Why my father died : a daughter confronts her family's past at the trial of Klaus Barbie /

On August 17, 1944, the author's father, Robert Kahn, and 49 other French Jews were shot by the Germans after digging out unexploded bombs at the Bron airfield. The SS wanted the airport ready for their escape from advancing Allied troops. The author saw her father for the last time when she was two-and-a-half years old and her brother was three-and-a-half. Robert Kahn, a member of the French Resistance, had been arrested by Klaus Barbie, the so-called Butcher of Lyon, in late 1943, was rescued by the Resistance, and was eventually recaptured by Barbie's militia. From prison, he managed to put his children in a safe hideaway for the remainder of the war, but his non-Jewish wife would not leave Lyon without her husband. On August 11, 1944, she was sent to Auschwitz. She survived but did not speak of her suffering for more than 40 years. In this book, Kahn's mother breaks her long silence to tell the story of the Resistance, her husband's role in it (recruiting opponents of the collaborationist Vichy government), and her imprisonment in Auschwitz. Interspersed with this memoir is Annette Kahn's coverage of Klaus Barbie's trial, which she was assigned to cover for the French magazine Le Point. It is a significant book, offering both an exceptional look into the French Resistance movement and a firsthand account of Auschwitz, as well as a probing report on the Barbie trial from a journalist whose father died a victim of Barbie. ~--George Cohen

The author was two years old in 1944 when her father, a Jew and a French Resistance fighter, was murdered by Nazi Klaus Barbie, the ``Butcher of Lyon.'' Forty-three years later, as chief political reporter for the magazine Le Point , she was assigned to cover Barbie's trial. Performing a balancing act between the roles of detached journalist and outraged, grief-stricken victim's daughter, Kahn skillfully interweaves courtroom drama, testimonies of Holocaust survivors, an account of Barbie's sordid career path and the wrenching story of her parents' ordeal. Her mother, sent to Auschwitz, was rescued, a near-skeleton, at the war's end. This gripping document, a singular addition to Holocaust literature, speaks with calm clarity of the century's worst crimes. Kahn provides shocking detail on how U.S. intelligence bureaucrats protected Barbie after the war and how the CIA helped him escape to Bolivia in 1951. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kahn is a well-known French courtroom journalist. Her parents were in the French Resistance, and her father was a Jew. Her father was shot by the Germans while in captivity shortly before France was liber ated; her mother survived Auschwitz. Barbie was responsible for the plight of Kahn's parents, and she confronts his story, and theirs, at his 1987 trial in France for crimes against humanity. Her book interweaves the two stories, as she listens to horrible tales of inhumanity, learns of what her mother never wanted to tell her and Kahn never wanted to hear, and confronts her memories of her father, whom at the end she still doesn't know. Vivid and compelling, the book is a useful portrayal of Barbie and his crimes. Recommended for academic and public libraries.-- Pat Ensor, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Terre Haute (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A piercing historical and personal record of the wartime crimes and 1987 trial of the Gestapo's ``Butcher of Lyon.'' France's most significant war-crimes trial since the Forties is covered here by the head of the political desk for the French magazine Le Point--who also happens to be the daughter of one of the victims of the notorious Klaus Barbie. Skillfully interspersing present-tense accounts of the Lyon trial with narration of her own parents' ordeal, Kahn charges up both halves of this legal/family saga. We read firsthand testimony about Barbie personally breaking limbs, throwing a baby away from a mother's arms, loosing vicious dogs on prisoners, forcing a woman to have sex with a dog, torturing children in front of parents, and sending many thousands to brutal executions on meat hooks or slow deaths in extermination camps. As Gestapo chief of occupied Lyon and environs, Barbie consistently drew upon his sadistic imagination to ferret out information on members of the resistance and Jews. Kahn's father was guilty of both associations, while her Christian mother couldn't get a baptismal certificate from her unforgiving priest. The author's details of her father's underground activity, capture, and execution match her research on Barbie, exposing his family's anti-French background and his trial lawyer's ties to Mideast terrorism. Kahn's precise and personal portraits of victim and victimizer humanize the overbearing phrase ``crimes against humanity.''