The House of Izieu

by Jan Rehner

Gérard nodded. “I’m grateful every day that you found me, Madame Sabine. Marie is my new mother now.”

  Sabine raised an eyebrow. “You’re allowed to call her Marie, and not Marie-Antoinette?”

  “The longer name seemed too formal to us. I’d prefer to call her Maman, but I’m to honour the memory of my parents, so we settled on Marie. I’m the only one allowed to call her that. It’s special.”

  They ate dinner in a festive mood and talked about Izieu, which Gérard recalled from his brief time there, as a raucous summer camp. When the boy had retired to bed, Sabine asked about the fate of his father.

  “It’s difficult to piece together. I understand he was forced on the death march to Gross Rosen when the SS evacuated Auschwitz in 1945. He died of exhaustion in March of 1945 at Buchenwald.”

  Sabine was silent for some time. “I often wonder if my visit to him alerted the Gestapo to the presence of the House of Izieu.”

  “We’ll never know. Certainly he was questioned at Montluc prison, and no one kept secrets there. But the Germans seized records from the raid on Chambéry, too, and might have easily found reference to the House of Izieu there. Or there may have been an informer. There was an investigation here that threw suspicion on Lucien Bourdon, a farmer in Brens near Izieu. Apparently, he accompanied the Gestapo on the raid, but he swore he was commandeered to give directions only. There was no proof of a denunciation.

  “A second man, André Wucher, was also accused because his son, Réné, was with the children and released. Réné’s aunt stopped the convoy to rescue her nephew. That’s how we learned that the Germans took the pig Farmer Perticoz had given Herman for Christmas. But we’ll get no answers from Wucher. He was executed in August, 1944, by an anonymous group of resisters with their own scores to settle. But I swear, Sabine, that no one in Izieu ever betrayed the children. The villagers continued to hide the children they had until the end of the war, and they mourned those lost deeply.”

  “I wonder if there’ll ever be an end to mourning.”

  “Mourning, yes. Remembering, no. I used to believe that constant sorrow would make me grow wise and strong, but I overestimated myself. Eventually, I decided to be happy again, for me and for Gérard. It’s what the children would want for you.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  “I didn’t say it was simple, but it’s possible. It’s like those stories about a rabbit kept in a cage for so long that when the door is opened, the rabbit is afraid to move. You have to take the first hop. You’re the only one who can open the cage door.”

  With that, she kissed Sabine on the forehead, and said goodnight.

  Their excursion to Izieu the next day in Marie-Antoinette’s new car was a hymn to their common past, the summary of a story disappearing in the distance, with no possibility of redress. They stood together at the top of the hill overlooking the House of Izieu, bright in the sunlight. The Rhône still flowed as it had for centuries, and the sight and sound of that flow was soothing.

  “I gathered up everything,” Marie-Antoinette said. “All their pictures and drawings, letters, and toys. I kept them for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll think me ridiculous, but this place still seems inviolable to me. I still see the children by the fountain, on the terrace, through the windows. I hear their voices in the trees. Léon calls it a hallucination, not of the mind, but of the soul.”

  But Sabine didn’t think her friend was seeing things. The children had purposely left traces of themselves, messages that could be read by anyone who had loved them. She could sense their presence. She felt like an actress after a performance returning to an empty stage, contemplative, still hearing the echoes of the brief world she’d created with her words and actions, still aware of the magic.

  “Where is Léon?” she asked. “Why hasn’t he tried to find me?”

  “He feels ashamed to be alive. He thinks he should have saved them, or at the very least, been arrested with them.”

  “But that’s so wrong.”

  “Yes, it is, Sabine. He’s built a cage for himself, too.”

  Sabine stood for so long without uttering a single word that the light began to shift and the breeze grew cooler.

  Marie-Antoinette waited patiently.

