Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  The Gestapo came for him at the Palais Royal before sunrise on December 12. Colette helped him pack a bag and hobbled to the stairwell, struggling to maintain her composure. Goudeket was interned with other Notables, housed thirty-six to a hut in freezing, lice-infested quarters with scant rations. One of his bunkmates called it le camp de la mort lent (“the camp of slow death”). They passed time trading lectures and writing accounts of their ordeal.34 Goudeket managed to get some requests smuggled out to his wife—for food, books, and old neckties—and she arranged to get the items smuggled in.

  Colette was sleepless and frantic with worry. She vowed to do anything in her power to win her husband’s release, including prostrating herself to those responsible for his detention. Goudeket understood her desperation. “There was no negotiation she wasn’t ready to try, no humiliation she wouldn’t face. She saw collaborators, she saw Germans. And who can blame her for it? I would have, I hope, done as much.”35

  Her dilemma was hardly visible to the public; the arrest of the Notables went uncovered in the paper she wrote for, Le Petit Parisien, as did the woes of the Jewish prisoners and their stranded children. When the paper issued a call for humanitarian action, it was on behalf of French children in range of British bombs.36

  Colette understood that her husband’s only hope lay with his persecutors. One obvious but unappealing option was the German ambassador, Otto Abetz. In April 1941, Abetz had met with the Vichy official Xavier Vallat and informed him that “the Germans are interested in progressively ridding Europe of Jewry.” The measures in France would begin, he said, by interning several thousand foreign Jews, plus “Jews with French nationality who are particularly dangerous or undesirable.”37

  But Abetz, an unctuous blond aesthete, had a weakness for writers and artists, and his French wife was a passionate fan of Colette’s. Eight weeks after Goudeket’s arrest he was released, apparently on the ambassador’s orders. Colette sent Madame Abetz a bouquet, and a few weeks later, Colette and her Jewish husband were invited for tea at the German embassy.

  Goudeket moved back into the Palais Royal, but he immediately began to look for hiding places in case of another emergency. (It was said that admiring maids offered him refuge in their beds upstairs.) He acquired forged papers and decamped to the Free Zone, but a few months later he was back at the Palais Royal. He stayed out of sight for the rest of the occupation, moving among Colette’s apartment and attic rooms.

  Colette continued to publish in Le Petit Parisien. Her essays were studiously apolitical: mostly delicate, closely observed pieces about life at the Palais Royal. The Nazis were mentioned only obliquely, and the hardships of occupation were handled with stoicism and even humor. Few individuals were identified, but she wrote of anonymous neighbors who may well have included the Spaaks. Many judged Colette harshly, but their verdict was mistaken; the writer was using her journalism as a smoke screen. Not only was she protecting the life of her beloved Jewish husband, she was also taking a growing interest in the activities of her upstairs neighbor, Suzanne Spaak.

  * * *

  I. Even if the list is apocryphal, it reflects the activities his bureau would conduct.

  II. Comité de coordination des oeuvres de bienfaisance du Grand Paris.

  IIII. Commissariat général aux questions juives.

  IV. Union générale des israélites de France.

  4

  la plaque tournante

  | JANUARY–MAY 1942 |

  The Spaaks’ life in the Palais Royal had settled into a new rhythm; their broken marriage had achieved a truce: Claude and Ruth were effectively a couple, Suzanne was the silent partner, and the children were left in the dark. To avoid internment as an enemy alien, Ruth had decamped to the Free Zone; first to Nice, then to a small hotel in the town of Lancey outside Grenoble. Claude stayed with her for long stretches at a time, hiring a guide to take him across the frontier illegally.

  The children adored Claude, who, despite his bluster, was also brilliant, seductive, and larger-than-life. “I didn’t believe in God,” Pilette recalled, “I believed in him.” Suzanne still cared for her husband. She told Pilette she was glad to see him come, and glad to see him go. He continued to make Suzanne’s life miserable. “When father came back to town, he would come to the Palais Royal, but then they’d start fighting,” Pilette recalled. “He’d tell her the children were left alone too much. She wasn’t there enough. She spent too much money. What she was doing was too dangerous. Then he’d go to the hotel next door so he could get some sleep and Bazou went with him. This happened repeatedly.”

