The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (55 page)

The trial of Klaus Barbie was stood on its head by the defence in the same manner as the appeals of Emil Mahl and Gustav Knittel. Once again the victims of war crimes would be cast as the perpetrators, and it would not be the accused Nazi murderer who would be on trial but France herself. And not the collaborationist Vichy government, but the colonial French administration that had ruled Algeria, Indochina and its African colonies. The truth was given a rough ride as forces of the extreme right and the extreme left united to defend the indefensible.

A wealthy Swiss banker, Francois Genoud, who was a declared Nazi both during and after the Second World War, had stepped forward to bankroll Barbie’s defence. Genoud had appealed to the extreme-left lawyer Jacques Vergès for help, and the attorney flew to Geneva to confer with the Nazi paymaster. This unlikely couple had more in common than at first appeared in that they shared a deep and fundamental antipathy towards Israel. Genoud funded Arab liberation movements of the extreme left, while Vergès had defended Arab terrorism. The lawyer had flown to Lyon to meet his new Nazi client and was appointed as the mastermind for the defence. From now on Barbie would merely be a pawn in an elaborate political agenda.

On the surface, Jacques Vergès appeared quintessentially, almost affectedly, like a member of the French establishment. He dressed in the immaculate, formal style of a lawyer, worked at a Louis XV desk in his office, and boasted old Flemish tapestries on the wall. But his entire life and political philosophy had been shaped by the conviction that the culture in which he was immersed secretly dismissed him as a colonial half-caste. Vergès was half Vietnamese, and therein lay the root of his intellectual and political rage against France. He was born a twin in Thailand in 1925 - then known as the Kingdom of Siam - where his father, a doctor and diplomat, had married a Vietnamese woman. She died when the twins were only three years old. The children seem to have been brought up by their father in a poisonous atmosphere of resentment and hate. As a young man Vergès saw the world through a distorting prism of racism, while his twin brother received a life sentence when he murdered the man competing with his father for a minor political position.

As a student in Paris, Vergès became a Communist and president of the Association of Colonial Students at the Sorbonne. One of the more active members was the young Cambodian Pol Pot, who became a lifelong friend. (Pol Pot went on to become leader of the Khmer Rouge and the architect of the mass murder of more than a million of his fellow countrymen.) The French Communist Party sent Vergès to Prague for four years in 1950, where he met Josef Stalin. He left the party when it failed to take a radical position against France over Algeria, insisting that French crimes in Algeria were as bad as Nazi crimes in the Second World War.

Vergès became well-known for defending Arab terrorists, and his court tactics were so aggressive that he was jailed for two months and temporarily lost his licence to practise law. In 1962 he moved to Algeria, converted to Islam and married an Algerian woman whom he had defended against charges of placing bombs in cafés.
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(The conversion had a practical side as the lawyer was already married with children in France.) He spent his honeymoon in China, where he met Chairman Mao and became an avid Maoist, and when he returned to Paris he edited the Maoist review Revolution. (It was Vergès who sent Regis Debray to Bolivia to hunt for Che Guevara.)

He now adopted a new enemy: Israel. Fundamentally opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, he defended Palestinian terrorists charged with hijacking an El Al plane. He argued that the act was political, not criminal, and that Israel was to blame for the passengers’ deaths. This outrageous claim attracted international notoriety, but did nothing to help his clients, who were found guilty. Most of Vergès’s clients were found guilty, despite all the rhetoric and political posturing. The press began to call him Maitre Guillotine.

In 1970, Vergès disappeared. Left-wing conspiracy buffs believed him to have been murdered by Mossad, while his enemies secretly hoped it might be so. He did not reappear until 1978, when rumours from the right suggested he had spent the time with his friend Pol Pot in Cambodia and with Palestinian guerrillas in the Lebanon. ‘I am a discreet man,’ Vergès said when questioned about the eight-year gap in his life. ‘I stepped through the looking-glass where I served an apprenticeship. I have come back battle-hardened - note that word, it’s the right one - and optimistic.’
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Once again he picked up radical cases, defending neo-Nazi bombers and Armenian terrorists, and used the courts as a platform from which to attack his political enemies. He continued to lose many cases, and some chents went to jail for long periods. The high-profile Barbie trial provided a magnificent stage, complete with an international audience, for him to vent his rage both against the French establishment and Israel.

