Ex-Official Accused of Aiding Nazis Begins Trial in France

Rene Panaras, retired oil executive and chance survivor of the World War II roundups of French Jews, stood in the drafty entrance of the Palace of Justice here Wednesday afternoon and, with tears in his eyes, marveled at what was happening.

In a chamber painted a pale hospital green, two uniformed police officers packing revolvers had just escorted a pale, grandfatherly man in his late 80s to a seat behind inch-thick panes of bulletproof glass. The trial of Maurice Papon, former official in the wartime Vichy government that was an ally of Nazi Germany, had finally begun after 16 years of investigations and delays.

For the slight, silver-haired Panaras, it was a moment of quiet satisfaction. On Oct. 19, 1942, his maternal grandparents, with whom he was living in Bordeaux, were arrested by French police, allegedly on orders from Papon. Samuel Geller, then 62, and his wife Timee, 64, later died at Auschwitz, the Nazi camp in Poland. The young Rene escaped because he had left this city in southwestern France the previous evening with an aunt.

“I don’t think we’ve done enough to find out who those Frenchmen were at the time who arrested other Frenchmen,” Panaras, 63, said Wednesday. “For once and for all, we have to confirm the truth.”

As a functionary of Vichy France with authority over Bordeaux’s Service for Jewish Questions, Papon, now 87, is accused of having played an efficient, dutiful role in uprooting more than 1,500 Jews and sending them to northern France. The vast majority were shipped onward to Nazi camps.

Hours before Papon’s trial opened, members of Bordeaux’s Jewish community of 4,000, led by a rabbi saying the kaddish, or prayer for the dead, gathered at Merignac, site of a wartime transit camp where more than 1,000 detainees were held before being sent by train on a journey that ended at Auschwitz for most.

The names of 106 Jewish children, ages 13 and younger, who died then were recited. One of those attending the Merignac ceremony Wednesday was Therese Stopnicki, who as a 6-year-old escaped the police roundup that captured her sisters, 2 and 5. Both perished at Auschwitz.

“I’ve been having nightmares for two weeks,” she told Associated Press. “Thinking I’ll be going in the courtroom and breathing the same air as that man makes me nauseated.”

Even though he was once a government minister and prefect of Paris police, from the moment Papon was ushered into the courtroom he became simply l’accuse--the one accused--like any defendant in a French criminal trial.

“I have one voice, and there are 20 voices to answer,” Papon said in strong and unwavering tones, referring to the number of prosecutors and attorneys for the plaintiffs arrayed against him.

The case, which should last until around Christmas, is anything but ordinary. For Papon is the first official of the Vichy regime to be tried for alleged complicity in “crimes against humanity,” specifically the connivance of French collaborators in the Germans’ war against the Jews.

He will be tried by three red-robed judges and nine civilian jurors--five men and four women--whose names were drawn at random from a black urn Wednesday. Seven of them clearly were born after the events that they will be asked to assess. If the court finds Papon guilty, he can be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.