  Finally, Sabine turned to her. “I’d like to design a simple stone monument, maybe the head of a boy and a girl against a Star of David. I’d like it to be placed at the crossroads between here and the village of Izieu. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “I think the villagers will be very pleased to help you.”

  Later that day, Sabine sent a telegram to Denise: Coming home. Plan your wedding.

  She thought about how Denise had constantly had to hide her own happiness and curb her own joy for fear of seeming insensitive. She thought about how many hours she’d listened, how weighed down by compassion she must have been, for there was nothing heavier than carrying another’s pain and being powerless to lift it.

  Sabine braced herself to open the door of her cage.

  THE TRIAL

  THE YEARS DRIFTED BY like leaves falling from autumn trees, barely noticeable in the moment and yet slowly accumulating. Sabine lived in a large apartment over an atelier in Paris where she sold paintings of figures drawn from theatre, dance, and the circus. She became well known as a designer, and often thought of her father as she sat at her drafting table. In the evenings, if the weather was mild, she liked to linger on her tiny balcony and admire the greenery that flowed over the railings like Rapunzel’s hair in the fairy stories Marie-Antoinette used to dramatize for the children on the terrace of the House of Izieu.

  There was a school near her apartment and she often watched the children walking in crocodiles in the street. The children of Izieu were never so orderly, and the thought made her smile. They were more like wild ponies full of skittish energy, roaming free in a sea of grass under an innocent blue sky.

  It took many years but eventually she learned to accept even her most painful memories, for without them it would have seemed as if she had never been young, or in love, or as tender as a mother. She had friends who were dear to her. Berthe still visited from Montpellier. Denise had married her Jake, but could not bear the drizzle of England and so returned to France with her husband and daughter, a sweet, rosy girl. Sabine had entered a bistro one day in 1968 and had found Philippe either by accident or fate. His mother, Marie, had retired to the Jura, but Philippe missed the sensual freedom and relative anonymity of Paris. He showered her with kisses when they met and insisted on cooking for her. She ate at his bistro twice a week and he never allowed her to pay and never served her anything made with apples.

  “There are no apples allowed in my restaurant,” he teased, “not after living on them for three months.”

  Among her friends, there was no need to speak of the past, and Sabine did not tell her story to strangers or passing acquaintances. If they were invited to her apartment, they might notice framed photographs of a man with hair brushed straight back from a broad forehead, or two handsome teenagers, or a group shot of smiling children in costumes, but she didn’t offer to explain who they were and there was something about her demeanour which forbid her guests from asking.

  Twice a year, Sabine travelled to Izieu: on April 6, the day of the raid, and on July 31, the day of her marriage to Miron and the day of his death. She placed flowers at the foot of the memorial and visited with Marie-Antoinette and Gérard, all grown up now and a doctor just as he’d promised. The villagers always welcomed her and she was grateful that they shared her need to commemorate the past in this tiny corner of France, even though the rest of the country and most of the world did not seem to notice.

  In what had become a relatively peaceful and useful life, not without some comfort and pleasure, there was one friend Sabine could not reach. Léon Reifman finally came to vis
it her, sometime in the late 1950s. His appearance shocked her, for his face was so gaunt he reminded her of the wrung out deportees who had once wandered the lobby of the Hotel Lutétia. All the fight inside him was gone, and his eyes emanated darkness.

  She made him coffee and listened while he told her of the mood swings that plagued him and the migraines that blinded him. Nights were worse than days, and most days he felt he was pushing against gale force winds. Each face from his memory was a portal to misery. He’d sunk to a place she’d already climbed out of and she didn’t want to go back there, even if it might help him to have company.

  Sabine shook her head. She tried patience, kindness, consolation, and reason, but nothing she tried could penetrate the stone wall of his perfect sadness because Léon, she suspected, did not want to live a life that had been spared for no reason that he could fathom. She knew it could be seductive, that perfect sadness.

  Eventually, she resorted to a direct attack. “I never thought you a coward for jumping out a window, but perhaps you’re one now.” She did not mean to be cruel. She only wanted him to focus his eyes on his own life, but she might just as well have slapped his face.