Essentially, Vergès argued that if France could try a man for crimes committed forty years earlier, while operating under orders from a foreign government, then France herself was equally guilty of crimes against humanity in Indochina, Algeria and Africa. The lawyers he assembled for the defence team were all from Third World countries: ‘In this trial made in the name of humanity it is important that the defence is made of the colours of the human rainbow: black, white, brown and yellow.’ There was not an Aryan among them, but the Nazi Barbie raised no objections.

The irony of this fanatical representative of racial purity being thus defended was not allowed to go unremarked. The French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut - who would later describe Barbie in print as ‘this paltry underling, this monstrous subaltern, this poor man’s Eichmann’
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- stood on the steps of the court and declared, ‘We should be indignant over the situation in which a black man, an Arab, a Bolivian and Vergès - a man who claims his Asian ancestry - rise to the defence of a Nazi, and furthermore defend him in the name of their race, in the name of their non-European identity. Imagine you’re in 1945, at the end of the war, and someone says, “You’ll see, in twenty or thirty years when they accuse and condemn a Nazi torturer, it’ll be the subhumans (that’s what the Nazis called them) who will defend him.” Everyone would have laughed.’
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Vergès continued to argue throughout the trial that Barbie’s crimes were no different to those committed by the French state sitting in judgement, and that the defendant was a small criminal in comparison to French colonialism. The French were no better than the Nazis, and neither were the Jews, as Israel’s actions clearly demonstrated. When Barbie claimed in a brief statement in German that he was only a cog in the machine following orders and should not be punished for doing his job, he was silenced by his lawyer. It was not the defence that Vergès had planned and could only serve to remind jurors exactly what Barbie’s job had been and the monstrous nature of the Nazi machine for which he had worked. And when the defendant declared that he remained an honest Nazi, and had been doing a soldier’s job in time of occupation, Vergès handed him a note. Barbie read it and took the advice to claim the right not to be present at his own trial. Vergès then had the stage to himself.

As the fifty-eight witnesses were interviewed over three weeks - each one numerically representing fifty victims - the intellectual and political arguments faded in the face of grim facts. One woman, who had been thirteen years old when Barbie tortured her, said she had never recovered from the experience. Another, who had been tortured nineteen times, described how her back was torn apart by a spiked ball on a rod, and was unable to say any more: ‘I excuse myself from recalling the rest.’ The evidence against Barbie piled up, the most damning of which was proof of his involvement in the murder of the forty-four orphans of Izieu.

Vergès dismissed the order for the deportation of the children presented as evidence by Klarsfeld as part of a Zionist plot to justify Israel’s existence and its oppression of the Palestinians by morally blackmailing the world with the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. He described Klarsfeld as a ‘Zionist hitman’ and said the order was a forgery. Experts proved beyond doubt that it was not. Vergès switched arguments. The Nazis were not to blame for the deportation and gassing of the children, but the Jews themselves. He held the UGIF in Lyon responsible for keeping files on the orphans and placing them in an unsafe region, and for collaborating with Vichy and the Nazis.

The plea made on Barbie’s behalf by his Arab lawyer consisted of a long rant against Zionists and Israel for crimes committed against Arabs. He again claimed that Israel was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that ‘the Israelis were just as guilty as the Nazis’. The attorney did not actually mention Barbie once, merely attacked Israel, until the judge finally silenced him for digression.

After six hours of deliberation the jurors found Klaus Barbie guilty of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Vergès predictably proclaimed the trial a farce. Barbie made a final statement, speaking in French for the first time: ‘I did not commit the raid on Izieu. I fought the Résistance and that was the war, and today the war is over. Thank you.’
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But perhaps the most eloquent argument against Barbie was made by Sabin Slatin, the woman who had founded the orphanage at Izieu, and the sole surviving adult. ‘Barbie said that he made war on
résistants
and
maquisards
, but the forty-four children of Izieu were neither
résistants
nor
maquisards
. They were innocents. Neither pardon nor forget.’

