Era of the Female Witness: Jewish Women and the Trial of Klaus Barbie

Abstract

“The grand figures and the grand voices of this trial are those of women.”

On May 28, 1987, the French newspaper Le Progrès printed these words in reference to the women who testified at the trial of former Lyon Gestapo Chief, Klaus Barbie.¹ Of the trial’s witnesses, two Jewish women, Sabine Zlatin and Simone Lagrange, used their courtroom appearances to share their harrowing experiences of the Holocaust.² Zlatin’s testimony revealed the perseverance of a Polish Jewish immigrant, and Lagrange shared her encounters as a young Jewish girl during the war. As leading witnesses, national and international media outlets spotlighted Zlatin and Lagrange’s wartime and postwar lives. The enormous media attention the trial received made it a crucial event during the resurgence of Holocaust memory in France, yet what made this trial unique with respect to the role of Jewish women as witnesses was its timing in the aftermath of the women’s rights movement. The feminist movement allowed people to better understand the gendered nature of Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies, recognizing their persecution and perseverance as women during the war. Their testimonies shaped the way the public and the media remembered the trial, and perhaps even fostered a greater consideration of crimes against women within the statutes for crimes against humanity.

Klaus Barbie was the first person to be tried for crimes against humanity before a French court of law. He was on trial for his actions as Gestapo Chief in Lyon during the German occupation of France. The trial took place in May and June 1987 and featured various witnesses including Jewish deportees and deported members of the French Resistance. On the stand, Sabine Zlatin and Simone Lagrange spoke powerfully about their experiences during the Holocaust. Zlatin was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who came to France in the interwar years. In the spring of 1943, Zlatin and her husband founded and directed a Jewish children’s home in Izieu. In spite of her efforts, all forty-four children and seven adults in the home, with the exception of Zlatin, who was out of town, fell victim to a Gestapo raid ordered by Barbie on April 6, 1944. After the raid, the Germans deported all the home’s children and adults to concentration camps, except for one adult worker who escaped, and one non-Jewish child released in the town before the lorries departed. Zlatin’s testimony highlighted the powerful wartime resistance and rescue work of a female Jewish immigrant who kept fighting, despite the losses she suffered.

Simone Lagrange, one of the youngest witnesses to testify, was tortured for seven straight days by Barbie when she was thirteen years old after having been arrested because she was Jewish. Following her horrific week with Barbie, the Germans deported Lagrange to Drancy, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lagrange testified extensively on the gendered nature of the torture tactics used by the Gestapo and the horrific circumstances women, particularly mothers, faced during deportation. Together, Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies reaffirmed the racial and gendered nature of Nazi persecution. This article explores how each woman testified before the court, and then dives into the media’s portrayal of them during the trial. I will situate their role as witnesses in Barbie’s trial among the contributions of women from a sampling of other prominent Holocaust-related trials.

Before the court, each woman recounted what she considered to be her most important experiences during the war. Zlatin focused on the persecution of innocent Jewish children who could not have been associated with resistance activity, in part because a key part of Barbie’s defense was his claim that he only targeted armed combatants of the Resistance.³ For Lagrange, this testimony meant emphasizing the torture and pain she suffered as a young girl. Their combined emphasis on violence against children was an effective method of swaying the jury against Barbie.

When reporting on the trial, the national and international media cast Zlatin as the caretaker and heroine who despite all her extraordinary efforts could not save the children she swore to protect, while journalists focused extensively on Lagrange’s youthful innocence and her life in 1987 as a mother of seven. On the surface it seems like the media portrayed these women as stereotypically feminine, which to some extent is true. For example, Vanity Fair described Lagrange as a “soft-spoken, affectionate housewife.”⁴ Yet the media also clearly covered their strengths as women. In the media’s depiction of Zlatin, she was a Red Cross nurse, a rescuer, and a resistance fighter. She held onto her Red Cross uniform “with pride” even after anti-Jewish laws forced her to leave her position at a military hospital.⁵ Concerning Lagrange, the focus on her identity as a mother was a way to express how a young girl could survive the horrific circumstances of torture and deportation and still raise a large family in the war’s aftermath. On one hand, this portrayal reflected the media’s alignment with more conservative gender norms, while on the other, it revealed the noticeable influence of the women’s rights movement.⁶

Zlatin and Lagrange were among a larger pool of strong female witnesses at the trial, who helped transform the courtroom from a predominantly masculine space into one where female voices significantly impacted the overall narrative of the trial and subsequent media commentary. The dominance of women’s voices in the trial brought to light the unique nature of crimes against women in the context of war and genocide. As a result, Zlatin and Lagrange’s trial contributions need to be situated within a longer trajectory of women’s involvement in court cases related to the Holocaust.

At Nuremberg, there were no female Jewish witnesses who spoke about their unique persecution as Jews. Decades later, women testified in the highly publicized Rezső (Rudolf) Kasztner and Adolf Eichmann trials, which both took place in Israel. The centrality of survivor testimony at the Eichmann trial might have inaugurated the “era of the witness,” but it certainly did not bring about the “era of the female witness.”⁷ For both trials, the press wrote about female witness testimonies in ways that subverted their nontraditional behavior during the war—a tactic to reinforce conservative gender norms in the present. Between the Eichmann and Barbie trials, one event made a huge difference on the overall impact of women’s testimonies: the international women’s rights movement.

The women’s rights movement revealed women’s absence in the recorded history of the Holocaust. At the Barbie trial, people paid attention to women’s unique contributions to the war and to the ways gender factored into how the Germans persecuted them. Even in the face of more conservative media reporting on these women’s testimonies, the focus on crimes committed against women potentially contributed to the further consideration of sexual violence as a war crime and crime against humanity.

Legal and theoretical context

Before delving into the trial and Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies, additional background regarding female witnesses at post-Holocaust trials is in order. The Nuremberg trials are seemingly the first example of justice after Nazi Germany’s defeat, even though victim testimony came second to documentary evidence in most of these proceedings.⁸ Even with the prosecution’s preference for material evidence, there were, however, several witnesses who discussed crimes committed against Jews. Women such as Polish Auschwitz inmate Severina Shmaglevskaya and French journalist Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier gave memorable testimonies, but neither was Jewish.⁹ Firsthand accounts about the Holocaust by Jewish women were absent.

