Riverside author Roberta Hartling Gates has been recognized by the Friends of American Writers, a 103-year-old Chicagoland literary organization, for her historical fiction book, Number 12 Rue Sainte-Catherine: and Other Stories, published last year.
A collection of nine short stories, the book covers the life and times of Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo secret police in Lyon, France, after the country became occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Barbie, who came to be known as the Butcher of Lyon, “was a war criminal, one of the last to be tried back in 1987. It describes his early years, his years in Lyon, his years in South America, and, finally, when he’s extradited to France and brought back to stand trial,” Gates told the Landmark. “There is also a story that takes place after his death, a story that reminds the reader that damage done during wartime, and during wartime atrocities, lives on. It has a life of its own.”
The author will be selling copies of the book at the North Riverside Library’s summer reading kick-off party Saturday, June 7, and at Riverside Arts Weekend in Guthrie Park Sunday, June 8.
Gates, who has lived in Riverside for about 40 years, said she was inspired after a trip to the Resistance and Deportation History Center in Lyon, where some of the French Resistance was based. She came across video footage of Barbie’s trial, where he was found guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in torturing Jewish people and members of the resistance during the war. Barbie was sentenced to life in prison, where he died of cancer in 1991.
“When I got home, I thought, ‘I’m going to write about this.’ It wasn’t too difficult to get the court transcripts,” she said.
In the course of her research, “I realized that so many Nazi war criminals, or Nazi officers, just escaped. They just kind of evaporated after the war. They went back to Germany and sold insurance, or whatever they did, but, because of this big trial, there were a lot of books written about Klaus Barbie, so I had something to start with,” she said. “After I read those books, I started to think about, ‘What was his childhood like? What went wrong? How did somebody, who wanted to be a priest when he was a child, grow up and become this?’”
Gates said it took her a decade to write the book, though that wasn’t her goal; instead, she said it happened naturally in the course of writing a different novel about resistance leader Jean Moulin.
“I was thinking, ‘This is just so hard. I’m going to take a pause and write some stories.’ As I said, I kept writing stories that were either about Barbie or the people that he worked with, or his mistress, or whatever. Then, I finally realized, ‘I have nine stories here. I guess they could be put together into a collection of linked stories,’” she said.
While doing research for Number 12 Rue Sainte-Catherine, Gates said she drew on what she could recall from high school and college French classes to read French history books and biographies.
“I hired a French tutor. It was a wonderful woman who lived out in Plymouth Place [in LaGrange Park], and she was from France. She not only helped me with my French, but she also gave me some very helpful information about French attitudes and mores, and a lot of things that, as an American, you don’t really realize [about French culture],” she said.
Tammie Bob, a member of the Friends of American Writers’ literature awards committee and previous president of the group, said Gates’ collection of stories won this year due to the quality of the author’s writing and her handling of a controversial subject matter.
“One by one, we read it, and it was like, this is a really fantastic book. It takes a very difficult topic. It’s a series of connected short stories. Generally, short story collections — we have awarded them before, but, in general, the stories are inconsistent. There’s a few really good stories and a few that it seems like they were added to round out the collection, but that was not the case here,” she said. “Every story was like a gem, and every story was in a different style. It was, as far as we were concerned, masterful writing.”
Number 12 Rue Sainte-Catherine won alongside Michelle Ephraim’s book Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare. Both authors received a $2,500 cash prize in addition to recognition from the Friends of American Writers, which has been awarding “outstanding” Midwestern authors for their work since 1922.
Gates said she felt her book, published in September 2024, is “tremendously timely.”
“We see fascist leanings all around the world right now. It’s very frightening when a graduate student at a college is surrounded suddenly by men in hoods who drag her off to an unmarked van. I mean, that is like Nazi Germany,” she said, referencing Rümeysa Öztürk, a student at Tufts University in Boston who was detained in Louisiana for more than six weeks after criticizing the school’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
“I do know from my studies that, really, it only took Hitler a matter of months to declare an emergency and close down the press and send the union guys to prison,” Gates added. “It can happen very fast, and I think it’s something that is applicable to our times.”
Correction, June 3, 2025, 9:10 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the genre of Gates’ book. It is a work of historical fiction. The headline and copy have been corrected to reflect this. The Landmark apologizes for the error.