Michel returned to America from the Barbie trial deeply wounded by his own experience and disappointed by the outcome in general. Barbie had been found guilty but the reality of wartime France had been further obscured in the process. Michel was bruised and angry, and felt that a great opportunity to expose the truth had been missed.

In the circumstances, he had to dig deep to find the emotional resources and stamina needed to resume the battle with the educational establishment. Fortunately, in this he had stalwart allies. Undeterred by previous rejections of Michel’s revolutionary method, Marvin Adelson approached Herbert Morris, the Dean of Humanities at UCLA, in the early 1990s and asked him if he was interested in improving the quality of foreign-language instruction in the university. ‘I sort of smiled at him,’ Morris remembered. ‘Given the fact that we were teaching eighty-six languages at UCLA at that time with what you might imagine to be a rather substantial investment of resources. Of course I was interested.’

Adelson told the dean - another gifted polymath with degrees in philosophy, law and literature - that he knew someone who could teach students of any ability a foreign language in days. Morris nodded politely, and while he knew the professor of architecture to be a brilliant and original man, he dismissed the conversation as fanciful. However, he agreed to meet and listened with fascination over a three-hour lunch as Michel spoke of his teaching method and his life.

As the men left the faculty dining room, Morris said, ‘Michel, either more miracles are associated with your life than anyone I could possibly imagine or you’re the biggest charlatan who ever walked the face of the earth.’

‘Give me a weekend and I’ll give you a language,’ Michel replied calmly.

Despite an impossibly busy schedule, Morris agreed. He drove to Michel’s hotel for three twelve-hour sessions, and on the third day woke up with a bad case of vertigo caused by an ear infection. ‘The room was swimming around me but I told my wife I couldn’t stay in bed - I had to get to Michel’s hotel. Even getting in the damn car was a high-risk activity, but I was so highly motivated, convinced that I was on my way to acquiring a facility in Spanish. I don’t know where my mind was during that day but I sat down and had another twelve intensive hours without a break for lunch. It was extraordinary. I had acquired a competence in Spanish after three days! A remarkable achievement. People ask me how it came about and I don’t know how to answer them. It’s a mystery to me. Michel has a charismatic quality, an intonation of voice, accompanied by extraordinary patience and self-assurance. I think he has managed to survive and achieve what he has done by having a degree of self-confidence that matches that of anyone I’ve ever known.’

Herb Morris talked the course up to the various heads of the language departments in an attempt to gain their interest. Nine months after taking the three-day course, without any continuation or revision, he was asked by the head of the Spanish department to take the university’s placement exam, a test given to students to establish their level of competency in a language. ‘I missed, by one question, passing the test that would have placed me as having a year of Spanish at college level. After nine months! Had I taken the test immediately after I would have been in the ninety percentile. I know that for certain because I began to audit classes in Spanish at UCLA. I would sit in on these classes and raise my hand, and was more advanced in my understanding of the language than native speakers taking Spanish Twenty-Five.’

A meeting was arranged between Michel and the heads of the language departments. ‘It was a catastrophe!’ Herb Morris remembered. ‘A disaster! A fiasco! The paradox of someone with Michel’s degree of self-confidence is that it can be perceived as arrogance and become self-defeating. A salesman would have gone into the meeting and humbly suggested he had something that might just complement their efforts in some modest way. I’ve had a lot of experience in academic politics and anyone who has any feeling for that world knows that what you have to do before you even dream of getting them to listen to you, or move in the direction of modifying what they’re doing, is butter them up. It’s just a given. Faculty are hypersensitive about their position, what people think about them, and how much they are respected. There are few groups more conservative than academics. They are distrustful of someone suggesting that there is a completely different way to do things, and that it is much better than what they are doing. They are simply not prepared to acknowledge someone else has got the answer and they don’t.’
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