Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  The abbé was forty but looked older in his broad-brimmed saturno and Coke-bottle glasses. His quaint, reassuring image helped build a clandestine network of concerned Catholics and Jews called Les Amitiés Chrétiennes (“Christian Friendship”). The group conducted rescues, lobbied the Catholic leadership, and published calls to action.

  On August 15, 1942, a month after the Grande Rafle, Lederman obtained an appointment with Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse. Saliège was crippled by a stroke and a poison gas attack he had suffered as a chaplain in the First World War. His fortitude was badly needed. Various individuals could act with courage, Lederman observed, but “the representatives of the Catholic Church were the only ones who could express themselves publicly.”

  Lederman approached the door of the bishop’s palace with trepidation. A nun admitted him and led him through the silent hallways to the presence of an old man sitting behind an enormous desk, wearing a black cassock, scarlet skullcap, and large gold cross.

  Lederman told the archbishop everything he knew about the fate of the Jews in Paris: the yellow stars, the arrests, the deportations, and the terrifying rumors of camps in the East. He described the suffering of the children in the Vel d’Hiv, news that had not traveled to the public beyond Paris. “We expect you, if you agree, to make all of this known to the French people, and for you to appeal to Christians to help the persecuted.”

  The archbishop listened silently. When Lederman finished, he asked, “Can you assure me of everything you have told me? If so, next Sunday we will require all of the churches in my diocese to read a pastoral letter.” Lederman contacted members of the Jewish resistance network: the MOI labor coalition, the MNCR, and the militant FTP-MOI. He asked Italian and Spanish members of the network to send someone to every church in the diocese the following Sunday.

  On August 23, parish priests read Saliège’s letter verbatim and without commentary from the pulpits of four hundred churches at once.13 Saliège’s words spread the MNCR’s message to thousands of French Catholics and imbued it with the Church’s moral imperative:

  Women and children, fathers and mothers treated like cattle, members of a family separated from one another and dispatched to an unknown destination—it has been reserved for our own time to see such a spectacle. Why does the right of sanctuary no longer exist in our churches? Why are we defeated? The Jews are real men and women . . . . They are our brothers like so many others.14

  The pastoral letter, Lederman wrote, was a powerful catalyst. The MNCR’s tracts could reach only a few hundred readers at a time, fearful recipients who debated whether to share them or destroy them. The archbishop’s message reached French Catholics in their public place of worship and sowed the ground for a vast, complex effort to aid the persecuted Jews, especially the children.

  The continuing disasters in the Northern Zone had created a new crisis in the South. Following the Vel d’Hiv arrests, thousands of Jews fled Paris for the Free Zone, only to be arrested as they crossed the border. On August 4 the Vichy authorities agreed to arrest Jews in both zones and launched new roundups in the South to sweep foreign-born Jews into camps. Lederman was concerned about camp conditions, particularly in Vénissieux, a military camp that had previously housed Vietnamese workers.

  Lederman asked Abbé Glasberg for help entering the Vénissieux camp, and the abbé provided him with the cover of a Catholic working for his charity, Les Amitiés Chrétiennes. Lederman brought along a dozen Jewish Scouts from the Éclaireurs Israélites Françaises.II Their goals were to help the detainees and to facilitate escapes where possible.

  “Once we were there,” Lederman wrote, “the facts were clear.”

  We knew the internees were doomed to deportation. It was August 1942; the first trains had left in March, and we hadn’t had any direct news of the “travellers.” They had all left behind a horrible silence, a silence of death. If it was impossible to save the adults, we had to try to save the children.15

  On August 27, the team began to spirit Jewish children out of the camp.III Lederman’s team had the heartbreaking task of persuading parents to hand over their children as they prepared for their own doom. Abbé Glasberg falsified documents concerning their legal status. For the next two days, streetcar workers conveyed the children to the local Red Cross office, and a friend of Lederman’s found them temporary hiding places. Finally the police panicked and alerted their forces, to no avail—the children were gone. But Lederman’s cover was now blown, and he was obliged to go underground.

