SPRING 1987. Why would I testify at the Klaus Barbie trial? I never even met Barbie. At the time he was terrorizing and torturing his victims in Lyon, I was a long way from France: first in Hungary, then in Auschwitz. And even though I am concerned with this trial, follow it passionately, and consider it of paramount symbolic importance, I prefer keeping up with it through the media—as an observer, not as a witness.
These are the arguments I offer to attorney Alain Jakubowicz, who on behalf of the Jewish community of Lyon has come to ask for my help. Though I had asked some friends for advice, among them Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Marc Kravetz, and several of them urged me to accept, I remain negative.
“You’re all crazy,” I tell them. “It would be enough for the defense lawyer to ask me some geographical or biographical questions, like, Where were you during the Occupation? Were you in Lyon? Were your parents living in France? for my testimony to become irrelevant. Let his victims depose. That should be enough; that will be enough.”
But the lawyers for the plaintiffs, and several historians, insist. To be sure, the deposition of the victims is essential, but … I still resist. So then they talk about context, milieu, testimonies in the public interest, until in the end I have to give in. There remains the problem of scheduling. Jakubowicz suggests that I be deposed on June 12, which, because of prior commitments, does not work for me. My preference is for June 3, that is, the eve of Shavuot. Jakubowicz persuades Chief Justice Cerdini to call me as the first witness to enable me to return to Paris before nightfall, before the beginning of the holiday.
So here I am, for the first time in my life, a witness in the trial of one of the killers of my people.
• • •
For weeks I have followed the debates from New York and Japan, which I am visiting, and I have been commenting long-distance on them daily for France-Inter Radio. I read as many newspapers and reviews as possible, familiarize myself with the entire cast of characters, noting Cerdini’s solemn demeanor, Barbie’s sarcastic smile, his lawyer’s hateful vehemence, the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ earnest determination, and above all the witnesses, the survivors: the mothers who try hard not to weep but do, the men who in a barely audible voice attempt to express the anguish of the underground fighter, and to describe the torture that Barbie and his henchmen inflicted on them. I admire the courage, the selflessness of the resistants: I love, I totally empathize with, the woman who as an adolescent girl saw her father shot before her eyes, as I admire the counselors, men and women, who risked their lives trying to save the Jewish children in their care. I said this before the trial, and I repeat it here: This trial will be remembered above all because of these witnesses; it permitted them, at last, to speak freely, to protect a past that many choose to reject and others deny. This trial is necessary for the world to be able to hear certain words said in a certain tone of voice.
After an initial surge of irritation, I am getting used to Barbie’s absence. He will not be able to silence his victims. Too bad that no one has thought of installing a camera in his cell so that he would have to face up to the images, so that he would see and be seen. Of course it wouldn’t be the same; I too would prefer to see him in a glass booth facing his victims. Never mind. Just as in the past he failed to make his prisoners talk, so he will not manage to render them mute. Though he may refuse to listen, the world will hear them.
“What is expected of me at the trial?” I ask.
Bernard-Henri Lévy has been following the sessions since the very first day, has experienced all their vagaries. He answers that what is expected of me is a text or a message to remember. “Remembrance and justice?” He responds instantly: “Yes, that is it, that’s it without a doubt.”
I set to work. Conscious of the significance of the moment, I propose to say in a concise text what, throughout my life, I have tried to convey in my writings: my apprehensions about language, my doubts with regard to the efficacy of education and culture, the anguish involved in confronting the extraordinarily heavy duties that memory imposes on the survivor.
Meanwhile I’m traveling more than ever. There seem to be more and more conferences. Michel Barthélémy of France-Inter calls me in Los Angeles and Hiroshima. He is asking for a sort of meditation on this uncertain era, in which the past keeps coming back to haunt the present. And where the silence of the dead rejoins the murmur of the survivors.
I leave Tokyo and return to Paris via Oslo. A telephone conversation with Jakubowicz. I am astounded to learn that all my work has been for naught: The law prohibits a witness from reading his deposition. But the lawyer is authorized to read it. I give it to Marc Kravetz, who publishes it in Libération.
Lyon, June 2. I visit Cardinal Decourtray: fraternal as always. I visit Chief Rabbi Klinger, who is warm and helpful. There is a meeting with Jakubowicz, and one with Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the tireless Nazi hunters. I visit the memorial. There are photos of children and old men, emaciated bodies, eyes open to the horror.
The courtroom is packed, as it is every day. There are well-known faces and unfamiliar ones. An obscure anxiety comes over me, as it does every time I’m forced to speak of those times. What am I going to say? How can I say it? A prayer goes round and round in my head, the prayer of the hazzan, the cantor, who, prior to the Musaf service during the High Holidays, declares his apprehension before the task ahead: “See to it, Lord, that my tongue does not falter.”
The witnesses are called. We withdraw to an adjacent room. Chief Justice Cerdini publicly notes the defendant’s absence. He dispatches court officers to his cell to invite him to attend the hearing. Twenty minutes go by. The officers return with their usual report: the defendant refuses.
As I stand before the court, I am gripped by an emotion that takes me by surprise. I put on my kipa to take the oath. I shall articulate those things that, until now, have remained buried within me. I speak of my grandmother; how I admired her silent, radiating sweetness and good nature. She could go for days and nights without opening her mouth. And what if I spoke of her mute litanies before this court? Or of the merry laughter of my little sister whose image never leaves me? And what if I revealed, just once, what I feel every time I recall my mother, every time I see her again, as she moves toward the nocturnal crossroads lit up by gigantic, somber, so somber flames?
That is the dilemma for the witness: What face should be illuminated, what name should be mentioned, what destiny should be included as one shares one’s memories? Should I speak of the rabbi who let himself be buried alive rather than violate the Shabbat? Or of the ghetto children who at the risk of their lives slipped back and forth through the holes in the walls to bring bread and potatoes to their starving families? Should I recall the youngsters who, against all odds, defended the burning Warsaw Ghetto to save Jewish honor? Or the Greek Jews who chose to die rather than accept assignment to the Birkenau Sonderkommando? Or the countless victims who moved, trancelike, to their mass graves in Babi-Yar and Ponar? They seemed to have little regret leaving a world corrupted by hatred and cowardice.
I shall not repeat here what I said in ten minutes during my deposition. All I remember is trying to stress the incommunicable aspect of our experience, and rejecting the despicable questions of the defense attorney, who did his best to dishonor the United States, France, and Israel by comparing them all to Nazi Germany. I also remember that I refused to look at him—the Talmud forbids looking at the face of an ungodly person—addressing my answers to the chief justice instead. I recall the reactions in the courtroom and how warmly the survivors, Barbie’s victims, looked at me. And then, perhaps most important, there were all these young people who seemed to want to catch every word, every sigh, every murmur in the courtroom. Sunshine flooded the city that afternoon, and I remember the packed, noisy railway station; I recall everything except what I may have said to the court. But I remember my tone, that of the thirteen-year-old who, in his remote little town during his bar mitzvah, trembled with fear as he recited the customary prophetic words, the Haftorah.
You see, that is how it is, and I can do nothing about it; everything carries me back to my childhood, and to the children of yesterday, and to all the Jewish children of Europe whose existence, in the eyes of Barbie and his accomplices, seemed incompatible with theirs.