Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  January 1942 was the turning point, though this would not be immediately apparent. On January 20, fifteen Nazi officials gathered in a gracious villa on a lake in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the extermination of the European Jews. The Nazi hierarchy had discussed a number of options, including shipping them to the island of Madagascar or creating a new Jewish homeland on the Russian-Polish border, but these were discarded.

  The “Holocaust by bullets” had already begun on the eastern front. Now the officials laid the groundwork for the next stage. It wasn’t feasible to murder Jews en masse, in situ in Western Europe; the local populations were more likely to protest and the news would travel quickly to the Allies. Those Jews who were not murdered locally under other pretenses (as resisters or hostages) would be deported to a new network of camps in Poland under the guise of conveying the prisoners to perform forced labor like millions of other Europeans. However, unlike the other slave laborers, Jews would be deported whether or not they were suitable for work, with the goal of murdering all of them on an industrial scale. The Wannsee Conference approved the administrative apparatus to make the machinery of genocide run smoothly. The meeting was over in ninety minutes.

  Its protocol evaluated the political conditions in each occupied country and estimated the number of Jews each one was expected to yield. France was assigned to “Category A”: occupied and compliant. The Nazis’ estimate for its Jewish population was wildly mistaken: 165,000 for the Occupied Zone and 700,000 for the Free Zone, when the total for both zones never exceeded 330,000.

  The officials took pains to shroud their proceedings in secrecy. No one who was not directly involved in the implementation of the killings was to know about them, whether citizen or soldier, and those who came close enough to learn of them were sworn to silence on pain of death. It is believed that only thirty copies of the Wannsee minutes were made.

  The Germans constructed gas chambers in the camps in late 1941 and soon dispatched their first victims, Soviet prisoners of war and Polish political prisoners. The mass gassing of Jews would not begin until after the Wannsee Conference a few months later. Polish villagers living near the camps could see evidence of the murders, but for most of 1942, the terrible secret was kept from the world. Jews were not the only target. In May 1940, the Germans had launched a program to execute tens of thousands of Polish teachers, engineers, priests, and even Boy Scouts in an effort to obliterate the country’s leadership. The Nazis targeted tens of thousands of Roma and millions of “racially inferior” Slavs as well.I6

  These crimes were committed far from France, and the French public received little information from the East. Polish Jewish immigrants tended to be better informed than their French counterparts, via networks of family and friends. Yet even these reports were difficult to evaluate, having passed through countless links in a terrifying game of telephone. The news was so dire that it was hard to believe. Many French officials and businessmen simply weren’t interested; they were making good money through collaboration. But by the spring of 1942, they had reason to reconsider. The entry of the United States reinvigorated the Allies, and Germany’s campaign on the eastern front had bogged down. Suddenly the feasibility of the Final Solution was in doubt. The Nazis reacted by accelerating it. The next year would prove decisive. As the historian Christopher Browning wrote:

  In mid-March of 1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. In mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse. At the core of the Holocaust was a short, intense wave of mass murder. The center of this mass murder was Poland.7

  Thousands of Jewish men languished in the camps at Drancy, Compiègne, Beaune-la-Rolande, and Pithiviers. Malnutrition and foul sanitary conditions were killing inmates by the score, but the prisoners still hoped for release.

  On the afternoon of March 27, 1942, four thousand Jewish prisoners at Drancy were ordered to assemble in the sunny courtyard. A German officer read a list of 545 names. The men, mostly working-class immigrants from the eleventh arrondissement, stepped forward and were taken to the train station a few blocks away. There they boarded third-class passenger cars, buzzing with the rumor that they were being sent to the Ardennes to cut lumber. “We thought we were going to leave a place we considered hell, but in reality it was just the antechamber,” one recalled.