Jewish women were prominent witnesses during Holocaust-related trials that took place in Israel in the 1960s. Historian Sharon Geva examines Hansi Brand’s role as a witness in the 1954 libel case involving Rezső (Rudolf) Kasztner, as well as the 1961 Eichmann trial. Hansi Brand worked to assist Jews during the war as a member of the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest. Notably, she participated in negotiations with German officials, including Adolf Eichmann, to stop the transports of Jews to the death camps.¹⁰ Geva examines how Brand featured in Israeli public discourse related to both trials. Even though Brand was central to the subjects each trial addressed, reporters marginalized her wartime experiences as compared to other male figures with whom she associated, including her husband Joel Brand and Rezső Kasztner. Geva concludes that “more than anything else, Hansi Brand’s place in the margins of Israeli public discourse manifests the traditional division of responsibilities between men and women in Israeli society.”¹¹ As evident from this example, the press’s downplaying of women’s wartime contributions was commonplace before 1968.

In a second article Geva wrote on female witnesses at the Eichmann trial, she notes the stark disparity of witnesses along gender lines. Of the 101 witnesses in the Eichmann trial, twenty-two were women, approximately one in five.¹² Even though women were squarely in the minority, roughly 80 percent of male and female survivors’ testimonies described women’s experiences in some capacity. Reporting on the trial, the press deflected attention from women’s “nontraditional” wartime roles. Even as women described experiences like their involvement with armed resistance, as was the case with Zivia Lubetkin’s testimony on the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the press presented women in a way that conformed to more traditional gender roles. In Lubetkin’s case, journalists wrote about her weeping on the witness stand as she testified—a claim that Geva notes was quite “dubious.”¹³ In this way, the press hoped to reassert traditional gender roles for women in the present, even if these women had broken from them. Geva ultimately concludes that the media’s reporting on female witnesses in the Eichmann trial reflected women’s place in Israeli society in the 1960s, “when feminism in the country was at one of its lows.”¹⁴ Even if Adolf Eichmann’s trial fell short in terms of how the press presented women’s wartime contributions, it did bring about what Annette Wieviorka has called the “era of the witness.” In this new era, more survivors told their stories because they increasingly considered themselves bearers of history.¹⁵

Even though women recounted their experiences during these earlier trials, their participation did not translate into the inclusion of their stories within the greater discourse on the Holocaust. This absence was not unique to Israel, as Jennifer Cazenave notes the dearth of female perspectives in her recent book on the outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.¹⁶ Likewise, Lisa Costello discusses the absence of women’s perspectives in written texts (e.g., autobiographies) as she considers why women delayed sharing their stories until decades after the war.¹⁷ This absence was a common trend throughout the postwar years until Joan Ringelheim and other pioneering scholars began asking questions related to gender in the 1970s.¹⁸ The women’s rights movement was the dividing line between these earlier proceedings and the work of scholars on gender and the Holocaust.

Besides considering women’s roles as witnesses, the Eichmann trial was the first to consider victims’ emotions as central to the practice of justice. The prosecution wielded victim testimony to obtain the harshest punishment possible.¹⁹ Utilizing the emotional impact of testimony in this way “challenged previous distinctions between reason and emotion and between the public and private spheres.”²⁰ The breakdown of this socially constructed boundary of private and public that once diminished women’s experiences during times of war left the possibility for women’s testimonies to have a greater impact in the Lyon courtroom. The 1963 East German trial of Hans Globke shows how this “strategy” can also have a gender dynamic. In Globke’s trial, all the Czechoslovakian witnesses were women.²¹ The choice of witnesses was deliberate; the East German prosecutors hoped the witnesses’ testimonies would deliberately create an emotional effect. Within the context of the Barbie trial, Zlatin and Lagrange delivered two of the most emotionally charged testimonies. After Lagrange stepped down from the stand, the Lyon Figaro reported how “the jurors had tears in their eyes.”²² Five days later, the same paper emphasized how testimonies like Lagrange’s are what “give the Barbie trial its force and its exceptional emotion.”²³ Emotional testimonies served a strategic purpose in the trials of wartime perpetrators.

How Zlatin and Lagrange testified was as important as what they said. They delivered emotionally powerful testimony on the stand that moved the courtroom and media alike. Their silences, tears, cries, tone of voice, and physical gestures were as instrumental to the court proceedings as their words. In this sense, we are also reminded of testimony’s performative character or Shoshana Felman’s categorization of testimony as a “performative speech act.” Witnesses are not called to merely tell their story or report facts, they are present to perform a speech act—or to “produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth.” Even “traditional” testimony, like what is given in the legal context, is subject to this performative aspect. To add to Felman’s point, I would argue that testimony’s performative nature is especially significant considering the publicity around the Barbie trial. The actions of trial witnesses assumed greater weight as a result.²⁴

Embodiment is another way to consider the idea of performance within the courtroom. Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies were prime examples of “embodied memory,” or performances that exemplified individual expression.²⁵ Zlatin and Lagrange demonstrated embodied memory not only through their physical gestures, but also through their “embodied language.” By nature of the type of testimonies they gave, “embodied language,” or as Knoblauch defines it, “the use of terms, metaphors, and analogies that reference, intentionally or not, the body itself,” served to highlight the visceral nature of Barbie’s crimes.²⁶ Zlatin smuggled little children out of internment camps against her body, literally under her cape, while Barbie slapped, punched, kicked, and hit a thirteen-year-old Lagrange during his interrogations.²⁷

This article draws from trial transcripts, trial videos, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and documentaries to balance the presentation of Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies. Journalistic reporting is not the only source category that warrants a critical eye; courtroom testimonies and memoirs also offer unique challenges for scholars. Over four decades passed before Zlatin and Lagrange stood before the court in Lyon. During those years, they repeatedly told their stories. Both women were likely familiar with other survivors’ accounts and historical works on the Holocaust. This knowledge, gleaned from the great body of existing Holocaust literature, undoubtedly influenced the interpretation of their own stories. Additionally, they had a purpose in telling their stories in the Lyon courtroom: to convict Barbie for his crimes against Jews. They constructed their testimonies to emphasize this point.