  Nor did Pilette escape his wrath. “If you came early, he got angry. If you came late, he got angry. If you didn’t come, he got angry. Whatever you did, he got angry.” One evening when Suzanne was out, Claude decided that their large white kitchen was dirty and asked Pilette to scour it with him—walls, floors, and ceiling—from eight o’clock until well after midnight.

  In the spring of 1942, the family was shaken by a revelation. Claude and Bazou had gone to stay with Ruth in the Free Zone, and Suzanne decided to take Pilette there for Easter. Suzanne determined that if she wasn’t allowed to cross over, Pilette should go on without her, but she was worried about what she would find there. One day Suzanne asked Pilette to join her for lunch, and explained that Claude and Ruth were lovers. “I wanted you to hear it from me.” The fourteen-year-old was scandalized. “Are you going to get a divorce?” she demanded. “Not until Bazou is old enough to understand,” her mother answered. A few days later Suzanne was turned back, and Pilette traveled on to Ruth’s hotel in Lancey. She cringed at the sight of Claude and Ruth together, and her relationship with her father never recovered.

  Suzanne was increasingly elsewhere, involved in her mysterious activities, and Bazou felt her absence keenly. As a shy boy of ten, he would come home from school in the afternoon in dread of putting his key in the lock. If it turned once, it meant that his darling maman was home to welcome him with hugs and encouragement. If it turned twice, it meant he was facing another long afternoon on his own. More and more often, the key turned twice.

  Managing the household was becoming more difficult. Paris grew darker and drearier. The fuel shortage meant little hot water and fewer baths. Women of fashion carefully made up their faces, but their necks were grimy and they wore turbans to hide their unwashed hair. Suzanne’s charwoman and Pilette had to stand in line for hours for rationed food. The rules were complex. To buy fish, Suzanne had to sign up at a fish market—the one near the Madeleine was the best—where she received a numbered slip. This qualified her to claim her fish with the family’s coupons when the number was called. She was dismayed to see that hers was above 18,000. Weeks passed, and she returned to the market only to learn that her number had been called and she’d missed her chance.

  In the old days, Suzanne welcomed the children home with skinny ficelle baguettes smeared with boudin noir, but sausage had disappeared. The Parisians’ beloved boulangeries now used crude mined salt instead of delicate sel de mer, and the children had to pick small stones out of their baguettes before they could eat them. There was plenty of wine, but no coffee; an acrid acorn brew served as a poor substitute.

  The family was fortunate to have chicken and rabbit from Choisel. Suzanne still had to bicycle from the village to the train station in the neighboring town of Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. Claude worried about the trip and told her, “I forbid you to go down the hill on the bicycle; it’s too steep.” One day in November she set out for the city with a friend, with bags hanging from her handlebars and a hatbox tied on the back. She skidded on a turn and stopped just short of a concrete pole; any farther and she might have been killed. Her friend called an ambulance, which took her to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Pilette reached her father, who was sitting in the Marignan café, helping his brother Charles with a screenplay.

  The surgeon feared she had fractured her skull. Fortunately, she had escaped a serious head injury, but her a
rched “Bourbon” nose was embedded with gravel. When the doctor informed her that the detritus had to be removed, Suzanne, the least vain of women, asked him to combine the procedure with a rhinoplasty. Her “Bourbon” nose could be mistaken for a “Jewish” nose, she said. If she was going to devote herself to helping Jews, it would be better if her nose didn’t make her look like one. The surgeon narrowed it and smoothed the arch.

