Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  As the foreign Jews of Paris felt the net tightening, they turned to trusted associations from the past and looked for ways to fortify them. In November 1940 some Polish Jews from the Communist-backed Yiddish-MOI (Main d’oeuvre immigrée) labor union met in Montmartre and founded an umbrella organization uniting some fifty preexisting groups. They called it Solidarité.30

  * * *

  I. Britain interned nearly thirty thousand Jewish exiles, though in better conditions. The United States interned smaller numbers in Tennessee, Georgia, and upstate New York.

  II. After the war, Claude spotted the painting, depicting three bells floating in space, in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice.

  III. As of 1939, only about 0.35 percent—that is, one-third of 1 percent—of the total population of France was Jewish, and Jews made up only 6 percent of its total foreign population.

  3

  paris by night

  | JANUARY–DECEMBER 1941 |

  Anxious and isolated, Suzanne absorbed the unrelenting bad news. Many around her had resigned themselves to the German domination of Europe, and at this point it was hard to imagine another outcome. The Nazis controlled nearly every country on the Continent. The few exceptions, such as Hungary and Spain, remained neutral or actively served Nazi interests. That left Great Britain, embattled and alone. The prevailing expectation in France was, in the words of the historian Robert Paxton, of a “short war, British defeat, danger of revolution, imminent peace.”1

  Mira and Harry Sokol moved to a different part of Paris hoping to be less conspicuous, but now that the Germans had arrived, it was impossible to feel safe. After Harry was demobilized, the couple filed a third appeal for repatriation to the Soviet Union. This time they acted on the advice of a minor embassy official, who suggested that the Soviets were more interested in technicians than doctors and social scientists. The couple’s new application, describing them as radio experts, attracted the attention of Ivan Susloparov, the Soviet attaché who oversaw military intelligence operations in France. He made the Sokols an offer: if they consented to work for Soviet intelligence, he would provide them with money, housing, and forged papers. The couple underwent training in radio operations and waited to be activated.2 From their seclusion in Paris, they had little to offer their friend in Choisel.

  One day in early 1941, Suzanne Spaak stood with her daughter at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and pointed out Mira and Harry’s new apartment: the first building to the left of the Trocadero, on the top floor under the mansard. Suzanne never took the children to visit them these days; the Sokols were too nervous.

  One day Mira rushed to Choisel with a plea. “Harry’s been arrested. He’s been sent to the camp at Pithiviers, and you’re the only ones who can help.”

  Harry’s detention may have taken place amid the first mass arrest of Jews in 1941. Over the second week of May, French police officers had gone door-to-door in the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods delivering billets verts—green slips. The printed form was headed Préfecture de Police, the blanks filled in with neatly handwritten entries: Jewish names and addresses that had been provided by the recipients themselves in the German-mandated census the previous fall. The forms politely stated:

  Monsieur [name, birthdate, address] is invited to present himself, in person, accompanied by a family member or friend, on May [———], 1941, at 7 am, to [address] to examine his status. Please bring identification. Anyone who does not report at the specified day and time will be subject to the most severe sanctions.

  The slip was signed the Commissaire de Police.

  The green slips reached 6,694 Jewish households, and 3,710 Jewish men (most of them Polish, some Austrian and Czech) reported to the listed sites, expecting to simply present their papers for review. The majority had valid resident permits, but all were immediately taken into custody, while the accompanying family member or friend was sent home to fetch a few belongings. A few days later the detainees, suitcases in hand, were taken by train to camps outside Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, two small towns some fifty miles south of Paris. Their money and identification papers were confiscated and they were herded into crude wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by French gendarmes.3

  Pithiviers’s 1,700 prisoners included Jewish men of every persuasion, among them members of the Yiddish-MOI and its new offshoot, Solidarité.4 Harry was named barracks chief and took his place among the eight directors of the camp’s Resistance Committee, alongside leading activists from the two organizations.

