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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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to meet us at the airport. I knew the Germans were
expecting "the French Resistance" that is, – people stoutly demanding an
end to the denial of justice to human rights for which they would speak up in
Munich.
The Germans were expecting flags, chests covered with
decorations, forced entry into the court. They were expecting fighters, not a
few dozen Frenchmen no different from other tourists. This new development
certainly seemed calculated to ruin the effectiveness of the trip. I also knew
that instead of the documents I had collected, the delegation would take only a
memorandum. Such a polite request for justice, it seemed to me, would not make
much impression on a prosecutor; he would be swayed only by a forceful
presentation of completely convincing documents. How could I make such a show
of force all by myself?
Once more the CDJC archives were of invaluable
help. Among the children Barbie had arrested in the Jewish camp at Izieu were
three brothers: Jacques (thirteen years old), Richard (six years old), and
Jean.Claude Benguigui (five years old). They had immediately been shipped to
Drancy, as Barbie had stated in a telegram to IV-B in Paris, dated April 6,
1944.
I found the names of the Benguigui children on the list of the
April 13, 1944, convoy destined for Auschwitz, where they were killed. The
brother of some other Izieu children whom Barbie had deported, Alexandre
Halaunbrenner, we located through the telephone directory. He knew Mme.
Benguigui, the mother of the three little boys, who lived in the Marais at 33
rue des FrancsBourgeois. I went to see her.
Mme. Benguigui herself had
been deported to Auschwitz on May 6, 1943, and was cruelly tortured in Block
10, where medical experiments were conducted. She was seventy-five percent
incapacitated, and her only source of income was a meager pension. While she
was in the concentration camp, she kept hoping that her children were safe in
that underground camp at Izieu, but in the spring of 1944 she recognized her
son Jacques' sweater in a pile of clothing that had belonged to recently gassed
prisoners.
I told Mme. Benguigui that the man responsible for the death
of her children had just been rehabilitated in Germany, and asked her if she
felt up to going to Munich to make a protest that would probably be more
successful than the delegation's. German public opinion could not fail to be
stirred by so martyred a mother. Since
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
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