Time’s passage, however, does not imply that witnesses narrated their experiences in more “simplified” or “sanitized” way. In his work on the court trials regarding Starachowice survivors, Christopher Browning asserts that survivor memories proved more stable and less malleable than he had anticipated when he compared their accounts over a fifty-six-year period.²⁸ Browning even asserts that some events require the passage of time and an appropriate setting before witnesses are willing to speak. Sara Horowitz seconds this notion in her discussion of “deferred” or “belated” testimonies, which were recorded starting in the late-1980s. She asserts that “it is precisely in later testimonies that we may find people willing to talk about matters that did not find their way into earlier accounts.” These matters might have been too painful or shameful for witnesses to discuss until more time elapsed. Furthermore, time’s passage may even help the witness to “develop narrative and psychological frames through which the unbearable may, in fact, be born and transmitted.”²⁹

Meanwhile, Zlatin and Lagrange’s memoirs reveal how they perceived their own courtroom testimonies and shed light on what they wanted people to know about their roles in the trial. Their memoirs are projections of how they saw themselves in the early 1990s—with distance not only from the war, but from the trial as well. Besides their inherent challenges, these sources provide valuable insight into how these two women presented their wartime experiences in front of different audiences including the court, media, and general public.

The trial

Barbie was on trial for his roles in the raid against the Lyon office of the Union générale des Israélites de France (UGIF, General Union of French Jews), the arrest and deportation of the Jewish children in Izieu, and his role in deporting Jews and resisters on the last convoy to leave France on August 11, 1944.³⁰ Without a doubt, Barbie was a fervent ideological supporter of National Socialism. He shared the Nazi party’s visceral hatred of Jews, which he demonstrated early in the war through his ruthless persecution of Jews while assigned in the German-occupied Netherlands (1940–1942).³¹ After the Germans took control of France’s southern zone, Klaus Barbie became the chief of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 until the end of the war. He had been sent to Lyon because the area was a stronghold for the French Resistance, and one of his missions was to disrupt and destroy its resistance networks. As Gestapo chief, Barbie pursued, arrested, and deported Jews with the same vigor as resistance fighters; and often sadistically tortured both resisters and Jews for information.

When the war ended, Barbie fled to Bolivia after working briefly for the United States Counter Intelligence Corps. Even though Barbie escaped from Europe, French courts convicted him twice in absentia in the 1950s, but this did not mean his crimes were forgotten.³² The well-known Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld tracked him down in Bolivia, where the government was protecting him, and where he lived under the false name Klaus Altmann. Bolivian authorities arrested him for theft and fraud on January 25, 1983. He was stripped of his Bolivian citizenship on February 4, 1983, and deported to France via Guyana in response to the formal demand by François Mitterand’s Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter, with assistance from Regis Debray, an adviser to the President and friend of the Klarsfelds.³³

Barbie was the first person in France to be tried for crimes against humanity. France adopted the charge into its legal system in 1964, and it carried no statute of limitations. Prior to Barbie’s trial, the courts modified the statue to apply not only to Barbie’s Jewish victims, but also to the resisters he tortured. This distinction created palpable tension between resistance and Jewish witnesses at the trial.³⁴ Formerly, only noncombatants could testify against perpetrators accused of these crimes. Many Holocaust survivors opposed this change because it weakened the protection of innocent civilians unjustly targeted during conflict.³⁵ Serge Klarsfeld, who served as a civil party lawyer during the trial, was one of the most prominent trial participants to take this stance.³⁶

The Barbie trial followed significant changes for women living in France. Discourse and legislation concerning French women’s rights increased in the mid-1960s and gained full steam with the uprisings of 1968. Before that point, conservative gender norms remained prevalent in France, as elsewhere, after the Second World War. ³⁷ The transformation that occurred in the 1960s was remarkable. Historian Sarah Fishman argues that women became the subject of attention as women, rather than as wives, mothers, or daughters.³⁸ Mid-decade, Holocaust survivor and French Minister of Health Simone Veil fought for and obtained the legalization to support abortion rights and grant full access to contraceptives. By the time Zlatin and Lagrange testified at the Barbie trial, studies of gender were slowly making their way into the mainstream of Holocaust Studies. The inclusion of women in the larger narrative of the Holocaust made an enormous difference for female witnesses’ participation in the Barbie trial.

The Barbie trial was truly a trial of women. Almost without exception, all of the trial’s female witnesses recounted gendered experiences from the war. Women who served in the Resistance, such as Lise Lesèvre, discussed the horrific torture perpetrated by Barbie. Lesèvre became a central witness in the case after the Court of Cassation expanded the statute for crimes against humanity to include resisters.³⁹ Lesèvre’s testimony shockingly recounted how her horrific torture sessions began with the humiliation of undressing in front of Gestapo interrogators, a tactic used to break down women.⁴⁰ Resistance veteran and niece of Charles de Gaulle, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, powerfully described her imprisonment at Ravensbrück, a concentration camp designed specifically for women. She related to the court one of the most painful experiences for women in the camp, that of drowning newborn children. On the stand, de Gaulle-Anthonioz recalled a conversation she had with an Austrian midwife whom the guards forced to deliver children: “she told me that it took 20 to 30 minutes to drown a new born in a bucket of water because the resistance to asphyxiation for a newborn is very powerful (grande).”⁴¹ In addition to this chilling incident, de Gaulle-Anthonioz focused on mothers too malnourished to provide milk for their children, the medical experiments on Polish women in the camp, and the brutal sterilization of young Romani and Sinti girls. Testimonies like those given by résistantes Lesèvre and de Gaulle-Anthonioz revealed the extent to which the Nazis ruthlessly targeted a remarkably wide range of women in specifically gendered ways.

When it came to Barbie’s crimes during the Holocaust, two mothers, Fortunée Benguigui and Ita Rosa Halaunbrenner, delivered heartbreaking testimonies about Barbie’s arrest of their children who were sheltered in Izieu.⁴² Other witnesses such as Austrian born Edith Klebinder testified about the horror of watching the Izieu children being led directly to the gas chambers after they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During her testimony, Klebinder also spoke about the traumas faced by pregnant women and mothers in the camp.⁴³ Sabine Zlatin and Simone Lagrange’s testimonies are featured from among this larger group of women because of their central role as witnesses concerning the crimes for which Barbie stood accused: Zlatin was the director of the Izieu Jewish children’s home, and Lagrange, at thirteen years old, was tortured by Barbie after having been arrested because she was Jewish. Their testimonies were among the most coherently assembled and powerfully delivered of the leading Jewish witnesses, and both women placed their experiences during the Holocaust within the wider context of their lives in France before and after the war.

