub torture. She said she was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater.

"During the bathtub torture, in the presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink to drown myself quickly. But I wasn't able to do it. I didn't say anything.

"After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel," she said.

"It was a beast, not a man," she said. "It was terror. He took pleasure in it."

During her last interrogation, she said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she still suffers.

"He told me, 'I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.'" But she never did, and she heard Barbie say finally, "Liquidate her. I don't want to see her anymore."

She was condemned to death by a German military tribunal for "terrorism" but was placed in the wrong cell and deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she survived the war. Her husband and son did not. She said they were both deported to their deaths by Barbie.

Lesevre said she identified Barbie in February in a face-to-face confrontation at St. Joseph Prison, where he is being held.

art: clothing in piles

Christina Boltanski's artwork/installation, "No Man's Land": a huge crane and a 25-foot-high mound of salvaged clothing rising from the floor of the Park Avenue Armory’s big drill hall. Every few minutes the crane’s giant claw will pluck a random assortment of shirts, pants and dresses from the mound and then release them to flap back down randomly. Visitors can watch the action — set to a ceaseless, reverberating soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats — from ground level, standing amid dozens of 15-by-23-foot plots of discarded jackets that extend in all directions from the mound and that may - should - evoke refugee or death camps.

"No Man's Land" is described in today's New York Times: here.

the personal is the political

My favorite line from Maus is not a line in the panel above. Although here - "You don't understand...at that time it wasn't anymore families" - is a close second. No, my favorite line from Maus is...

Well, first - sorry - a little set-up. Artie is exasperated by his survivor father's behavior. Artie loved his mother and feels he hates his father; constantly feels guilty about the brother he never met, who died in the Holocaust; feels that his father especially holds him up to the standard of what the brother might have done and been. Artie, who is now of course a visual artist - a comix guy - longs to see his mother's story of surviving Auschwitz. But now he is about to learn that his father has burned the diaries his mother kept, for which they had both been searching - and which Artie desperately needs for his book project, to "bring balance" to it. Currently it has no balance because it's wholly the story of the manipulative father.

Vladek, the father, pretends to have had a heart attack - in order to be sure Artie responds to his latest phone call. Drop everything, he says to Artie on vacation in Vermont, and drive down to my summer bungalow - right now. So Artie and his partner Francoise begin the drive. Art sighs:

"I mean, I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father... How am I supposed to make sense out of Auschwitz? ...of the Holocaust?"

The key phrase is "make sense...of." He wants to understand the huge historical forces, continent-wide life in extremis, that shaped his way of understanding his family, which is to say shaped his most basic means of understanding what people do for and to each other. He cannot make sense of B (the larger force which created the smaller force) if he cannot (first?) make sense of A (the smaller force created by the larger). B made A but A must be made sense of if B is to make sense.

Another reading has it that Artie is wrong: one does not need to deal with one's Freudian family romance (love mom, hate dad, envy sibling who had mom's special love, call dad murderer for destroying mom's narrative) - to deal with one's personal neuroses - in order to be able to tell the story of the Holocaust. Personal psychic health should not be a pre-requisite for knowing how the European genocide happened, and why - and to know how to try to prevent another. If so, lots of folks would have an excuse not to learn about the Holocaust. Or, in short: Artie's idea of subjectivity is itself selfish and perhaps (in a world that understands the Holocaust too little) dangerous.

I don't agree about the danger imagined just above. Maus is a representation of the Holocaust that is constantly showing its awareness of itself as a representation - that it is opaque; that it is the survivor narrative filtered through layers: (1) anger and damaged memory; (2) loss of crucial perspective; (3) a neurotic teller of the tale. We need to know that in order to know how hard it is to "make sense of" something that would seem to be objectively knowable as a story but is utterly dependent on a knowledge of the subjectivity that nearly prevents it every time.

the inability to describe

Jan Karski (1914-2000), non-Jewish Polish member of the Polish underground government after the fall of Poland to the Germans, was persuaded by two Jewish leaders to make a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto. They hoped he would see the conditions there at first hand, observe closely, and be able to convey in a written report, and perhaps orally in person too, a sense of the Nazi treatment of the Jews to the allied governments, such that England and the U.S. would specifically intervene to prevent the genocide that was already underway but had plenty more destruction to do by this point.

