Essay: Was He Normal? Human? Poor Humanity

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The author, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was 15 years old when the Nazis entered his hometown of Sighet, Hungary, in 1944. Miraculously he managed to survive the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and at war's end he became a journalist in Paris. He would not speak out about the unspeakable for ten years. When that self-imposed vow of silence ended, he devoted his life to writing and talking, with rare eloquence and power, about the despair of the past and the concerns of the present. Now a U.S. citizen, Wiesel, 56, has written some 30 books and is widely acknowledged, in the words of the Nobel committee chairman, as a "messenger to mankind." Later this month he will testify in the case of The State of France v. Klaus Barbie.

I remember the nearsighted, balding man in his glass cage in Jerusalem. During the April-to-December trial in 1961, I listened to witnesses whose words and silences contained the tormented memory of an entire people. Yet I was not watching them. Most of the time I was watching the defendant. It was to see him that I had come to Israel, anxious to find out for myself if he was human, if there was any humanity in him. I had hoped to find myself in the presence of a disfigured creature, a monster whose unspeakable crimes would be clearly legible in his three-eyed face. I was disappointed: Adolf Eichmann seemed quite normal, a man like other men -- he slept well, ate with good appetite, deliberated coolly, expressed himself clearly and was able to smile when he had to. The architect of the Final Solution was banal, just as Hannah Arendt had said.

Will the same now be said of Klaus Barbie, who was less important but whose work was no less cruel? Barbie's trial is bound to attract worldwide attention. People are already saying this will be the last great courtroom drama to result from the Holocaust. They may be right.

For even behind bars, Barbie throws a long shadow. From the day of his capture, there were whispers that retribution could bring political catastrophe: the prisoner knows too much about too many. His lawyer is Jacques Verges, most recently the defender of the Arab terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, sentenced last February to life imprisonment by a French tribunal for complicity in the killings of two diplomats, one of them an American, and in the attempted murder of a third. With Verges' help, Barbie is quite capable of turning the tables, of forcing a trial of France under the Occupation.

But despite these fears, there will be a Judgment Day. The official examination of Klaus Barbie begins on May 11 in Lyons, France. No one knows how the story will end. But we know now how it all began.

Barbie, who grew up in Trier, a small town in Germany, and dreamed of becoming a minister, first arrived in Lyons at the age of 28. He was assigned the task of fighting the Resistance and getting rid of the Jews. The young, dedicated Nazi excelled at his job. He is accused of having executed 4,000 people and deported 7,500 Jews. His career grew so bloodstained that he was dubbed the "Butcher of Lyons." Yet only a fragment of that past will be weighed in the deliberations: the accusation is primarily concerned with the 44 Jewish children who, along with their guardians, were arrested on his orders in the village of Izieu and then sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.