Letters From Jewish Children May Return to Haunt ‘Butcher of Lyon’

On April 1, 1944, Alice-Jacqueline Luzgart, 10, wrote a letter to her sister Fanny. “You know today is April 1,” she wrote, “and it’s also April Fools’ Day, when people stick fish down your back. Someone stuck two down my back, but I didn’t realize it.”

About the same time, Liliane Gerenstein, 11, wrote a letter to God. “Make my parents come back,” she wrote. “My poor parents, protect them (even more than you protect me) so that I see them again as soon as possible. Make them come back again.”

Alice-Jacqueline and Liliane were among 44 children rounded up by the Gestapo--the secret police of Nazi Germany--from a children’s camp in a remote area of occupied France a few days later, on April 6, 1944, and transported to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. None survived.

Alice-Jacqueline’s sister Fanny, who received the letter, is now a plaintiff in the case against Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon in World War II, who is charged with ordering the raid on the children’s camp.

The letter to God from Liliane was found in the camp at Izieu, 40 miles east of Lyon, after the raid. She had asked for God’s protection of her parents because they had been arrested and deported to Auschwitz almost five months earlier. Her father survived, but her mother, like Liliane, died there.

The letters are part of a dossier of documentary evidence about the children’s camp that has been compiled and recently published by Serge Klarsfeld, a Parisian lawyer. Klarsfeld, who represents the plaintiffs in the case, and his wife, Beate, found Barbie in Bolivia more than 10 years ago and pressured the French government to seek and obtain his extradition two years ago.

Although the defense insists that there will probably be further delay, it is now widely expected that the trial of the 71-year-old Barbie will get under way in Lyon toward the end of this year. The raid on the children’s camp at Izieu is sure to take up a good deal of the proceedings.

After almost two years of sifting evidence and after questioning Barbie again for three days during the first week of January, Christian Riss, the judge of instruction in the case, dropped five charges against Barbie, leaving only three.

Under French law, a judge of instruction is appointed to study the evidence in a criminal case and determine if there is enough to warrant a trial. In a sense, he acts as if he were, under American law, both the district attorney investigating the evidence and a grand jury handing down indictments.

In this case, Riss ruled that Barbie should stand trial for the raid on Izieu; for closing down the offices of the main Jewish organization in Lyon and deporting 86 of its officials and members to extermination camps, and for deporting 650 people, half of them Jews, to extermination camps just a few days before Lyon was liberated in 1944. The other charges were dropped because of lack of evidence or because the cases could not be regarded strictly as “crimes against humanity.”

Under French law, it is too late now to try anyone for war crimes committed during World War II; the statute of limitations has run its course. But it is not too late to try them for crimes against humanity. Acts of genocide against the Jewish people are regarded as crimes against humanity.

Since Riss has finished his work, the trial would normally be expected to get under way in the fall at the latest. But Jacques Verges, the defense lawyer, predicted that it would be delayed until after the spring of 1986--not because he plans any appeals or delaying tactics but because, he said, the government does not want the trial held before the 1986 legislative elections. The government, according to Verges, would find the trial too embarrassing.

Although Verges agreed that the central charge against Barbie involves the Izieu children’s camp, he said, “I have the firm intention to bring up Jean Moulin’s case even though the prosecution does not want to hear about it.”

For the French, Barbie, who is known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” is most notorious as the Gestapo chief who captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance. Moulin, who died after torture in captivity, is a national hero, buried in the French Pantheon in Paris.

Verges has insisted for some time that he has evidence that Moulin was turned over to the Gestapo by fellow officers of the resistance “for personal and political reasons.” The case of Moulin was not included in the charges against Barbie because of the statute of limitations on war crimes.

As far as Klarsfeld is concerned--he is a Jew whose father was murdered during World War II--the focus on the Izieu case is vital because he believes in the importance of uncovering the full story of the killing of the Jews in France during the war. The evidence that the raid was an act of anti-Semitism is considered overwhelming. All 44 children and the seven adults arrested with them were Jewish. The Nazis spared the life of the one child in the camp who was not Jewish.

Life in the Camps In the published dossier on the case, a 128-page book between soft covers, Klarsfeld has tried to document life in the camp, the raid itself, the identity of the victims, the fate of the children and the responsibility of Barbie. He said he turned over all the evidence to Riss.