  He lived with the sorrow that hundreds of others in the camp could not be saved. Nonetheless, les nuits de Vénissieux represented a coup, thwarting the mechanics of deportation and introducing a new model of “kidnapping.” The Nazis had resolved to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The MNCR responded that countless Jews might be murdered, but if children from the next generation could be saved, the Nazis would fail.

  The rescuers in the South had important advantages. The transit camps in the Free Zone were overseen by French officials and guards, some of whom assisted with the escapes. The Vichy government refused to require Jews in the South to wear the yellow star, and there was far less surveillance there than in the German-occupied North. Hiding places in the countryside were more accessible, and the borders of neutral Switzerland and Spain were preferable to those of Belgium and Germany.

  But in Paris, three hundred miles to the north, 4,115 children languished in detention. They missed their homes and puzzled over their circumstances. The grown-ups were always boarding trains; what lay at the end of the ride? In Drancy they conjured a magical destination called “Pitchipoi,” but no one knew what it was. Could it be a shtetl, as in the stories from the old country? A beautiful city where they would find their families? Or nowhere?

  The SS and the French police wrestled with the problem of the children for several weeks. They needed to decide whether the children would be deported now or later, with their parents or separately. Someone had to determine which approach would place less pressure on state resources and less emotional strain on the French police.

  The plans for deporting children advanced. Adolf Eichmann had strictly forbidden convoys containing only children. His August 7 memo stated, “Children of stateless Jews can be deported in adequate proportions”—without specifying what those proportions might be. Vichy officials and the Gestapo decided that children could be added at a ratio of at most one child per adult. According to Serge Klarsfeld, “The reason is doubtless simple—the SS wants French and German railway workers and any others who may see the trains to believe that the children are being deported with their parents.”16

  The wheels began to turn. On August 15, a thousand children were transferred from Pithiviers to Drancy in sealed boxcars. They arrived in a piteous state, filthy, half-naked, and sick. On the morning of August 17, 323 girls and 207 boys in Drancy were transported to Auschwitz. Two days later, the unthinkable occurred. They were led into the gas chambers and their bodies incinerated.17

  By the end of August, the prefect overseeing the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande reported that there were only “a few sick or untransportable children” left.18 The convoys would depart for Auschwitz on the average of every two days until the end of September. In later years, wrenching accounts would come to light of social workers arguing with jaded prefects and stealing children out of the camps one by one.

  Over 1942 the Nazis’ news blackout held fast. Only scattered flyers from the MNCR and a few other resistance groups announced the deportations, and even these fell far short of the reality. The Communist resistance still placed the July arrests in the context of forced labor, not murder. The August edition of the Communist paper Le Franc-Tireur was headlined “Against the Shameful Persecution,” but it suggested that the Jewish deportees were merely the first in line for the same treatment awaiting every Frenchman:

  The monster Hitler needs slaves. He has our prisoners [of war]; he can’t have our workers. The “hiring” isn’
t working, despite the bluffing and the unemployment. So Hitler demands that we send him 30,000 foreign Jews from the Occupied Zone, and 10,000 from the Free Zone . . . .

  Frenchman! Watch out. Don’t ever imagine that Hitler’s brutes will treat you any better than the poor foreign Jews, than the Polish and Czech martyrs!19

  In contrast, the Paris flyers from the MNCR emphasized the special plight of the Jews, including an apparent reference to the rescue at Vénissieux.

  The Catholic organizations of Lyon, in a magnificent gesture of Christian solidarity, have succeeded in saving 100 children whose parents were deported to the Occupied Zone to be placed in the hands of the Nazis . . . . A ferocious repression immediately came down on certain Catholics who opposed this act of vandalism and refused to hand over the children . . . .

  French fathers and mothers! Are you going to allow this odious crime to be committed? . . .

  Defend the persecuted Jews! In defending them, we defend our own freedom! Down with the anti-Jewish persecutions!20

  Another MNCR publication took the form of a brief letter, apparently mailed secretly to individuals, describing the group’s mission to “defend France from the odious grip of racism.” It politely asked the recipients to send anonymous letters to local police and civic officials to show their agreement with “this vast movement that we’re organizing.”21 The authors chose not to mention that their “vast movement” consisted of at most a few dozen members.