Karski's account of his experience was published late in the war (I believe 1944 the first time). The text of it I read was translated by Zofia Lewin and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and published in London in 1969. An excerpt has been in my Holocaust site for many years.

Karski was never able to convince the Allies to respond. He was not sure they believed him; it seems likely that they did not. Afterwards, at least into the early 1980s, he blamed himself for his inability to convey in words what he had seen sufficiently to arouse response. In Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, at the beginning of a long interview, he breaks down as he attempts to "go back" to the time of his failure to represent. "I go back..." he begins, stammeringly. "No, I do not go back...." and then he falls apart. To my mind he he not struggling to remember the horrors he saw in the ghetto; his struggle is not as a witness of the Holocaust itself. His trauma is remembering his inability to describe it through the conventional language and means of international diplomacy.

Here is a brief part of his account of his experience as a witness. Here he is quoting the two Jewish leaders who, in their first meeting with him, are trying to convince him to visit the ghetto:

"We want you to tell the Polish and Allied Governments and the great leaders of the Allies that we are helpless in the face of the German criminals. We cannot defend ourselves and no one in Poland can defend us. The Polish underground authorities can save some of us, but they cannot save masses. The Germans are not trying so enslave us as they have other peoples; we are being systematically murdered."

The Zionist broke in: "That is what people do not understand. That is what is so difficult to make clear."

That is what is so difficult to make clear. That he could not "make clear" was Karski's burden then and ever afterwards. What sort of diplomatic and/or reportorial and/or personal language would have succeeded? Or was a new medium required?

The photo above was taken of Karski in 1994 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Yali at yuletide

Did some victims of genocide bring it on themselves? (To be sure, I think not. But the question is being raised--once again; it's socio-biological logic I find troubling.)

In today's "Science Times" section of the Times there's a long story about the ecocide end of the genocide spectrum - and about other ways in which societies have historically led to their own demise. Reading along, the piece seems innocuous, another collage of curious is-that-so? socio-biological factoids. But at heart it's an account of the reactions for, and mostly against, the Guns, Germs and Steel theses in Jared Diamond's best-selling book. A chart offered alongside the text shows that of five examples of societies that went extinct, all five "failed to solve social problems." And we are reminded that in a section of his book called "Collapse," Diamond argued that a "precipitating" cause of the genocide in Rwanda was Malthusian. The country had let its population outstrip its food supply. This is controversial stuff, to be sure.

Along the way we are reminded of "Yali's question" and fortunately get two opposing interpretations, that of Diamond and that of his detractors. Among the latter are anthropologists who have written a book length rejoinder all about "Yali's question."

Yali was a political leader of an ethnic group in Papua New Guinea, a people who had gotten used to the bounty of supplies delivered from the air by the Allies during World War II. In the immediate postwar years a cult arose among this people, a "cargo cult." They built ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wore faux headsets carved from wood, trying to summon back the packaged food, medicine and weapons that Yanks, Brits and Aussies had flown in during the early to mid-1940s. Yali asked Diamond this question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" I urge readers to consult the Times for a good summary of Diamond's interpretation of Yali's question and of his critics', but I'll say here that everything depends on what you think Yali meant. That there could be a connection between understanding Yali's question and contending the alleged socio-biological causes of Hutus killing Tutsis is, to me, earth-shattering. I'm glad the counterargument against Diamond gets such play here. Quite a Christmas Day feature for the Times.

If fifteen conditions must or do exist that led to genocide, fourteen of them are matters of conscious political will combined with conscious political neglect or avoidance and conscious political failure of will (to negotitate, to compromise, to re-arrange borders, etc.). We focus on the fifteenth - the climatic, the evolutionary, the catastrophic [e.g. drought] - at the peril of letting social will and action (those taken and those we fail to take) off the hook.

Darfur now (not later)

Darfur NOW tells the story of how the crisis in Darfur developed and it follows six individuals who in their own ways have worked to try to stop the genocide before more people die and more are displaced. These six include the actor Don Cheadle, who also served as a producer on the film, and Adam Sterling, a young, recent graduate of UCLA who became involved in fighting the genocide partly because he knew the stories of how his grandparents had fled the Holocaust in Europe.

Watch this film. If you can't see the information on the image above, click on the image and you'll get a larger view.