  He flinched from her words and hung his head.

  “You might try to visit Léa in Israel,” she urged, more gently.

  “To be among other Jews mourning their lost families, you mean?”

  “No. To be among people rebuilding their lives.”

  Léon left her home soon after and she let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

  Many years passed before she saw him again. The second time, he brought Paul Niedermann, as tall as ever and twice as handsome as Sabine remembered. He was drawn immediately to her photo of Théo.

  “We promised each other we’d meet up again after the war. He taught me how to swim, and I pretended to teach him how to court Paulette. We were best friends.”

  Sabine noticed the way Paul’s smile began at his mouth and then crept up into his eyes.

  “I’m a photographer now, and a translator of technical documents. I wouldn’t be anything if you hadn’t taken me in, Madame Sabine, and if Léon hadn’t helped me cross the Swiss border.” He shook his head. “My life was saved simply because I was too tall for my age. Imagine that.”

  “Yes, imagine.” Léon repeated.

  Sabine thought she saw a spark in Léon’s eyes when he spoke. Perhaps, after all, he’d found some consolation in the utter arbitrariness of the universe. She wished him well.

  Sabine did not pay much attention to the aftermath of the war, except to notice that Paris had become lovely again. Hatred of the Germans was like an addiction she wanted no part of, for it corroded the insides of the hater more than the hated. She knew that Barbie had put himself beyond the reach of justice. There were escape routes, ratlines they were called, for those Nazis with foresight, looted money, and secrets to sell. The Americans whistled in the wind, folded their arms, and were up to their necks in collusion.

  All of that changed in the early 1970s when she was visited by a young lawyer, Serge Klarsfeld. He had a round face, kind eyes behind black-framed glasses, a determined chin, and a mission.

  Barbie, he told her, was in Peru, living under the name of Klaus Altmann. “We, my wife, Beate, and I, want to have him extradited. Will you help?”

  “Bring him to France and I’ll testify on behalf of the children of Izieu. But I can’t help to identify him because I never saw the man.”

  “I swear to you, Madame, he will return to France. He will stand trial.”

  “I already know what he’ll say. I was a soldier. I followed orders.” Sabine had heard this kind of rationalization before and still found it breathtaking in its cowardice. There was always some excuse, a finger to be pointed at someone else, an anonymous order to be obeyed.

  “Madame, he signed the order that sent the children to Drancy. And we have a witness, Raymond Geissmann, director of the Union Générale des Israélites de France in 1943-44. He tried to stop the executions of Jews at Montluc prison, Jews whom Barbie had arrested. Monsieur Geissmann asked that they be deported instead, for no one knew for certain then what deportation meant. In his answer, Barbie revealed that he certainly knew, and so betrayed himself.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Shot or deported, there’s no difference.”

  Sabine sagged in her chair. Was a man who could say that, and still send forty-four children to certain death, capable of remorse, or was he a soulless mechanism? “He will say the war was over long ago.”

  “Perhaps. But we will try him for crimes against humanity, for which there are no statutes of limitation.”

  “I’ll testify.”

  “One last thing, Madame. People are often disappointed at these trials.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They expect Nazis to radiate menace. They will especially expect that of this one, given his crimes as the Butcher of Lyon. But all you’ll see is an old man, stooped and balding.”

  “I hope not. I might be tempted to pity him then, and he doesn’t deserve it.”

  After Serge had left, Sabine followed every bit of news she could find on Barbie for almost a decade. He had aligned himself with the Bolivian army and instructed them in his special skills of interrogation and torture. He was rumoured to have been instrumental in the capture and execution of Ché Guevara. He ate at the finest clubs, and rubbed shoulders with drug lords and dictators. The first attempt to kidnap him failed. He skipped back and forth over the borders of Peru and Bolivia as free as a bird.