  Their first stop was Compiègne, where the train took on another 547 men, most of them French Jews who had been arrested along with Colette’s husband the previous December. They included Léon Blum’s younger brother, a ballet impresario who had chosen to return from New York after the invasion, as well as a senator, a colonel, and a number of prominent lawyers. French policemen guarded the train up to the German border. The prisoners were told that if anyone escaped, the occupants of the car would be shot. One prisoner did escape, but the retaliation did not take place. The rest arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.8

  All were selected for labor. No one from the first convoy was gassed upon arrival, but only twenty-two of them survived until the end of the war.

  Over the next few months the convoys rolled quickly, some at two-week intervals, some every two days. Subsequent trains used cattle cars instead of passenger compartments, and prisoners were crammed into the dark, airless spaces. The rumors of labor details persisted, now more tentatively.

  On May 12, 1942, the German military command in France circulated a notice forbidding the terms “deportation” and “toward the East” in internal communications. The permissible phrase was “sent to hard labor.”9

  The Germans and the Vichy government continued to link the Jewish deportations to the attacks carried out by young Communists, even though the bataillons de la jeunesse were by no means exclusively Jewish. Pierre Georges, the youth who shot a German naval cadet in the Barbès Métro, was the non-Jewish son of a Paris baker, and his squad included an Italian, a Haitian Creole, and a German Communist, as well as a Russian Jew and a Greek Jew.II

  The youth battalions’ casualties continued to mount, and Solidarité’s Adam Rayski decided they needed help. He had been one of the first advocates for armed struggle, and in early 1942 he helped found a new, predominantly Jewish urban guerrilla movement connected to the Yiddish-MOI labor organization called the FTP-MOI (Franc-tireurs et partisans, or Sharpshooters and Partisans). Rayski and his friends recruited Jewish survivors of the youth battalions and stepped up the production of counterfeit documents for their use.

  They also launched a search for illegal arms and explosives. It was a maddening pursuit, starting with antique weapons stashed away in Jewish junk shops in Saint-Ouen, a remote suburb of Paris. “Antiquated pistols didn’t always come with the corresponding bullets,” Rayski wrote, “so we had to consider switching to explosive devices.”10 His group set up its first bomb factory in a student apartment on the Left Bank facing the Jardin des Plantes, manned by Salek Bot, a twenty-year-old violinist, and Hersz Zimmerman, a thirty-two-year-old chemist. It was a disaster. On April 25, the two were constructing a bomb intended for a German barracks when it exploded, killing both. The police arrested six Jewish Communists, who were executed by firing squad at Mont-Valérien.

  After each arrest, the survivors conducted an internal investigation to determine how the suspects had been identified. It was often found to have been through the efforts of the Brigade Spéciale, a new unit made up of several hundred French agents assigned to investigate Communists and “domestic enemies.” One common tactic was the filature, in which agents tailed individuals who led them from one contact to another, then swept in and made multiple arrests. Rayski noted that it was possible to develop a “certain psychosis and believe you’re being followed when you aren’t. But it was also dangerous to be too confident.”11

  Rayski and the FTP-MOI opened a second laboratory on Rue Saint-Charles on the Left Bank, but its amateur bomb maker set off another accidental explosion, severely burning his face. It was impossible to take him to an e
mergency room, since the hospitals were under orders to report wounded suspects: police were looking for a man who had been pulled out of the flames with an overcoat over his head. The FTP-MOI turned to Léon Chertok. The doctor placed the burn victim, who was almost blinded, in a bicycle taxi and conveyed him to a private clinic, where he spent six months recovering.12

  Rayski’s recruits were an unlikely assortment of students, artists, and blue-collar workers, most of whom had no experience with the mechanics of war. The exceptions were Jewish veterans of the Spanish Civil War, but even they lacked matériel. Léon Chertok was impatient with his medical role and longed to see action in the armed resistance. But Rayski and his group squelched that idea; Chertok was too valuable as a medic. Chertok became the FTP-MOI’s emergency room physician without an emergency room, treating an ever-growing number of wounded militants and forging ties with the legal medical community for supplies and support.13