Even though women were featured prominently in press reports, a number of men also appeared frequently in media accounts. Barbie’s extremely controversial defense attorney, Jacques Vergès, constantly made headlines in large part because of his attempts to deflect attention from Barbie’s crimes by referencing French colonial abuses in Algeria. Serge Klarsfeld, a trial prosecutor and memory activist, was the frequent subject of news coverage because of his advocacy on behalf of the Jewish children of Izieu and their surviving parents.⁴⁴ From among the trial witnesses, Mario Blardone, who was imprisoned in Lyon for his resistance activity, spoke about Barbie’s use of sexual violence against women. The papers quoted his testimony widely because he described an incident where he saw Barbie sexually abuse a woman using a dog.⁴⁵ During the trial, Vergès went on a tirade trying to discredit Blardone’s testimony, which also contributed to its wide coverage in the press. It is also important to note how the press highlighted Blardone’s testimony, which focused on a woman’s body and sexual violence.

When Beate Klarsfeld first identified Barbie in 1972 it drew significant media attention, which continued as she staged public demonstrations regarding his attempt to hide in Bolivia.⁴⁶ Press coverage intensified after Barbie’s expulsion in 1983, and stories about him and the impending trial appeared regularly throughout the following four years. During his trial in May and June 1987, international news outlets joined in reporting on Barbie as journalists worldwide covered the day-by-day proceedings of the trial. Upon Barbie’s death in 1991, a flurry of news coverage revisited his crimes, and Barbie continued to appear in stories related to the trials of other major wartime perpetrators.

This high level of media coverage, which often included the stories of Zlatin and Lagrange, extended the impact these two women had on what people read about the Holocaust, and also helped shape a distinct memory of the genocide, which included their stories. This article takes as axiomatic the central role of journalism, and of the media in general, to memory studies. This relationship functions in several ways that affected Zlatin and Lagrange. For example, just as contemporary events weighed upon how they discussed their wartime experiences, so did the decades of news stories published between the war and the trial’s start.⁴⁷ Furthermore, journalists played a key role in recounting major milestones in the Barbie trial. Through their reporting, they actively shaped different aspects of the trial, and certainly helped direct attention to a handful of key trial moments. This dynamic comes through in a variety of different contexts: by contributing to the tension between resisters and Holocaust survivors, the prevalence of reporting on women, and the dominance of torture testimonies, to name a few.

One cannot overstate the Barbie trial’s importance for Holocaust memory, particularly in France. It was one of several events that contributed to what Henry Rousso calls the “obsession” period with regard to Jewish memory in France. During this period, discussions on the Holocaust exploded into public discourse about the war through a variety of media such as the news, films, television series, and books.⁴⁸ From these discussions, many Holocaust survivors hoped the Barbie trial would result in the official recognition of Jewish suffering as separate from the experiences of other deportee groups and acknowledgment of French complicity in the Holocaust.⁴⁹ Even though the Barbie trial helped keep issues related to the Holocaust alive in contemporary discourse, it took until 1995 for French President Jacques Chirac to acknowledge the French state’s involvement in the deportation of Jews.⁵⁰

Sabine Zlatin: The lady of Izieu

Born in 1907 in Warsaw, Sabine Zlatin moved to France and was naturalized as a French citizen with her husband in July 1939. Zlatin’s testimony on May 27, 1987, featured a presentation of personal life milestones that led to her involvement with the Jewish children in Izieu. Her testimony is important not just because she protected Jewish children, but also because, by discussing her life in detail, she publicly told the story of the Holocaust from a female Jewish immigrant’s perspective.⁵¹

Zlatin began her testimony with the French declaration of war against Germany in 1939. Zlatin and her husband Miron lived in northern France, just ten kilometers from the Belgian border. Not long after the war began, Zlatin volunteered as a Red Cross military nurse. As a nurse, she moved around to several different hospitals before eventually settling at the Montpellier military hospital. Zlatin worked in Montpellier until 1941 when, along with another Jewish doctor, the hospital dismissed her because of newly instituted anti-Jewish statutes. The legislation Zlatin’s testimony referenced was likely the June 2, 1941, Statut des juifs (Jewish statute), which prohibited Jews from practicing certain professions, including medicine. After her dismissal, Zlatin explained: “I left the military hospital and found myself without work the next day, all the while still keeping my military nursing uniform and guarding the pride of belonging.”⁵²

Finding herself unemployed, Zlatin searched for other ways to help people. Having heard about the internment camps that held foreign Jews at Agde and Rivesaltes, Zlatin looked for opportunities to aid Jews imprisoned in those camps. Before German occupation, the two camps held refugees from the Spanish Civil War and foreigners assumed to have Nazi sympathies, even though many of these foreigners were Jews fleeing Nazism. After France’s defeat, the camps were repurposed to hold first foreign, and eventually French-born Jews. Zlatin found work with the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (Children’s Emergency Aid Organization, OSE), where they accepted her in the position of assistante sociale (social assistant). The OSE had a network of children’s homes throughout France which provided food, shelter, and education to Jewish children whose parents had been interned, deported, or could no longer support them.⁵³

Working for the OSE, Zlatin entered Agde and Rivesaltes where she discovered the horrible conditions in which the Germans forced Jews to live. In her testimony, she recounted a time when dressed in her Red Cross military uniform, she went into the barracks for women. “When I entered into that barrack a silence fell over the room because of my uniform, and then a change, a cry, a terrible cry, a cry that I will never forget! ‘Take our children!’” And that was what she did next. She worked within the OSE’s network to remove children from the camps, one small group at a time. After leaving the camps, she transferred the children into OSE custody and the organization placed them in homes scattered throughout France.⁵⁴

After gaining experience working with the OSE children’s homes, Zlatin and her husband founded their own refuge for Jewish children in the small village of Izieu southeast of Lyon. The first children arrived there in June 1943. In 1943 and 1944, German raids targeted many of the OSE homes throughout France, so the OSE closed many of their houses and sent some of those children to the refuge in Izieu. Likewise, the UGIF also sent Jewish children to Izieu when they realized that the Germans were increasingly targeting Jews in UGIF homes. At its peak residency, the Izieu home held approximately eighty children.⁵⁵

While this home may have seemed like a safe haven tucked away in the tranquil mountains of southern France, Zlatin and the OSE recognized the dangers and increased chance of roundups that Jews in the region faced—especially after the arrest of a Jewish doctor who lived nearby. For their safety, the children needed to be dispersed. In April 1944, there were forty-four children in the home and Zlatin was busy searching for other places to hide them. On April 6, 1944, she was in Montpellier working on the necessary paperwork to relocate the children when she received a four-word telegram: “famille malade, maladie contagieuse,” or “family sick, sickness contagious.”⁵⁶

Zlatin knew immediately from the telegram that a Gestapo raid had targeted the house in Izieu. Her worst fears were confirmed when she discovered the Germans had arrested all forty-four Jewish children and the seven adults who cared for them, including her husband Miron. Only one caretaker escaped during the raid and another non-Jewish child was let off the lorries before they left town. Immediately after the arrest, Zlatin set off to appeal in person to the powers at Vichy, hoping to stave off deportation. She must have known this attempt was futile considering that officials at Vichy held little influence, especially since the Germans had directly occupied both zones since November 1942. When that plan failed, she tried desperately pleading with the Red Cross to intervene. Anticipating what the courtroom audience might have been thinking, she remarked: “I was not scared of anything, how could I be scared when the children, my husband, all the world was gone….” Despite her efforts to rescue children from internment camps, provide them with what she thought was safe shelter in Izieu, or even appeal to the powers at Vichy and the Red Cross on their behalf, in the end, she failed to save them from deportation.