  Now Suzanne became the most theatrical member of the family, transforming herself for a new role. As Pilette put it, “Mother disguised herself as a lady,” turning herself into the image of the wealthy woman of fashion the world expected her to be. For years she had worn her hair unfashionably long, twisted into a figure eight at the nape. Now she had it cut and styled. She bought a new burgundy suit (from the sale rack at Lanvin, Pilette thought), finished with velvet pockets. She added an ochre blouse to complete the ensemble. She had always been slender; now, under the occupation, her collarbones began to show, making her as svelte as a mannequin. Claude bought her a coat made of shining beaver fur. She purchased two new hats, one brown and one black with a pink rose, which she wore at a rakish tilt. She completed the look with fine leather gloves from a shop on the Avenue de l’Opéra. She had taken good care of her brown Bally flats, which was fortunate; replacing them now would be impossible.

  Suzanne was photographed in her new suit. She now wore a winning smile rather than the glum expression she had offered Magritte four years earlier. Even her movements were transformed. Two years earlier she had sat immobilized for hours in a lawn chair. Now she walked quickly, her children noted, “always eager.”

  Suzanne was grooming herself to be the public face of Solidarité. The group’s members could be arrested at any moment for the crime of being Jewish, further compromised by their acts of forgery, smuggling, and money laundering. She could move freely aboveground. Over time, a Solidarité activist wrote, Suzanne proved that she could “play the role of the grande dame in the ‘best society’ ” when necessary. She was equally content to serve as “a simple office worker, a typist, a distributor of flyers.”

  Suzanne had repeatedly asked her friend Mira “What can I do?” and her friend had put her off, even after Claude helped extract her husband from Pithiviers. Finally, perhaps when Claude was away with Ruth in the South, Suzanne was told, “You can type.”

  The fact was, she couldn’t. Her finishing-school education had focused on domestic arts, not secretarial skills. But she managed to lay hands on a little burgundy portable Olivetti, perhaps one that Ruth had left behind. Pilette often heard her pecking at the keys into the night. The Jewish resistance needed more tracts: to alert the community, to rouse the French, to spread the news from the BBC and Radio Moscow, to counter despair. Suzanne typed double-sided copies, rolling eight blue carbons through the platen at a time. A typographical error was a disaster when so many copies had to be corrected. Suzanne read the texts as she typed, every line increasing her sense of urgency.

  In the winter of 1941 Suzanne Spaak joined a new organization, an offshoot of Solidarité. It was called the National Movement Against Racism, or MNCR. In this case, “racism” signified “anti-Semitism.” If the Nazis and the Vichy government were going to impose “racial” laws to harm the Jews, this group would oppose them. Unlike Solidarité, the MNCR was designed to reach across religious and political divisions. Charles Lederman, Adam Rayski, and Léon Chertok were involved, but as an illegal organization, its membership was fluid and its activities took place in the shadows. Suzanne worked with each of the three men, but it appears that she was closest to Léon Chertok.

  Suzanne’s center of gravity shifted. After years as the neglected wife of an irritable husband, she was surrounded by new friends who found her kind, generous—and essential. She was, after all, a vibrant woman. Antoinette, Paul-Henri’s daughter, saw her as the most charismatic member of a difficult family: “She was adorable, gay, the only one who was affectionate with me. Suzanne loved people—she was full of kindness and generosity, luminous. And she was grande bourgeoisie” (a member of the gentry who could marry into aristocracy). Antoinette’s mother, the former first lady of Belgium, paled in comparison. “My own mother was provincial.”1

  The activists from Solidarité saw her in a similar light: a dazzling creature who had wandered into their grim circle from an alien world of wealth and ease. Charles Lederman described Suzanne as “a small blond woman, with very clear blue eyes, with a charm born of intelligence, delicacy, and simplicity.” That said, some of her traits puzzled him.

  She lived in a superb apartment looking out on the gardens of the Palais Royal that I visited a number of times. The Spaaks owned a collection of important paintings, among which was a Magritte that she was fond of, that intrigued me. My personal taste didn’t incline me towards this genre of painting. I never told her. Why spoil a pleasure?2

  One of Suzanne’s attractions was her radio, a massive receiver made of blond wood placed at the entry of her apartment. Deprived of their radios, Jews considered foreign broadcasts a crucial link to the outside world. Every day, Suzanne and the children gathered for the thirty-minute BBC broadcast Les Français parlent aux Français (The French Speak to the French). The Nazis tried to jam the signal, and merely listening to the broadcast could bring a six-month prison sentence, but Suzanne was undeterred. She didn’t even bother to turn down the sound; the stone walls of the Palais Royal were built to guard a cardinal’s secrets. And, recalled Pilette, “No one else was around to hear it.” But they did turn the dial to a different station after the broadcast.