  Printing operations were another priority, and an equal challenge. Rayski and Lederman had recruited Rudolf Zeiler, a Communist printer from Bohemia who was willing to help, but Zeiler was arrested and executed by firing squad in December 1941. Then the two set up small makeshift print shops, eventually operating four or five in Paris and more in the Free Zone. These weren’t proper businesses but rather apartments or rooms rented under false names with front offices, usually in immigrant neighborhoods such as Belleville. The underground journalists smuggled in roneo machines and paper, dashed off their work, and vacated the premises, hoping to stay a step ahead of the police.14

  Forged documents were a critical part of the operation. Rayski used one of his forgeries to illegally cross into the Free Zone, where he established a Jewish resistance network and an edition of his Yiddish underground newspaper in Marseille. The forgeries were also distributed to Solidarité’s membership, which rose to over a hundred. These papers allowed them to register with the police under false addresses. Since the arrests had been limited to adult males, the men rented garrets and maid’s rooms in “bourgeois districts,” while their wives and children remained at home.15

  The Jewish underground had to alter its message. It had previously concentrated on warning the Jewish population about anti-Semitic measures and supporting the prisoners’ families. Until now, the internees had assumed they should bide their time in hopes of release. Now they were urged to escape at the first opportunity.

  In April 1942, the MNCR launched a new clandestine publication called J’Accuse, with the participation of Suzanne Spaak.III Its editor, Mounie Nadler, had served on the resistance committee at Pithiviers with Harry Sokol the previous year. Nadler was arrested following the April 25 explosives disaster a few weeks after the newsletter’s debut, and died among the six Jewish Communists shot at Mont-Valérien—but the newsletter continued to publish.

  J’Accuse marked a transition from the Jewish insularity of Solidarité to the broader mission of the MNCR. This was the first time the group called on non-Jewish intellectuals to rally the broader French public.16

  J’Accuse may have been the first publication to convey a sense of terror regarding the Jewish deportations, and it hit home. Over April and May, a record seventy-three Jewish escapees succeeded in fleeing the camps.17

  It soon became clear that a larger operation was under way. On May 29, 1942, the authorities announced that all Jews in the Occupied Zone over the age of six would be required to wear yellow stars on their garments. Yellow stars had been imposed on Jews in medieval England, Spain, and France, as well as in Nazi Germany, and the Nazis had already instituted the stars in occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. It came as a shock to France.

  The French expressed no enthusiasm for the order but implemented it. Textile workers produced four hundred thousand yellow stars from specially ordered cloth, and fashioned celluloid stars for butchers and members of other “messier professions.”18

  There were a few reports of insults on the streets, especially among schoolchildren taunting classmates who were suddenly “different.” But most passersby responded with mute embarrassment or expressions of sympathy. Clusters of young Parisians appeared bearing hand-lettered stars that read, “Goy,” “Swing,” or “Catholique.” Others sported stars with the letters “JUIF”—for jeunesse universitaire intellectuelle française (“French university intellectual youth”).

  French police officers arrested about forty of the protesters and sent them to Drancy, where Dannecker ordered them to wear white armbands with the words “Friend of the Jews” and a yellow star. They embraced detention as a gesture of solidarity, and deplored the camp’s meager provisions and squalid conditions. But the “friends of the Jews” were released in late August on Dannecker’s orders, while the Jewish prisoners were not. Many “friends” joined the Resistance.

  Suzanne Spaak never declared herself a “friend of the Jews” by wearing a yellow star, and her friends in Solidarité would have been appalled if she had. She was far too valuable to consign to Drancy for a symbolic act.

  At the clandestine meetings she hosted, the Jewish activists arrived one by one, careful not to attract attention, and climbed the grand stairway to the Spaaks’ apartment. There they sat, sharing news of arrests and planning their strategy in the luxury of a home that wasn’t under surveillance. Their attention would wander to the Magrittes on the wall and they would puzzle once more at their hostess’s peculiar taste in art.