  The internees established a library of over 1,800 books and a lecture series on topics ranging from Yiddish literature to mechanical engineering. Harry was assigned to work in the camp infirmary along with thirteen other doctors, who held office hours twice a day.

  At least one witness expressed outrage. A local Red Cross volunteer named Madeleine Rolland protested that these were innocent men, not the black market scoundrels depicted in Le Petit Parisien and Paris-Soir—but her appeal went unheard.5 On May 15 a pro-Vichy newspaper rejoiced, “Five thousand Jews are gone. . . . That makes five thousand fewer of the parasites that had infected greater Paris with a fatal disease.”6

  Harry and the other prisoners were allowed to send and receive one letter per week, but their family members were prohibited from visiting or staying in the town outside the camp. There was little that Mira could do to help her husband. Solidarité and other Jewish groups made up packages for the prisoners, offered support to their families, and tried to publicize the arrests, but this action was impossible in the censored press. The activists wrote out their texts in Yiddish on stencils (or typed them, if they could lay hands on a typewriter), then ran them through small, mimeograph-like machines called roneos. The resulting leaflets, called tracts, were usually slipped under doors or circulated hand to hand.

  At the end of May, Solidarité published a new appeal denouncing the arrests in the name of the Groupe des femmes et enfants juifs (Group of Jewish Women and Children):

  People of France! On Wednesday May 14, before noon, hundreds of Parisians witnessed the expulsion of masses of Jews towards an unknown destination, monitored by police . . .

  It is with a heavy heart that we resort to these “illegal” means to inform you of the suffering we have been subjected to. We well know the misfortune that has come to the French people and we take our share of them. But we cannot allow the beastly lies to pass in silence, with which we are stricken by people without conscience, who present us as those responsible for the woes of France.

  We appeal to you in the name of your glorious past, in the name of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” . . . to join us on our protest arising from the 5000 innocent victims, the 5000 ruined homes, the thousands of children exposed to hunger and misery.7

  The pamphlet represented a major departure for its Communist, Yiddish-speaking authors. It was the first to appear in French, directed to the French public, and the first to draw the line between barbarism and civilization instead of capitalism and socialism. It portrayed the anti-Semitic measures as a threat in themselves, a departure from the French Communist Party’s depiction of them as a ploy to divide the working class.8

  Still, the new strategy was unlikely to yield quick results. Harry Sokol, trapped behind the barbed wire, realized that the Soviets were his best hope for freedom, but he had to compete for their attention. More than two hundred other prisoners had also appealed to the Soviet embassy, begging the officials to recognize their citizenship and arrange their release.9 This was feasible given the nonaggression pact, under which the Germans exempted Jews who could prove they had been born in what was now Soviet territory. But the Soviets were in no rush to help Jewish immigrants. Harry, the Soviets’ newly trained radio operator, knew he might receive special consideration. However, a daunting challenge remained: securing the necessary documentation and delivering it to the proper French authorities. This fell to his wife.

  Mira went to the Soviet embass
y in Paris and obtained a certificate to confirm that Harry’s birthplace lay within Soviet territory. The officials warned her that under no circumstances would they issue a second copy. It was this certificate that she entrusted to Claude Spaak. “Promise me, on the heads of your children, that you will deliver this to Harry,” she begged. Claude overcame his dislike for Harry and agreed to help.

  The distance from Choisel to Pithiviers was only fifty miles, but the towns were worlds apart. Claude’s journey took the better part of a day; when he finally arrived, the only available lodging turned out to be a brothel. The next morning, he set out on foot for the camp.

  Unknown to Claude, Solidarité had put out more flyers, this time in Yiddish, directed to the families of the arrested men, summoning them to a protest led by a feisty organizer named Sophie Schwartz. The group rallied dozens of Jewish women to march on the barbed wire enclosure, demanding the right to see their husbands and send them provisions.10 Claude found himself amid a phalanx of wives and mothers flanked by a testy police escort. By the time the protesters reached the camp, Claude thought the scene resembled Dante’s Inferno:

  The poor devils were behaving like lunatics. Messages were being screamed back and forth, hands were helplessly reaching out parcels, the women were sobbing and wailing. . . . Police were walking up and down between the cages, quite indifferent to what was going on.11

  Claude, a tall, commanding figure, walked up to a French policeman and confidently asked for his assistance. He showed him Harry’s certificate and asked him to deliver it. “You realize it’s his life you hold in your hands,” Claude told him.