Zlatin spent the last part of the war in the Resistance. After the Liberation of Paris, she held a leadership position at the Lutetia Repatriation center where she waited each day for news of the children and her husband. She explained how a man passing through Lutetia broke the news she dreaded: several months earlier, the Germans had shot her husband and two of the older boys from Izieu while they worked on a forced labor detail in Estonia.⁵⁷ Devastated, Zlatin recounted to the court how she began memorializing the children and adults of Izieu through plaques, road signs, and commemorations almost immediately after hearing the news at Lutetia.

One of the most widely quoted moments from Zlatin’s testimony was when she countered the defense council’s statements that Barbie only arrested members of the Resistance and that he did not order the arrest at Izieu, as he stood accused. Zlatin emphasized that the children of Izieu were arrested because they were Jewish. She began:

Throughout Barbie’s defense, Barbie had always said he was occupied uniquely with resisters and Maquis [guerilla] fighters, those who were determined enemies of the German army. I ask this: the children, the forty-four children, what were they? Were they resisters? Were they Maquis? What were they? They were innocents!

The volume of her voice gradually escalated to a yell as she delivered this moving part of her testimony. Her voice, slightly shaky and with a Polish accent, quivered with emotion.⁵⁸ She reemphasized her point by explaining that from all the books she had read about the war and the Holocaust, Hitler wanted to destroy as many Jews as possible, including children.

Zlatin’s statements intended to bring the court’s attention to the unique persecution of Jews as different from other deportee groups, and to separate the story of Izieu from that of the torture testimonies told by resistance witnesses. Immediately after the war, as Zlatin memorialized the children in a plaque and through yearly commemorations, people criticized her for ignoring the children’s Jewish identity and for inaccuracies on a plaque she commissioned.⁵⁹ In the immediate postwar period (1945–1950), the stories of Jewish persecution were subsumed under the narrative of universal French suffering, and then surpassed by resistance-related stories. To push through the approval of the plaque Zlatin sought to put up in April 1946, she worked within this dominant discourse at the cost of downplaying the Germans’ targeting of the Izieu children solely because they were Jewish. Zlatin’s actions should also be considered from the perspective that she was a Polish-Jewish immigrant trying not to make waves in France after having witnessed years of antisemitic persecution at the hands of French collaborators. Her statement in the Barbie trial seemed to be an attempt to make up for not emphasizing the children’s Jewish identity during earlier memorialization projects.⁶⁰

In media reports on Zlatin, journalists first portrayed her as a heroine protecting the children under her care. “The former military nurse tried everything in her power to save the children,” the Lyon Figaro observed. “She went to Vichy. Took steps [to locate them]. In vain … without much success, it was too late, the fate of Sami, Jean-Claude, Mina, Elie … the fate of forty-four little deportees was sealed.” The article mentioned her former status as a Red Cross nurse, recognizing her admirable contributions to the war effort.⁶¹ Since women could not join French military units in 1939, the Red Cross offered them a way to help fight Germany. Women were also prevalent in resistance groups, and eventually, the military integrated them into certain sectors of the armed forces during the Liberation period.

Zlatin was not only a Red Cross nurse, she was also involved in rescue and resistance for the remainder of the German occupation, a point the papers frequently discussed. In Le Monde, correspondent Laurent Greilsamer recalled Zlatin’s matter-of-fact, and very much embodied, description of her work to save Jewish children from Agde and Rivesaltes: “We took the children out [of the camps] with their permission, and sometimes without, under my cape. We had our little tricks.”⁶² As part of her rescue efforts, she transported some children into Switzerland, and eventually, she founded the children’s home in Izieu. “I knew very well that we had to disband that house [Izieu] at all costs,” she recounted to Greilsamer. When reporting on her, the papers always captured Zlatin’s efforts to rescue threatened Jewish children.

Zlatin’s identity as a Polish immigrant was also the focus of newspaper accounts that discussed her courtroom appearance. At the beginning of Zlatin’s testimony, she abruptly summarized of the Izieu raid on April 6, 1944. This account was chronologically out of order with the rest of her testimony; it seemed to be something she needed to say before getting to the main part of her story. As she recounted what happened the day of the raid, Le Progrès noted how the emotion in her voice built as she told the story, and then “suddenly, the accent of Warsaw cracked through in her cry.”⁶³

Highlighting her accent brought attention to her identity as an immigrant. Similar to many of the Eastern European immigrants, Zlatin was Jewish and came to France during the interwar years in search of greater economic opportunities and safety from increasing antisemitism.⁶⁴  Le Progrès might have intentionally mentioned Zlatin’s accent to highlight the past suffering of immigrants and thus to draw attention to contemporary political issues surrounding immigration. The period of the Barbie trial coincided with the first real successes of the right-wing party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Front National. The Front National’s success worried many people, especially immigrants, because its national-populist ideology was interpreted by its followers to be largely anti-immigration.⁶⁵  Le Progrès is also a regionally based paper, which politically has ties to a more left-leaning constituency than the areas where Le Pen generally gathered support, such as in parts of northern France.⁶⁶

Testifying before the court legitimized Zlatin’s story and made her a household name. Through her testimony and media reporting on her, people learned how a Polish Jewish woman contributed to the military, rescue operations, and the resistance. She was always a caretaker in some capacity. Zlatin’s wartime experiences showcased the power of women’s perseverance on behalf of others.

