letter to God

Holocaust
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In 1944 the Nazis decided to exterminate the children of the orphanage La Maison d'Izieu. 44 little children were deported to Auschwitz and murdered immediately upon arrival.

Eleven-year-old Liliane Gerenstein was sent to her death a few days after she wrote this letter to God: 

"God? How good You are, how kind and if one had to count the number of goodnesses and kindnesses You have done, one would never finish.

God? It is You who command. It is You who are justice, it is You who reward the good and punish the evil.

God? It is thanks to You that I had a beautiful life before, that I was spoiled, that I had  lovely things that others do not have.

God? After that, I ask You one thing only: Make my parents come back, my poor parents protect them (even more than You protect me) so that I can see them again as soon as possible.

Make them come back again. Ah! I had such a good mother and such a good father! I have such faith in You and I thank You in advance."

The letter was found in April 1944 in the abandoned home in Izieu. Liliane's mother had been deported and was already murdered. Her father, Chapse, miraculously survived the horrors of the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States after the war. He died in 1979, never knowing the fate of his children.

The sleepy village of Izieu lay overlooking the Rhone River between Lyon and Chambery in central France. The children, aged between 3 and 18, felt safe and secure, supervised by seven adults. The Children's Home was a perfect idyll and the Jewish children led a happy life with plenty of time for playing, drawing and painting.

However, on the morning of April 6, 1944 - a warm day, no clouds, bright sun - as they all settled down in the refectory to drink hot chocolate, three vehicles, two of which were lorries, pulled up in front of the home. The Gestapo, led by the Butcher of Lyon Klaus Barbie, entered the home and forcibly removed the children and their supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes.
Then the SS men ransacked the house and several more children were discovered hiding under a table in the attic classroom. In the confusion one small boy began racing across the courtyard, but the SS men grabbed him and beat him with rifle butts. Blood streamed from his nose as he was thrown into the truck. The last child, a blond boy of 3, too terrified to walk, was carried into the truck.

Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were taken directly to the cellar of the Fort Montluc Prison in Lyons. The very next morning Klaus Barbie arranged for the cattle cars that would take the children to the 'collection center' in Drancy. Then they were put on the first available train towards the death camps in the East.

Forty-two children and five adults were gassed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Two of the oldest children and Miron Zlatin, the superintendent, ended up in Tallin in Estonia and were put to death by a firing squad.

Of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one survived. Of the supervisors there was one sole survivor, twenty-seven year old Lea Feldblum. When the children from Izieu arrived in Auschwitz on April 15, 1944, Léa led the column of children to the selection point. When she informed the SS that these children were from a home, she was ruthlessly separated from them and sent to the prisoners' camp.

At the later trial of Klaus Barbie a witness, Edith Klebinder, testified that the children were put to death immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was an Austrian-born Jew and was deported from France to Auschwitz April, 1944, and arrived at the death camp on April 15 aboard the same train as the Izieu children. The Nazi guards ordered Klebinder, who was fluent in French and German, to translate as they ordered children and pregnant women onto trucks and told the other arrivals to walk to the camp.

Edith Klebinder - in a voice choked with emotion - told she at first thought the children and pregnant women were given rides to the camp out of compassion. Later, she said, she asked what had become of the children:     

"I asked myself where were the children who arrived with us? In the camp there wasn't a single child to be seen. Then those who had been there for a while informed us of the reality. "You see that chimney, the one smoke never stops coming out of  ..  you smell that odor of burned flesh ..."