  The policeman responded respectfully. “I give you my word of honor I will deliver it to him.” He refused, however, to take the parcel Claude had brought, because, Claude believed, it would have caused further commotion among the women. Half an hour later the policeman returned and handed Claude a page torn out of a notebook. It bore a handwritten message: “Thanks—Harry.”12 Harry was freed.

  Suzanne Spaak found her way to Solidarité soon after, perhaps through Harry’s committee in Pithiviers. The activists were reluctant to accept a non-Jewish member, and their initial reaction was not promising. One recalled:

  We received an offer from a certain Madame Suzanne Spaak to help with the resistance work. We quickly learned, against all of the rules of clandestinity, that Madame S. Spaak was the sister-in-law of Foreign Minister Spaak and the daughter of a major Belgian banker.

  We weren’t very optimistic regarding the productivity of our new collaborator. On that point we were mistaken. . . . When she came to us, she said, “Tell me what I can do, I’m ready to take on any task as long as I can serve in the fight against Nazism.”13

  Suzanne may have been impressed by her new colleagues’ colorful histories and outsized personalities. One cofounder was Adam Rayski, a twenty-seven-year-old journalist from Bialystock, a compact man with fierce black eyebrows who sported natty suits and a black fedora. He had written fiery editorials for the Naïe Presse, the Yiddish Communist daily, until it was closed under the occupation. Now he lived in Paris semiclandestinely with his wife, Jeanne, and their toddler, Benoît. Another principal was the distinguished Communist lawyer Charles Lederman. Lederman had been born in Warsaw but had lived in France since infancy. Both he and Rayski had enlisted to fight the Germans, and both had made daring escapes as prisoners of war. But there were marked differences: Rayski was dark and querulous, with a strong Polish accent. Lederman was blond and tactful, and spoke perfect French.

  A third partner was a relative newcomer named Dr. Léon Chertok. Rayski first heard about le Docteur Alex (his nom de guerre) as someone who could help the Yiddish-MOI recruit “Aryans” to support their movement.14 Lederman later wrote that Chertok introduced Suzanne Spaak to their group, and Chertok wrote that it was Lederman, which suggests that Suzanne met the two men around the same time.

  Chertok was born to a well-to-do Jewish family from a small town outside Vilnius. Rayski considered the doctor’s background bourgeois and his politics feeble, but he reluctantly admitted that Chertok, “though he wasn’t a Communist, was providential for us. He had the telephone directory of the city of Paris in his head at a time when we were confined to our social and geographical ghetto.”15

  The young doctor exuded charm, with a winning smile and wavy black hair. In the spring of 1939, Chertok had fled the German invasion of Prague, where he had been studying medicine. He arrived at Luxembourg station and took a taxi to his lodgings instead of trudging from the Gare du Nord to the Marais like other Jewish immigrants. He shunned the grimy bistros around the Place de la République, installing himself at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain, where Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre held court. When war broke out, Chertok joined the Polish regiment in France, despite his qualms about Polish anti-Semitism. He was informed that he didn’t qualify for a weapon or a uniform; they were in short supply and Jews were the last in line. Soon France’s war and Chertok’s military career were over.

  In May 1941, Chertok was among the thousands who received a billet vert. Rather than reporting to the French police, he went underground. But for Chertok, “underground” did not mean “out of sight”; there were always females willing to assist him—in this case, two friends from the Café de Flore, the Catala sisters. Not only did they help him move to new quarters, they also gave him the birth certificate of their brother Yves, who had been killed in the war. Chertok added a baptism certificate and a medical certificate documenting an operation for a foreskin abnormality to explain his circumcision. With these, he noted, “I was all set.”16 He faced one last problem: in Prague, Chertok had purchased a set of “superb poplin shirts” with his monogram over the pocket. He obtained another set of false papers with initials to match the shirts.