Simone Lagrange: The thirteen-year-old who faced Barbie

Born in 1930 in Saint Fons, France to Moroccan-born, but self-described “very French” Jewish parents, Simone Lagrange was thirteen years old when she first encountered Klaus Barbie. Prior to her arrest, Lagrange attended school like any other girl her age, trained in first aid to help during air raids, and helped distribute leaflets for the French Resistance. Her father was loosely involved in distributing resistance pamphlets as well, and the Germans had already arrested Lagrange’s older sister Phiby Abergel for resistance activity in March 1943. Abergel was never heard from again.⁶⁷

On June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, Lagrange’s life changed forever following the denunciation and arrest of her family. At Barbie’s 1987 trial, Lagrange discussed her arrest, torture, and deportation. She wrapped up her approximately forty-five-minute testimony by talking about her role in the pretrial identification of Barbie in 1983.⁶⁸

For the first half of her testimony, Lagrange repeatedly emphasized her age when she encountered Barbie. Her stress on being a somewhat naïve, innocent young girl when she fell into Barbie’s hands strengthened her testimony’s impact and made his torture sessions seem even more horrific. When the Germans first brought Lagrange and her parents into Gestapo custody, they took all three of them into a room for questioning. Lagrange and her parents waited alone until a man petting a gray cat came through the door. The man, whose name she did not know at the time, was Klaus Barbie. According to Lagrange, from the perspective of:

a little girl of thirteen, when you see a man petting a cat, you are not really afraid. I must also say that we had the tendency to picture the SS as men who were very strong, very tall, very blond, and Barbie was not representative of that type of SS man we had spoken about when we were children…. I did not think that this man could be mean. ⁶⁹

It did not take long for Lagrange’s perception of Barbie to change. He first began questioning her mother, then Lagrange, for the whereabouts of her two younger siblings who had been placed in the countryside for their safety (primarily from aerial bombardments). The truth was that neither Lagrange nor her parents knew the exact address of the two youngest because the children had recently been relocated, but Barbie refused to believe all three of them were ignorant of the youngest siblings’ whereabouts.

After the initial questioning of Lagrange and her mother, Barbie put the cat down, and came back over to ask Lagrange again for the address of her siblings. Through a heart-wrenching embodied description, Lagrange recounted what happened when she answered Barbie once more in the negative:

the young girls of that era, they had hair that was very long; which was also true in my case. My hair had been wrapped up in a hairnet…. Barbie tore the hairnet, and my hair fell to my shoulders. At that moment, he rolled my hair around his hand, pulled with all his strength, and I took the first pair of slaps of my life.⁷⁰

Lagrange’s parents were still in the room during her initial round of violence at Barbie’s hands and her father stepped forward to intervene after Barbie hit her. In an instant, Barbie put a revolver to her father’s stomach to stop his advance.

In this brief exchange, we gain insight into the torture tactics employed by Barbie and the Gestapo. The agony of their young daughter placed Lagrange’s parents in a position of utter helplessness, reinforcing the Germans’ absolute power over them. Barbie demonstrated that as parents they could no longer protect their child. Second, putting a gun to her father’s stomach as he attempted to defend his family directly challenged his masculinity, ensuring he no longer had any way to physically protect his daughter. Torture in this first instance was a family affair meant to exploit the emotions of Lagrange’s parents and force them to divulge the information Barbie sought.

After describing this introduction to Barbie’s torture sessions, Lagrange broke down on the witness stand and cried. This memory was an emotional moment for Lagrange and for those listening to her testimony. The details she provided—the cat, the hairnet, her father’s failed attempt to protect her—were how she experienced her first encounter with torture as a thirteen-year-old girl.⁷¹ During this part of her testimony, emotions and tears carried their own meaning, which her words struggled to convey.

Lagrange’s torture did not cease after this initial session. Each day, Barbie came to her cell in Montluc Prison where she shared a small space with her mother and a few other women. As Barbie entered Lagrange’s cell, he asked her mother for the names and whereabouts of her other children. When Lagrange’s mother refused to answer, he grabbed Lagrange from the cell and transported her to the Gestapo building for another round of violent torture. Lagrange recounted her torture sessions at Gestapo headquarters to the court. After Barbie asked her the same question about her younger siblings and she failed to respond, “he would punch me, kick me. He knocked me to the ground countless times, and forced me back to my feet by kicking me! He hit me in the face, re-opening the wounds he previously gave me that had not healed.”⁷²

This sequence, or “petite sérénade” as she sarcastically called it, endured for seven days without ceasing, yet Lagrange emphasized that as horrible as this physical torture was, it never compared to the “moral torture” Barbie inflicted. At the end of each day, Barbie brought Lagrange back to the cell where her distraught mother anxiously waited. Barbie shoved Lagrange against her mother and said: “Voilà, this is what you have done to your daughter.”⁷³ Barbie made it clear that Lagrange’s torture sessions resulted directly from her mother’s refusal to disclose her younger siblings’ whereabouts. He exploited their mother-daughter relationship to gain information.

After discussing her time in the Gestapo headquarters and Montluc prison, Lagrange described her life at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her testimony focused on several incidents related to the suffering of children, women’s bodies, and mothers in the camps. Lagrange was a mother of seven at the time of the trial, which certainly influenced her decision to include these accounts. The first deportation memory she shared recounted the cries of children on the train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the train car, Lagrange and her mother took two children under their care for the voyage. It was common for women in the train cars and at the camps to help unaccompanied children, but there were many other terrified little ones they were still unable to assist. During the trial, Lagrange recalled how “the cries of children rest in my ears at night, I wake with those nightmares. Believe me.”⁷⁴

As she continued her testimony, Lagrange spoke about her arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau where she suffered from the dehumanizing in-processing procedure that consisted of having her hair sheared, standing nude before other women and guards, being tattooed, and receiving new ill-fitting clothing. Lagrange’s long hair was a part of her identity as a young French woman. Long hair, she emphasized, was common among young girls her age from the Lyon area. As such, it made her recollection of the head shearing all the more painful: “My first ordeal, that was when they sheared off our hair. That seems idiotic, it is nothing next to what these women have just recounted before me, but you know that when you have your hair, you are someone.” The women she referred to were Lise Lesèvre, Claire Frémion, and Ennat Léger—all women involved in the Resistance whom Barbie tortured. These three women spoke about their horrific experiences right before Lagrange testified on May 22, 1987.⁷⁵ These few lines of Lagrange’s testimony are particularly striking. By shearing her long hair, the Germans stripped her of her unique identity, a process which was capped off by tattooing a number on her arm—a procedure she loathed just as much. She attempted to squeeze out the ink immediately after the tattooing to obscure the numbers, eliciting a blow from a nearby camp guard.

