A month before the end of World War II, the Gestapo in Lyon, under the command of Klaus Barbie, sent two vans to the French village of Izieu to remove Jewish children from an orphanage called La Maison D’Izieu.
This action was set to become one of the most infamous symbols of Nazi brutality and, ironically, the single count (of crimes against humanity) for which Klaus Barbie, torturer and murderer of Jewish men, women, and children, but most criticised as the executioner of Résistance hero Jean Moulin, was tried and convicted forty-three years later.
Conclusive evidence in the trial was the telex Klaus Barbie sent to the Office for Jewish Affairs, stating, “This morning the Jewish children’s home ‘Colonie infant in Izieu, Ain was cleaned out. … Neither cash nor other valuables could be secured. Transport to Drancy to follow on 4/7/44.”
On the morning of April 6, 1944, while the children and their counsellors were having breakfast, Barbie and his men rounded up forty-five youngsters, of which one non-Jewish child was subsequently released to his cousin in town and seven adults loading them “like sacks of potatoes” onto waiting for trucks toward their inevitable deaths in Auschwitz.
Léon Reifman, a teacher, was able to escape through a second-floor window and, alongside five Jewish women, was able to shed light on the murder of the children of Izieu. The founder of the home, Sabine Zlatin, had gone to seek a safer place for the children when they were captured.
During the children’s detention in Lyon, the Germans also discovered the whereabouts of some of their family members, who were then taken to Drancy and later deported to their deaths in Auschwitz.
The news of the raid reached other children’s homes, letting them know how unsafe they were, and soon directors of the OSE began to evacuate the children and gradually close down the children’s homes. Some of these children were successfully smuggled out of the country.
In 1987, when Klaus Barbie was put on trial in France and convicted of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Laja Feldblum-Klepten testifying at the trial, said:
“It is my duty to testify against Klaus Barbie in the name of my 44 children who were murdered at Auschwitz because every night they appear before my very eyes.”
Sabine Zlatin convinced the president François Mitterrand to turn the orphanage premises into a memorial towards the end of her life.