The children’s camp at Izieu was set up in March of 1943 by a social worker, Sabina Zlatin, who had tried to use that part of France, occupied by Italian troops, as a refuge. But after Italy signed an armistice with the Allied forces, the Germans occupied the Italian zone of France and Zlatin decided to hide the children in a large house on huge grounds in the mountain village of Izieu. Local French officials had agreed to protect them.

The international Organization of Help to Jewish Children, headed by Prof. Albert Einstein, agreed to pay for the maintenance of the camp. The children were treated as orphans since the parents of most of them had been arrested and deported to camps outside France.

The documentation prepared by Klarsfeld, which includes a biography of each child, describes an atmosphere of normality at the camp. Also included are several letters written by Georges Halpern, 9, who signed them Georgy. They seem like the letters of any child away at a summer camp.

“It is very pretty to see the mountains which are covered with snow,” Georgy wrote his mother, who was ill and hospitalized in France, on Feb. 7, 1944. “I need shorts and socks. The director says you should send me 100 francs because she has a ticket to buy shoes. Are you feeling well? I am well, I eat well and have a good time. I feel well. I am sending you 1000000000000 kisses.”

But the war does creep into the correspondence. Joseph Goldberg, 11, wrote his mother that the director “said that we had to learn. Otherwise, if you see us after the war, we would be donkeys.”

Early in the morning of Holy Thursday, April 6, 1944, two trucks and two cars arrived suddenly at the camp. The school had a kind of drill that instructed the children to rush into the nearby woods when the alarm was sounded. But the trucks appeared too suddenly for anyone to sound the alarm.

One Person Escapes Soldiers and civilians rushed out of the vehicles and began rounding up everyone at the camp. The children were at breakfast, and their cocoa was left unfinished in the cups. Only one person escaped, 30-year-old Leon Reifman, who had worked at the camp as a male nurse. His sister, Dr. Suzanne Reifman, the camp doctor, had shouted at him to run. He did, and hid in the woods.

The 44 children and seven adults were imprisoned that night in the Ft. Monluc prison in Lyon, the same prison to which Barbie was taken after he was extradited to France from Bolivia in 1983. A day later, they were transferred to the French internment center in Drancy, outside Paris. The move to Auschwitz began on April 13. Only one person survived the deportation--Lea Feldblum, a teacher’s assistant at the camp.

The most important evidence supplied by Klarsfeld against Barbie is the original of a telex message sent by him to his superiors for the attention of the Department of Jewish Affairs of the Gestapo.

Discrepancy in Numbers “This morning,” the telex says in German, “the orphanage for Jewish children, a children’s colony, at Izieu was removed. A total of 41 children, aged 3-13, were captured. Moreover, the entire Jewish personnel were arrested, that is, 10 individuals, among them 5 women . . . . “

The discrepancy in numbers seems to be accounted for by the fact that Barbie counted the three children above the age of 13 as members of the adult staff.

Klarsfeld insists that Barbie would never have sent a telex like this if he had not authorized the raid. Verges, Barbie’s lawyer, says the telex is a fake.

The documentation fails to shed much light on one confusing aspect of the case. Maurice Rajsfus, a Jewish journalist whose parents were arrested in Paris during World War II and then killed by the Nazis, has accused Jewish organizations of a kind of criminal negligence for operating a children’s camp like the one at Izieu, making it an inviting target for the Gestapo. Insisting that the children should have been dispersed among Christian families, he said that Jewish organizations kept the children together so they could follow Jewish ritual such as eating kosher food.

Was Seeking Alternative According to Klarsfeld’s documentation, Sabina Zlatkin, who had been warned of impending danger, was seeking some alternative for the camp when it was raided. But she evidently was searching for a new hiding place for the camp as a whole rather than for a number of Christian families to accept the children individually.

In the case of one Jewish child, the Klarsfeld documentation shows that a social worker actually removed the child from the home of a Christian family and brought her to the children’s camp. On the other hand, the documentation also shows that, before the children arrived at Izieu, Leon Reifman tried in vain to persuade the Archbishop of Chambery to place the Jewish children in various Catholic institutions.

The question of why the camp’s children had not been dispersed by 1944 is just one of several painful issues that are sure to come out at the Barbie trial. There are many old wounds, and Verges, the defense lawyer, has promised “revelations that will not only make noise but cause some hurt.”