The hair shearing and tattooing also coincided with the camp guards forcing her and the other women from her convoy to remove their clothes and wait naked in front of one another as well as the camp guards themselves. The shock of seeing women she knew her whole life from Saint-Fons shaved and naked struck her: “I didn’t even realize I was like them, but I was embarrassed to see the women all naked, without hair, not even pubic hair, nothing at all.”⁷⁶ Lagrange disassociated herself from the naked women from Saint-Fons standing before her; she hardly recognized that she was in the same vulnerable position. Seeing older women naked was a shock to Lagrange because, as she explained, it was not culturally common to see adults nude. Recounting her testimony nearly forty years after the war, Lagrange seems to have felt the humiliation of the other women who were degraded in such a way before a child.

After Lagrange testified about her experiences at Auschwitz, her parents’ death, and her return to France, she told the court about a much later encounter she had on July 20, 1983, with Klaus Barbie. After Barbie’s expulsion from Bolivia and subsequent transfer to France, the trial’s prosecutorial team located several of Barbie’s victims, including Lagrange, and brought them one by one to a meeting with Barbie as part of their larger investigation of him.⁷⁷ Meetings between witnesses and the accused are aptly known as “confrontations.”⁷⁸ Barbie was hiding behind his false identity as Klaus Altmann, so in addition to collecting evidence, these meetings sought to officially confirm his identity.

As expected, during the confrontation between Barbie and Lagrange, Barbie denied meeting Lagrange or torturing her as a young girl. “Amnesia” was a tactic Barbie used in many of these confrontations, not just when facing Lagrange.⁷⁹ His response was unsurprising given that he faced life in prison, yet near the end of the confrontation, the conversation took a disturbing turn. At the 1987 trial, Lagrange explained how Barbie at one point smiled at her and said: “Ma’am, excuse me if I seem to be staring at you, it is because when one has been in prison for seven months, it’s always agreeable to see an appetizing woman.”⁸⁰

Lagrange’s courtroom testimony differs slightly from the transcription of the encounter completed after the original meeting in 1983. In the 1983 meeting, after Lagrange stated that if Barbie claimed not to recognize her, the way he was staring at her indicated he at least remembered her story. In response to Lagrange, Barbie replied: “When one has been in prison, this woman is still pretty enough to look at.”⁸¹ The transcription of what Barbie said in 1983 contained words that were not nearly as strong—describing her as pretty, rather than appetizing. The term “appetizing woman” carries a distinct sexual connotation. By choosing “appetizing” to describe this exchange, it was possible Lagrange was trying to describe Barbie’s look and how it made her feel.

Unsurprisingly, Lagrange found Barbie’s comment on her appearance (in whatever form it was said) insulting, and she angrily articulated this sentiment in her 1987 court testimony.⁸² Lagrange passionately remarked to the President of the court how: “This man, who allowed himself to hit me when I was a child, this man who killed my mother and father, this man who sent my little nephews to the four crematoria, wanted to flirt with me. Today, I still consider that I had been insulted at that confrontation.”⁸³

According to court records from 1983, Barbie dismissed the whole incident as a “joke” that Lagrange failed to understand. In doing so, Barbie consciously deflected the focus of that 1983 meeting, which was to identify him as the man who committed crimes against humanity. Instead, Barbie turned it back on Lagrange as a woman—referencing her looks and articulating the attraction he felt. His deflection failed. Instead, it helped Lagrange show the court Barbie’s lack of remorse and his base, sadistic character.

The media’s reporting on Lagrange emphasized the strength of her appearance before the court and her identity as a mother of seven. Journalists interviewed Lagrange even before the trial started, telling the story of the young girl who survived Barbie’s torture. After her May 22, 1987, testimony, the local, national, and even international papers wrote about the impact of her words. Journalists quoted extensively from her testimony and almost always emphasized the emotion her words evoked. As news of Barbie’s identification and subsequent expulsion broke in the press, reporters pursued Lagrange for an interview about her life and encounters with Barbie.⁸⁴ One reporter from Vanity Fair, Francine du Plessix Gray, spent time in France with Lagrange in 1983.⁸⁵ Plessix Gray’s article, which was designed to bring Lagrange’s story to an American audience, summarized Lagrange’s background and her encounters with Barbie, her time at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her postwar life. Vanity Fair was by no means the only American news outlet reporting on the Barbie trial; The New Yorker, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian were among many others.

Plessix Gray came to know Lagrange well during their time together. She wrote about Lagrange’s personality and demeanor: “She stands by me in front of Barbie’s former offices on Lyon’s Place Bellecour, a soft-spoken, affectionate housewife with russet hair, showing me the scars left on her forehead from Barbie’s beatings.” Plessix Gray described how Lagrange discussed the horrors of medical experimentation at Auschwitz. Lagrange offered “this data in the same affable confidential tone in which she would advise me on the making of a perfect quenelle: ‘Don’t forget the pinch of nutmeg….’”⁸⁶

Plessix Gray wrote that Lagrange was making crêpes for her children when her husband called her into their living room to show her a news broadcast that featured Barbie’s photo. The broadcaster asked for anyone who could identify Barbie to come forward. At first this juxtaposition of quaint quotidian life alongside Lagrange’s most haunting memories seems absurd, yet for Plessix Gray to articulate Lagrange’s story to her American audience, she needed to make Lagrange relatable. Lagrange was a housewife who took pride in cooking for her children and husband, but behind this domestic façade was the strength of someone who survived torture by one of the most infamous Nazis. It was through this contrast that Lagrange’s exceptionality shone through—she prevailed over the trauma she experienced as a teenager to grow into the woman capable of taking care of a large family. This message was the story Plessix Gray hoped to impart to her predominantly female readers.

After Lagrange testified on May 22, 1987, the press attention she received increased exponentially. During the trial, nearly all newspapers that discussed her testimony mentioned she was a mother. The Lyon Figaro quoted Lagrange, “I have had seven children. That was vital. And that saved me…. Reconstituting a family very fast was a lifeline for me. By twenty-six years old, I had already had my first six children … that was the only revenge possible over death.”⁸⁷ It was her mission to counter the deaths of the Holocaust by raising a large family. The journalists who mentioned Lagrange’s role as a mother seemed to recognize the strength of that identity, a marked contrast to the essentializing mention of women as mothers during earlier trials. In this way, we can see the clear difference between reporting on women before and after the feminist movement. Whether highlighting motherhood as stereotypically feminine or a source of women’s strength, the press contributed to shaping the ways people read about and understood women.

