Only the victims seemed quite real. Marcel Stourdze, a deportee who traveled back and forth from Paris to Bordeaux every day, in order not to miss a day, testified, “When I went back to Auschwitz after the liberation, I saw that in an enormous vat they had saved all the hair. I thought that I saw the hair of my wife. Today all that hair has become white. But at the time it still bore the color of those we had loved.”
One of the shocks the trial offered involved the events not of 1942 but of 1961. At that time, when Papon was the head of the Paris police, the city and federal police had taken part in a massacre in which approximately two hundred Algerian demonstrators died. It was toward the end of the Algerian War, and Algerians in Paris, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, broke a curfew and marched to the center of the city. There had been Paris policemen killed in the preceding month, and as the march pressed on, a kind of murderous free-for-all began. Many of the demonstrators, bound hand and foot, were drowned in the Seine. (The details of this atrocity, which took place in the center of Paris, remain murky and obscure.) A partial glimpse of the records of the crime appeared only last fall, in the newspaper Liberation.
This was regarded as good news for the defense—it showed that Papon had nothing particular against Jews—but it was also seen as an attempt by the left to equate the mistakes of the Gaullist regime during the Algerian civil war with the crimes of Vichy. What came to fill the gap of real issues was, inevitably, contemporary politics. The first people to feel the sting of the Papon trial were the Gaullists, and Philippe Sequin, the leader of the remaining Gaullist party, was the first political leader to denounce the trial. De Gaulle himself, Seguin felt, had come under attack. Papon, after all, had been allowed to continue in the fonction publique and had been regularly promoted by Gaullist politicians,
The right discovered a response in an 850-page book called Le Livre Noir du Communisme, the Black Book of Communism, which appeared last November, shortly after the Papon trial had begun. It is an encyclopedia of Communist atrocities around the world, from 1917 to the present, all scrupulously recorded and presented, with a tally of a hundred million deaths. The Black Book became the subject of a polemic, focused indirectly, as everyone understood, on the proces Papon. Were the crimes of the Communists really comparable to the crimes of the Nazis? And if they were, didn’t that make the entire apparatus of international communism, including, of course, the French Communist party and its intellectuals—slavishly Stalinist for so long—“complicit” in another way too? Were the fiches in the prefecture the only ones that mattered or could acts in that other paper universe, of poems and manifestos, be complicit in murder too?
After the jury retired, the journalists waited for the verdict at La Concorde. The wine was good, a generic Merlot, and every table was taken. Nine o’clock became ten, the clouds of smoke thickened, and the gaiety rose as, one by one, filing deadlines for the next day’s paper passed. Twelve o’clock and the French journalists are off the hook; three o’clock and the Brits are off! Only the Americans are going to have to file late tonight, no matter what. But then, around three-thirty, the big news comes in. The Paula Jones case has been dismissed; whatever anyone files is now set for page 2. Mildly annoying to the newspapermen, this news is disaster for the independent television crews. “I can hear them now,” one cameraman says moodily, deep in his cups. “‘Ship it, ship it.’” (“Ship it” meaning “Don’t even try to put it on the satellite” is the TV equivalent of “We’ll call you.”)
The owners of La Concorde had learned, over the months of the trial, that American journalists cannot be outdone in their pitiless pursuit of truth and blank restaurant receipts. To cries of “Fiche, fiche, fiche,” the waiters slap one down with every order. A gloomy Dutch newspaperman at one table is telling stories about how often he has broken big stories, but in Dutch. “No one knows. No one cares,” he says. “Cheesus could come back tomorrow, but if he comes to me, they’ll know it only in Amsterdam.”
The British journalists, deadlines gone, drink whiskey and begin to reminisce about other, kinder war crimes trials, where you didn’t have to stay up all night for the verdict. “Take the Barbie trial,” one says. “Everyone knew what the verdict would be, but the jury waited until just after midnight to announce it; that way they got an extra day’s pay, six hundred francs. We all went out and got drunk with the jury and the lawyers, and then we filed and were all on the boat train home and back in London in time for dinner. Now, that was a trial for crimes against humanity that wasn’t a crime against humanity.”
The Klarsfelds wander in and out, waiting for the verdict like everyone else. They have been cast as wreckers, loose cannons, pursuing some odd, private agenda. Seeing them together, certainly, one finds the connection between stolid, impassive father and mercurial son hard to grasp. Daniel Schneidermann, a television journalist who has written a book about the trial, argues that the horror of their family history—Serge’s father was a deportee who died in Auschwitz—has left an “emptiness” inside Arno, the emptiness of a world that, since the Holocaust, has been abandoned by God. It is probably true that Arno’s aggressive gestures—the Rollerblades, the jeans, the rude interjections in court—are meant to show a certain distaste for the whole pompous system, for the parallel paper universe in all its dignity. But it is also possible that metaphysics aside, the Klarsfelds just have a shrewder take on the possibilities of the trial than their more sophisticated confreres. They understand that only an “intermediary” penalty, only some finding of guilt for Papon clearly distinguished from the great guilt of the real killers, will seem plausible to a Bordeaux jury. They are struggling to articulate, in the rhetoric of the courtroom, that there are gradations of guilt, styles of complicity, even in the Holocaust. To treat Papon as though he were equivalent to SS killers, like Barbie, is, in a sense, to draw a line again around the killings, with pure evil on one side and innocence, by implication, safely on the other.
Among the people and the talk and the stories, one bald, hard-looking man in his seventies, drinking his cognac and coffee, never leaves his table. “Who is he?” a newcomer asks.
Nobody knows,” one of the women from the wire services answers. “He’s been here every day since the trial began. He hassled some of the women, but then he gave it up.” She lowers her voice. “A lot of us think he may be the man from the FN.” The FN, the neo-Fascist National Front, is the phantom of Vichy that everyone wishes would go to sleep.
At four-thirty in the morning it was announced that the verdict would arrive at eight. A lot of the American reporters went back to their hotel rooms, opened their windows to let in the French spring air, and turned on CNN to watch the news about the Paula Jones dismissal. It was hard, one reporter commented afterward, not to think about the extravagant good fortune of a country that had trials like that to worry about. Another, watching James Carville and Susan Carpenter-McMillan on Lorry King, said that he found it hard, particularly after months of trying to decode French verbal combat, to remember which was which: Did the two Americans on TV actually hate each other, despite the smileyness and forced good humor? Or was the hatred the pretense, and the reality the professional prizefighter’s camaraderie? He had, he said, been away from America too long to remember.