  She stopped reading. To even think about him was to teeter on the edge of an abyss, a yawning void that promised to plunge her into whirlpool of howling demons and madness. She backed away from that threat, backed away from hate and revenge, and thought that justice wasn’t meant for this world.

  But Serge Klarsfeld never gave up, and in the early morning of February 5, 1983, a small miracle occurred. An airplane landed in France carrying Klaus Barbie, who was immediately taken to Fort Montluc in Lyon, the very place where he had once interrogated the forty-four children of Izieu.

  It took four years to bring Barbie to trial, four years of searching for witnesses to testify, four years of gathering strength and sifting through documents to find the telegram signed by Barbie and sent to Paris, addressed to the head of the German security police and to the attention of the Gestapo department for Jewish affairs. That telegram gave details of the roundup at Izieu and included the deportation order to Drancy.

  On May 27, 1987, the sun was shining when Sabine, white-haired and eighty years old, arrived at the Lyon courthouse. She hoped the trial would be dignified, and not a carnival of hate. She shied away from the flashing cameras and looked into the faces of those who stood with her: Léa and Léon, the schoolteacher Gabrielle, Paul Niedermann, and the still lovely Paulette Paillarés. She embraced Madame Halaunbrenner, the mother of Mina and Claudine, and Madame Benguigui, the mother of Jacques, Richard, and Jean-Claude. Only her youngest child, Yvette, had survived, because she was too little to reside at the House of Izieu.

  The courtroom was huge and solemn. When Sabine entered, it fell silent as a church, as a stone, as a grave. She had to lean her head back slightly to see the judges, so high did they sit presiding over the lawyers and the reporters and the people who were here to tell what they had seen with their own eyes.

  She stood up straight. There was something compelling in her gaze. When she spoke, her words were as sharp and clear as glass. She spoke without hesitation or sentiment or tears, nothing to blur or soften the edges of her words.

  She had papers—letters the children had written, pictures they had drawn and signed to each other, birthday cards and photographs. She had facts, dates, numbers, and names. Forty-four names. Her husband’s name. She had evidence.

  She did not look at the murderous man with the bl
ack eyebrows.

  “Above all,” she said, “I want to say to Barbie’s defence that Barbie always said that he only dealt with members of the Resistance and maquisards; in other words, enemies of the German Army. I ask you, the children, these forty-four children, what were they? Were they members of the Resistance? Were they maquisards? What were they? They were innocent.”

  Barbie pled not guilty as she’d always known he would. She wondered if he truly believed that. She wondered how he hadn’t noticed when his crimes became so heinous.

  When Sabine left the courthouse, dazed and as wrung out as a dishrag, one voice she hadn’t heard in a very long time penetrated the babble of reporters and their thrusting microphones. She felt a strong arm reach across her shoulders and carve a path for her through the throng. The man led her to a waiting car, and a few minutes later she was driving through the city with Marie-Antoinette and Pierre-Marcel. She was overjoyed to see them.

  “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

  “My dear, all of France knows,” Pierre-Marcel shrugged. “The media have stripped away the illusion of a nation of resistors and exposed the depth and breadth of collusion. It’s time for France to look in the mirror without flinching.”

  “Are you here to testify?”

  “No. I’m here for you, and because Marie-Antoinette said so. You’ll remember how persuasive she can be.”

  “Just drive, Pierre,” Marie-Antoinette smiled. “We thought lunch in the countryside would be restorative.”

  But the meeting among three friends was so much more than lunch in a pleasant garden. As she always had, Marie-Antoinette lifted Sabine’s spirits, boasting without apology of the achievements of the remarkable young Gérard, the best and most handsome doctor in all the country if you believed everything she said. Pierre-Marcel spoke more modestly of his family and his career in the civil service.

  “We have a surprise for you,” Marie-Antoinette interrupted, “and we thought today was the best time to tell you because testifying must’ve been an ordeal. You tell her, Pierre.”