The fact that Lagrange was the mother of seven was striking in itself; seven was well above the average number of children per family in France at this time. After the Holocaust, for some Jewish women, becoming a mother was a way to reaffirm their feminine identity in an intimate and symbolic way. In the camps, women felt as if they had lost this identity for reasons such as the head shearing, lack of menstruation, and maltreatment by camp guards. Many SS taunted female prisoners by threatening that they would never be able to give birth again.⁸⁸ Having children, as historian Atina Grossmann argues, was a way to reassert personal agency while simultaneously affirming life in the aftermath of the Holocaust.⁸⁹ In addition to wanting children for their own reasons as survivors, Jewish women in France were also exposed to the state’s pronatalist discourse. A carryover from wartime policies, the state continued to promote and reward women who had multiple children.⁹⁰ It was perhaps not a coincidence that Le Figaro, considered to be France’s most conservative, widely disseminated newspaper, published this quote. Even so, it was not the only paper to foreground Lagrange’s identity as a mother.

Other newspaper descriptions of Lagrange highlighted her age in comparison to the other witnesses, both female and male. Lagrange was fifty-seven years old in 1987, whereas most other witnesses were in their seventies and eighties. It is clear that age factored into her testimony’s performative aspects; the Lyon Figaro pointed out how she was the youngest survivor to testify, describing how “in front of the court, she rediscovered the spontaneity and freshness of soul of the thirteen-year-old child she was at the time when she was tortured by Barbie.”⁹¹ Reporters noticed how her testimony was given with force, even mentioning that she was a “star” among the trial’s witnesses. “Solid, balanced, that mother of seven children has attained publicity in spite of herself.” This publicity, the account continued, came from “that internal force, that tone of simple truth … that truth that she communicated with a surprising energy.”⁹² Her stature on the witness stand and her powerful delivery ensured Lagrange’s place among the leading witnesses in Lyon that May.

Lagrange’s testimony was significant for the way she described the horrors faced by a young Jewish girl arrested in France during the German occupation. Her story featured a perspective that had rarely been explored within the larger French discourse on the war. Her testimony also focused on the experiences of other women she encountered during her arrest and deportation. From the mental torture Barbie inflicted on her mother at Montluc prison to the sexual humiliation of the women from Saint-Fons during in-processing at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she revealed to the court several different, but equally horrific ways Jewish women suffered. By mentioning Barbie’s comments to her at the 1983 confrontation, she exposed a more recent form of harassment. Her testimony was crucial for raising awareness about the different forms of gender-based violence that can occur within the context of crimes against humanity.

The impact of Lagrange and Zlatin’s testimonies

At the Barbie trial was wide-ranging. Women and men learned, many for the first time, of the traumas Zlatin and Lagrange endured throughout the German Occupation. Zlatin, as the director of the Izieu Jewish children’s home, revealed to the world the full extent of her efforts to save Jewish children during the war. Throughout her time on the stand, her emotional delivery also showed how she remained scarred from her losses, a point that became clearer with the discussion of her role memorializing Izieu. In Lagrange’s case, the audience heard about the perseverance of a young Jewish girl, who faced unspeakable horrors. Delivering an emotional performance before the court, she laid bare how forty years later, the Holocaust still haunted her. Serving as witnesses in the Barbie trial allowed Zlatin and Lagrange to face their traumas and participate in the process of obtaining justice for their murdered loved ones. Thanks to Zlatin and Lagrange’s testimonies, people with no link to France’s Jewish communities understood a little bit better the Holocaust’s lasting impact on Jews, and specifically on Jewish women.

Examining Jewish women as witnesses shows how testifying before an official court body has long-term implications well beyond the trial itself. The wartime experiences recounted by Zlatin and Lagrange reached an international audience, both in 1987 and today as their accounts are held in the archives in France and the United States. Overcoming the difficulties of retelling their traumas before the court, both women ensured their personal stories would shape the public memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The involvement of Zlatin and Lagrange, alongside the other women who testified during the Barbie trial, made it clear that female witnesses were a crucial component of trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The inclusion of women’s experiences elicited strong emotions from the courtroom audience and media, most likely increasing the probability of a conviction. Going forward, including women as witnesses would become the norm not only for the emotional impact of their testimonies, but in recognition that women’s perspectives are essential to understanding the full scope of the crimes.

The Barbie trial unveiled the horrors of violence committed against women. In the future, it would be more common for women to come forward to testify about their specific targeting as women within the context of war and genocide. Four years after the Barbie trial, a survivor of the Japanese military’s regime of sexual slavery filed a lawsuit for damages and compensation resulting from her victimization during the Second World War. In 2000, seventy-five survivors banded together in Tokyo to consider the crimes of high-ranking officials and the responsibility of Japan itself for rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity associated with Japanese military activity in the 1930s and 1940s.⁹³ One year later in February 2001, a trial chamber at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted three Bosnian Serb soldiers of war crimes and crimes against humanity for sexual violence against Muslim women and girls in 1992 and 1993.⁹⁴ In most instances, witnesses in these court cases faced pushback or even threats for their participation; nonetheless, these women found the strength to testify.⁹⁵ Meanwhile, in response to the widespread sexual violence against women in these contexts, as well as during conflicts in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations declared that sexual violence against women was considered a crime against humanity as part of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, effective in July 2002.⁹⁶ Over time, women’s participation in the legal process translated into the greater prosecution of crimes against women.

The Barbie trial stood at a powerful moment of transition for women’s representation in courts of law. Benefiting from the women’s rights movement that was energized in 1968, women like Zlatin and Lagrange appeared before an international audience to share their unique experiences from the Second World War. Perhaps without even realizing it, they transformed the way people looked at women’s suffering within the context of war and genocide. They inaugurated a new “era of the female witness” where women are increasingly empowered to use the courts to obtain justice for the crimes committed against them.

Ashley Valanzola, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of the Holocaust at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. She has published articles related to French history and the Holocaust, as well as a pedagogical publication on teaching traumatic subjects. Her current book project, When She Remembered: Seven Women who Transformed French Holocaust Memory, examines the incredible role of individuals in shaping the production of Holocaust memory from 1945 to the present.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to a long list of scholars and mentors who advised me as I embarked upon the research that led to this article, foremost among them Dr. Katrin Schultheiss, Dr. Jenna Weissman Joselit, Dr. Lisa Leff, and Dr. Angela Zimmerman. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions and comments.

Funding

I am thankful for the generous funding that made this publication possible, including grants from the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences provided by the French Embassy in the United States, the Washington, D.C. Cosmos Club Foundation, and George Washington University.

Footnotes