  Suzanne was careful to schedule the meetings for times when Claude was away and the children were elsewhere. She hid clandestine materials—tracts and memos, addresses of contacts—between the pages of volumes stored in the large bookcase in the entryway. These were time bombs should they ever fall into the wrong hands. When Pilette and Bazou arrived home from school, there was no evidence a meeting had ever taken place.

  * * *

  I. The estimates for non-Jewish Poles murdered by the Nazis range from two to three million, compared to three million Polish Jews. In northern Russia, the Nazis implemented the murderous Hungerplan, diverting agricultural produce to the German army and leaving four to seven million Soviet civilians to starve over the course of the war.

  II. Georges came to be known as “Colonel Fabien.” A Métro stop in Paris is named after him.

  III. The publication was named after Émile Zola’s condemnation of the Dreyfus Affair in 1898.

  5

  monsieur henri

  | JUNE 1942 |

  One day in June 1942, Leopold Trepper appeared unannounced at the Palais Royal. The Soviet agent was prone to fidgeting, and on this occasion he was even more nervous than usual. His operations, as well as his life, generally depended on the kindness of strangers, and this time his fate lay in the hands of Suzanne and Claude Spaak. He knew that the Sokols trusted them, but they were close friends, while he was unknown to them. One word to the police or slip to a neighbor and he was finished. Claude opened the door. Trepper introduced himself as “Monsieur Henri,” then delivered the bad news. “The Sokols have been arrested.”

  Claude summoned Suzanne, and Trepper was struck by how calmly the couple received the information. They seemed certain that, even under Gestapo interrogation, the Sokols would not implicate them. Looking around the apartment filled with books and paintings, Trepper could see that the Spaaks were people of wealth and privilege.

  “I’ve got the gold coins Mira left with us,” Claude told him. “Do you want them now?”

  “No,” Trepper answered. “When I do, I’ll send someone to collect them.”

  Claude took to Trepper immediately. Years later he described him to the French journalist Gilles Perrault: “He seemed thoroughly humane and inspired total trust; his eyes shone with goodness.”1 Claude found Trepper’s urbanity a welcome contrast to Harry’s belligerence.

  This, at least, was Claude’s version of his first encounter with Leopold Trepper—the story he offered to Perrault, his children, and anyone else who asked until the day he died. It coincided with Leopold Trepper’
s own account in his memoir, The Great Game (first published in 1975, eight years after Perrault’s book The Red Orchestra).I In the future, a different version would emerge, although it, too, was riddled with uncertainty. This is not entirely surprising. After all, both Claude, a dramatist, and Trepper, a spy, told tales for a living.

  Harry and Mira Sokol had been introduced to Trepper in the spring of 1941, courtesy of the Soviet military attaché. “I told [Mira] that the job involved ‘special work’ that wasn’t directly tied to the Communist Party, and would require them to keep their distance from various people, especially known Communists,” Trepper recounted later. “Based on our meetings, I was convinced that she was a discreet and intelligent woman. I proposed to her that she learn Morse code . . . and the husband and wife learned together. They received money for subsistence.”2

  Harry and Mira Sokol began their transmissions in February 1942 from a house Trepper provided for them in Maisons-Laffitte, a town northwest of Paris. They sent the coded messages to the Soviet embassy in London, which relayed them to Moscow. Desperate for information, Moscow pushed them to the limit in their transmission, and the Sokols realized that their lengthy sessions were inviting detection.

  In June 1942—a scant four months after they began—a roaming German police van picked up their signal in a suburb northwest of Paris. The vehicle returned accompanied by a Gestapo officer and two black Mercedes full of agents. They re-located the signal and homed in on the source, a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood.

  The Gestapo stormed the building and raced up to the attic, where they caught Harry bent over his keyboard in the act of sending a transmission. Mira, clutching a batch of encoded messages, bolted from the back window, but the agents seized her in the garden. The Germans shoved the couple into one of the Mercedes and took them to their headquarters on the Rue de Saussaies. Thus began their season in hell.