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Witness Says She Saw Barbie Set Up Death Train
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: June 4, 1987
query.nytimes.com 
LEAD: A witness today told the court trying Klaus Barbie for crimes against humanity that she had seen the wartime Gestapo chief of this city personally organizing a deportation train from Lyons to Auschwitz that took about 600 people to their deaths.
A witness today told the court trying Klaus Barbie for crimes against humanity that she had seen the wartime Gestapo chief of this city personally organizing a deportation train from Lyons to Auschwitz that took about 600 people to their deaths.
''I saw Barbie with four of his men and he was the chief,'' said the witness, Alice Vansteenberghe, a 78-year-old medical doctor who was being held in Montluc Prison here at the time the train was organized.
''I saw him on Aug. 11,'' she said, referring to the date of the train's departure in 1944.
The deportation train is one of three major operations charged to Mr. Barbie in the trial, which completed its 16th day today. 650 Prisoners on Train
The train carried some 650 prisoners, including captured members of the Resistance and some 350 Jews, on what witnesses today described as a nightmarish 11-day journey to Auschwitz, where the vast majority of them were killed. The prosecution has been trying to demonstrate, as part of its case, that in ordering deportations Mr. Barbie knew he was sending people to their death.
In addition to Dr. Vansteenberghe, who did not leave on the train, the court heard five survivors of the concentration camp describe both the deportation train itself and their experiences in the death camp.
One witness, Charlotte Wardy, now a 58-year-old university professor of French, told the court that she saw Joseph Mengele, the SS doctor of Auschwitz, take a girl from the Lyons train away from her mother, presumably to perform medical experiments.
''She was about 12 years old, very cute, with big black eyes,'' Mrs. Wardy said. ''Mengele selected her, and, not content only with that, he returned a few hours later and tossed her clothes in front of her mother.''
''That scene, '' Mrs. Wardy said in a trembling voice, ''I'll never forget it.''
The deportation train, which left Lyons less than two weeks before the city's liberation by Allied troops, has been seen by historians as a last-ditch effort by the Germans to send as many Jews and other ''enemies of the Reich'' as possible to the concentration camps in Poland and Germany.
According to the witnesses' reconstruction of the event in court today, the prisoners were gathered together at dawn in the yard of Montluc Prison, which was the city's major detention center. They were taken by truck to the nearby railroad station and put on what Mrs. Wardy described as ''a strange train,'' consisting of third-class cars and cattle cars for the prisoners, plus a single first-class car for the SS officers accompanying them. The Scene at the Prison
Dr. Vansteenberghe, one of two witnesses expected to be heard in court who say they saw Mr. Barbie direct the operation, said she had been arrested a few days earlier and tortured by Mr. Barbie as a member of the Resistance.
She said that during her stay at Montluc, which lasted until the Allied liberation of Lyons on Aug. 24, she was able to climb on a small table in her cell and see through a barred window into the prison yard. It was thus, according to her account, that she witnessed the roundup of prisoners that took place on Aug. 11. ''There was Mrs. Blum, who was more than 80,'' Dr. Vansteenberghe said, recalling the people from Lyons whom she recognized in the prison yard that day. ''There was Mrs. Blanc, who was more than 80. There was Mrs. Lehrman.''
''There was the daughter of Mrs. Blanc, who was an adorable girl,'' Dr. Vansteenberghe said. ''There were many others.''
Dr. Vansteenberghe said she had no doubt about her recognition of Mr. Barbie. ''I find that his face has not changed all that much,'' she said.
She said she knew him from a slight deformity of his left ear and from a gesture he made with his small finger, keeping it slightly apart from the rest of his hand, both attributes that have been cited by other witnesses.
Le docteur Alice Vansteenberghe, résistante et témoin lors du procès de Klaus Barbie, en 1987, est décédé à Villeurbanne à l’age de 82 ans.
www.humanite.fr Laurent Laloup le dimanche 02 novembre 2008 Contribution au livre ouvert de Alice Yvonne Joly épouse Vansteenberghe | |