- Louis Bülow

Bibliography/Sources:
Beate and Serge KlarsfeldMusee Memorial des Enfants d’Izieu (Memorial Museum of the Children of Izieu) www.izieu.alma.fr/
French Children of the Holocaust A Memorialby Serge Klarsfeld
Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, by Serge Klarsfeld. New York, Abrams 1984
Bolivia Web "The Outsiders"
Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, "Les trois traîtres français d'Izieu," Lyon Figaro 2 June, 1987
Pierre Bois, "D'Izieu à Auschwitz, le martyre de 44 enfants," Le Figaro 28 May, 1987
Letter from Izieu By Raphael Rothstein
The Consortium by Martin A. Lee
The History of Espionage www.theoffice.net/1spy
The Macedonian News Service
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Simon Wiesenthal Center www.wiesenthal.com/
 

The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE weaves together for discussion with former ty years of footage and interviews culled from over 120 hours of Nazis, American intelligence officers, South American government officials, victims of Nazi atrocities and witnesses. Barbie, while Gestapo chief in Lyon, tortured and murdered resistance fighters, including Jean Moulin, Jewish men, women and children, and had thousands deported to death camps. After the war he was protected by and worked with the U.S. Army and American intelligence officers, and then allowed to hide in Bolivia, where he lived peacefully for 30 years as a business man under the moniker Klaus Altmann. Only in 1987 was he brought to trial in a French courtroom in Lyon for crimes against humanity thanks to the efforts of Serge and Beate 

Klaus Barbie

(1913 - 1991)

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Klaus Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, on October 25, 1913. Barbie was born to a Roman Catholic family. His parents were both teachers. Until 1923 he went to the school where his father taught. Afterward, he attended a boarding school in Trier. In 1925, his whole family moved to Trier. In 1933, Barbie’s father and brother both died. The death of his abusive, alcoholic father derailed plans for young Barbie to study theology or otherwise become an academic, as his peers had expected. While unemployed, Barbie was drafted into the Nazi labor service (Reichsarbeitsdienst); membership was compulsory for all young German men and womIn September 1935, he joined the SD or Sicherheitsdienst (security service), a special branch of the SS and the intelligence gathering arm of the NSDAP (Nazi party). In 1940, he was sent to The Hague (Den Haag), where his main task was to arrest Jews and German political refugees who fled to the Netherlands. In 1942, he was sent to Dijon and in November of the same year (after November 11, when German forces took over the unoccupied part of France, the so called “zone libre” or free zone) he was sent to Lyon, where he became the head of the local Gestapo, which included 25 officers who covered an area comprising Lyon as well as the Jura and Hautes-Alpes police departments and Grenoble.en..While in France, his duty was to fight Communists, prevent sabotages and persecutre Jews. He was to penetrate and destroy the resistance in Lyon, and he indeed carried out his task with unmatched brutality.

Simone Lagrange, a soft-spoken Holocaust survivor whose family was exterminated, later recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944.  Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews, Simone and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where a man, dressed in gray and caressing a kitten, said Simone was pretty.

“He was caressing the cat. And me, a kid 13 years old, I could not imagine that he could be evil because he loved animals. I was tortured by him for eight days.”

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

Another survivor, Lise Lesevre, recalled how Klaus Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub. She told how she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar. 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 her last interrogation, 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 suffered the rest of her life.Another survivor, Ennat Leger, said Klaus 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.”

He personally tortured prisoners and is blamed for the deaths of 4,000 people. A dedicated sadist, responsible for many individual atrocities, including the capture and deportation to Auschwitz of forty-four Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu, Klaus Barbie owed his postwar notoriety primarily to one of his “cases”, the arrest and torture unto death of Jean Moulin, one of the highest ranking member of the French Resistance.

Jean Moulin was mercilessly tortured by Klaus Barbie and his men. Hot needles where shoved under his fingernails. His fingers were forced through the narrow space between the hinges of a door and a wall and then the door was repeatedly slammed until the knuckles broke.

Screw-levered handcuffs were placed on Moulin and tightened until they bit through his flesh and broke through the bones of his wrists. He would not talk. He was whipped. He was beaten until his face was an unrecognizable pulp. A fellow prisoner, Christian Pineau, later described the resistance leader as “unconscious, his eyes dug in as though they had been punched through his head. An ugly blue wound scarred his temple. A mute rattle came out of his swollen lips.”Jean Moulin remained in this coma when he was shown to other resistance leaders who were being interrogated at Gestapo headquarters. Barbie had ordered Moulin put on display in an office. His unconscious form sprawled on a chaise lounge. His face was yellow, his breathing heavy, his head swathed in bandages. It was the last time Moulin was seen alive.