  Reinvented as “Yves Catala,” Chertok returned to his cafés on the Left Bank, but he was shocked at the way other Jews had been lured into captivity, and he decided to join the Jewish resistance. If the Communists had the most effective organizations, he would work with them. He chose Solidarité. It provided him with a monthly stipend and a list of planques, or hideouts, warning him not to sleep in the same one two nights in a row.

  Solidarité needed to find more financial resources and broader public support, and its Communist roots worked against it. The group had to transcend its insularity and intolerance regarding non-Communists, and overcome its distrust of French Christians, traditional French Jews, and France’s economic elite. Its founders needed to convert their former “class enemies” into allies—rendering unconventional recruits like Léon Chertok and Suzanne Spaak essential.

  • • •

  On November 1, 1940, SS officer Helmut Knochen arrived to take charge of the Gestapo in France, setting up shop at 72 Avenue Foch, a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. His mandate was “the Jewish question,” with a special emphasis on resistance activities. His specialty was Verschärfte Vernehmung, or “enhanced interrogation,” a term the Nazis invented in 1937. It was said that he put in an order for special equipment:

  50 coffins to be added to present supply

  150 handcuffs requested by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA)

  thick curtains for vans taking persons to execution

  2000 liters of fuel oil for burning the corpses of the executed in the Père-Lachaise crematorium

  refreshments (whisky, wine, snacks) for the execution squads, preferably to be served in their barracksI17

  SS captain Theodor Dannecker technically answered to Knochen’s command, though Eichmann’s man in Paris had his own agenda. In January 1941 Dannecker distributed a memorandum to his staff concerning his “gigantic” mission. Its “success can be assured only by the most meticulous preparations.” Its end was described as “the carefully implemented complete deportation of the Jews prior to a colonization action in a yet to be determined territory.”18

  Dannecker pressed for the creation of two new organizations. One was the Coordination Com
mittee of Jewish Relief Organizations, made up of both French and immigrant Jews, to promote compliance with Dannecker’s measures.II The second was the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (CGQJ),III a Vichy government body to administer anti-Semitic restrictions and liquidate Jewish property, under the direction of the anti-Semitic French politician Xavier Vallat.

  In April 1941 Dannecker launched a new publication, Informations juives, which described itself as the organ of the Coordination Committee of Jewish Relief Organizations. In reality its editorial director was Dannecker himself, working through his Jewish “technical adviser,” Israel Israelowicz. The newsletter urged its readers to prove they were “good citizens” by complying with the anti-Semitic decrees. The first issue, sent to sixty thousand addresses in Paris, advised that it was designed “to give advice or provide aid only to those who openly belong to the Jewish community of Greater Paris”—in other words, those who had registered with the police.

  Those same households received a second mailing, this one anonymous, warning, “Jews, beware!”—Informations juives was part of a trap. Someone in the Coordination Committee office had smuggled out the mailing list and given it to the Jewish underground.19 Distrust of the Coordination Committee grew.

  That summer, France was stunned by the news of the German invasion of the USSR. On June 22, 3.5 million German and Axis troops, representing the largest military operation in history, launched a surprise attack at dawn, overwhelming defenses and pressing rapidly into Soviet territory.

  The invasion helped unmask the Nazis’ intentions concerning the Jews of Europe. In July SS general Reinhard Heydrich asked German vice chancellor Hermann Göring to authorize the preparation of a plan for a “final solution.” An important step took place on August 1, when the SS Cavalry Brigade in Soviet Byelorussia received the orders, “All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamps.”20 Within weeks, the measures to wipe out Bolsheviks and to eliminate Jews became fully conflated. In Paris, the public myths were maintained; it was difficult for anyone there—beyond officers in the highest reaches of the SS—to grasp what was happening.