cover image Why My Father Died: A Daughter Confronts Her Family's Past at the Trial of Klaus Barbie

Why My Father Died: A Daughter Confronts Her Family's Past at the Trial of Klaus Barbie

Annette Kahn. Summit Books, $19.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-65883-0

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)