On behalf of his cruel crimes and specially for the Moulin case, Barbie was awarded, by Hitler himself, the “First Class Iron Cross with Swords.”

After the war, Klaus Barbie was recruited by the Western Allies and worked for the British until 1947, then he switched his allegiance to the Americans. He was protected and employed by American intelligence agents because of his “police skills” and anti-Communist zeal - he penetrated communist cells in the German Communist Party.

With the aid of the Americans, he fled from prosecution in France in 1950 and relocated to South America together with his wife and children.

He lived in Bolivia as a businessman under the name Klaus Altmann from 1951 onward. Though he was identified in Bolivia at least as early as 1971 by the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, it was only in February 1983 that the Bolivian government, after long negotiations, extradited him to France to stand trial. This caused the U.S. to offer a formal apology to France in August 1983.Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the “Butcher of Lyon,” responsible for the torture and death of thousands of people. On January 19, 1983, that the newly elected government of Hernán Siles Zuazo arrested and extradited him to France.

In 1984, Barbie was put on trial for crimes committed while he was in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon between 1942 and 1944. At the trial Barbie received support not only from Nazi apologists like François Genoud, but also from leftist lawyer Jacques Vergès. He had a reputation for attacking the French political system, particularly in French colonial territories. Vergès’ strategy at the trial was to use the trial to expose war crimes committed by France since 1945. Indeed, many of the charges against Barbie were dropped, thanks to legislation that had protected people accused of crimes under the Vichy regime and in French Algeria.His trial started on May 11, 1987, in Lyon — a jury trial before the Rhône Cour d'assises. In a rare move, the court allowed the trial to be filmed because of its historical value. The lead defense attorney was Jacques Vergès, who argued that Barbie’s actions were no worse than the ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide, and that his trial was selective prosecution. The head prosecutor was Pierre Truche. During his trial, Barbie famously stated that: “When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent”.

On July 4, 1987, Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, and died in prison of leukemia four years later, at the age of 77.On the 12 February 1941, the German authorities used the death of a Dutch Nazi, Hendrik Koot killed in a fight with Dutch dockworkers, as a pretext to seal off the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.

Abraham Asscher & David Cohen on right

On 19 February 1941 an SD raid in Amsterdam entered a tavern called Koco, run by Jewish refugees from Germany, Cahn and Kohn. In the tavern, a protective device which Cahn had installed, an ammonia flash went off by accident, spaying the Germans with ammonia.

The SD raid was commanded by Klaus Barbie and after some violence everyone inside was arrested and three days later, as a reprisal for his act of “resistance” , the SS raided the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, seized 425 Jews, most of them young men.

They were assembled on the Jonas Daniel –Meyer –plein subjected them to beatings and abuse and then on 27 February 1941 deported 389 of them to Buchenwald concentration camp and after two months 361 of them were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and certain death.

   

The arrests were followed by a general strike, Barbie was ordered to execute Cahn and his associates, who had been condemned to death. Barbie was put in charge of the execution squad.

He recalled:

Hotel Terminus in Lyon

“One of the condemned asked to hear an American hit record and then we shot them.” On the 14 May 1941 a bomb was thrown into a Germans officers club in Amsterdam, and the German authorities decided the Jews should suffer as a reprisal.

Barbie went to the offices of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam met Abraham Asscher and David Cohen and Barbie tricked them into providing a list of 300 Jewish young men, on the basis they could return to the training camp and complete their apprenticeships. Asscher and Cohen were summonsed to see SD Commander Lages room and were told the boys had been arrested as a reprisal for the bomb attack.