  Suzanne and the children listened intently to the opening timpani beats—“tam-tam-tam tam”—the cadence of Beethoven’s Fifth, representing the Morse signal V for “Victory.” Then the announcer intoned, “Ici—Londres,” and another world opened up, beyond Nazi censorship and Vichy propaganda. One regular jingle mocked Vichy’s propaganda outlet, sung to the tune of “La Cucaracha”: “Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris ment! Radio Paris est allemand” (“Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris lies! Radio Paris is German”). The broadcasts included thrilling “messages personnels,” London’s coded instructions to the Resistance: “The gardener’s cat is crying.” “The library is on fire tonight.”3

  French listeners used these phrases to conjure images of espionage, airdrops, and rescues carried out by legions of gallant résistants—even if, in that frozen winter, resistance forces were thin on the ground.

  In some respects the news was disappointing. At this point neither the BBC’s French service nor Radio Moscow considered the plight of France’s immigrant Jews worthy of notice.4 Nonetheless, the foreign broadcasts offered an alternative to the Vichy press’s menu of despair, in which every German war crime was an act of self-defense, every battle a German victory, and a world ruled by Nazis a matter of time. The BBC provided much-needed news of Allied victories and outrage at Nazi crimes, making it possible to imagine a future without mass arrests and swastikas. For members of the Jewish underground, moving from cellar to attic to avoid arrest, Suzanne’s receiver was a lifeline to the outside world, extended to their community through their tracts.

  News gathering was a major challenge. Beyond the banned foreign broadcasts, the activists scraped together rumors and whispered reports from sympathizers, many of them Communists who worked for the police and other government agencies. Every step was perilous. The sound of a radio or the clatter of a typewriter from a Jewish residence could attract the police. Anyone looking to buy paper in quantity without authorization came under suspicion. Roneos, or mimeographs, required malodorous chemicals and a cumbersome apparatus that had to be moved frequently to avoid detection. The tracts were often hand delivered, and the possession of one was a serious crime. Each step in the operation invited a tip-off to the Gestapo from a hostile neighbor or concierge.

  The Jewish underground rose to the challenge by setting up various copying and forgery shops and procuring supplies in outlying cities and towns. Suzanne was a n
atural choice as a courier. She could travel without fear, since neither the Vichy nor the German authorities had reason to suspect her. Her legal identity papers, fixed abode, and access to food and money made her a rare treasure.

  • • •

  The winter and spring of 1942 marked a new phase in the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Once again, the policy was concealed by Vichy censorship, Nazi propaganda, and outright lies. Forced labor lay at the heart of the deception.

  France was reluctantly on the move, as workers across the country boarded trains bound for Germany. At first they signed up in desperate response to France’s massive unemployment; an April 1942 report estimated that a total of 157,000 French workers had voluntarily gone to Germany to date and 96,000 were still there.5 But the German war machine had an insatiable appetite, and as the campaign on the eastern front dragged on, more French workers were needed for German farms and factories.

  The Vichy government explained the detention of immigrant Jewish males within the context of labor requirements, and most of the public, including the Jewish community, bought the explanation. Furthermore, the number of detained men was relatively small. France’s immigrant Jews numbered 150,000 individuals; people were far more concerned about the nearly two million French prisoners of war.

  The Jewish arrests were erratic and therefore confusing. Initially, only immigrant Jewish males were detained, and in some cases they were released. Then the Jewish arrests were expanded to include male French citizens, including professionals and military veterans, who had been treated with deference in the past. Even so, there was cause for optimism. In the fall of 1941, a German military commission visited a detention camp and denounced its abject conditions; about 750 of the sickest prisoners were freed. The prisoners reasoned they were unlikely to be arrested again, but they were wrong.