  Other resistance publications, including the Gaullist Défense de la France, condemned the Vel d’Hiv arrests, but they could not imagine the extent of the disaster. “We hesitate to use the term bestiality, because a beast does not separate a female from its babies.”22 The authors could not imagine that the children torn from their mother’s arms were the lucky ones, with a far better chance of survival.

  Hundreds of stranded children were now candidates for the next round of arrests and deportations. The Vichy authorities divided them into two categories: the “free” children were those who had escaped the original arrests, which gave them a relatively protected status. Bloqué, or “blocked,” children were those who had been arrested and released for administrative reasons but whose names were recorded on a special list, making them subject to rearrest at any time.23

  Both the blocked and the free children were assigned to the seven Paris orphanages and shelters run by the UGIF. Many of these had been Rothschild charities before the war, but they were now funded by forced contributions from the Jewish community to the UGIF. Conditions in the homes had sadly deteriorated, as the cheerful crèches gave way to bleak wards packed with anxious, hungry children tended by beleaguered staff members.

  The four hundred beds in the UGIF children’s homes were now constantly filled, and an additional 1,080 children had to be placed in non-Jewish homes and institutions.24

  The children’s fate rested with a complex web of organizations that often pursued conflicting goals. The official staff of the UGIF served the authorities’ bidding, terrified of losing their own exemptions from arrest. Other UGIF staff members—including Dr. Fred Milhaud and his wife, Denise, and Hélène Berr and her relations—secretly undermined the UGIF’s procedures, looking for ways to spirit the children out.

  The rescue operations expanded, thread by thread. Entr’aide Temporaire increased its efforts to help the Jewish children. The Jewish Scouts, obliged to join the UGIF in 1941, founded a clandestine division called La Sixième for the purpose of rescuing Jewish children from deportation. The MNCR created a new ad hoc children’s committee.

  It was a ragged network, nearly impossible to coordinate and divided by status, religion, and geography. The triage was daunting. The starting point was the money and ration cards to keep Jewish families alive, whether they had gone underground or were living openly. The orphanages wanted for food, medicine, and clothing. Suzanne’s associates scavenged for funds and moved children off the books and into temporary lodgings—anything to disrupt the system. They were inefficient but dogged.

  Suzanne, a founding member of the children’s committee, did what she could from Choisel. Claude was still in the South with Ruth, and Suzanne’s children still needed her attention. Pilette, fifteen, had entered adolescence, and Bazou was a needy eleven-year-old.

  But Suzanne felt guilty about their privileged life, constantly comparing it with the sufferings of Jewish children. Her MNCR colleague Jeanne List-Pakin wrote:

  We often heard her say, “My children are safe while others are threatened.” After the July 1942 arrests in Paris, Suzanne was obsessed with the Jewish children who were herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and taken from there to Drancy. She looked for a way to rescue as many as possible.25

  * * *

  I. Glasberg’s birth place is now in northwestern Ukraine.

  II. The French branch of the international Scouting movement. Other groups involved in the effort included the Jewish OSE (Oeuvre de secours aux enfants) and the Protestant Cimade.

  III. Accounts differ as to the number of children who were rescued from Vénissieux that August. The estimates range from 80 to Lederman’s report of “about 150.” Lederman adds that some adult detainees escaped and were recaptured. The accounts are in agreement that the children survived the war in hiding.

  8

  suzanne and sophie

  | JULY–OCTOBER 1942 |

  The principals of the MNCR met furtively. One of them, Sophie Schwartz, first encountered Suzanne Spaak one summer day in 1942 when she had received instructions to seek an “elegant lady” on the Ligne de Sceaux, the railway line that ran through the southern suburbs of Paris.I

  Sophie boarded a train at Denfert-Rochereau station in the fourteenth arrondissement and headed south. Suzanne walked or bicycled three miles from her house in Choisel to the station at Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. The exchange may have taken place there, or Suzanne may have ridden north through the lush Chevreuse Valley to a station farther up the line. At any rate, the Belgian heiress and the Polish organizer joined forces.

  Sophie, a little overwhelmed, described her new contact as “indeed elegant, wearing a black tailored suit and blonde hair, really quite elegant.”II If Suzanne recorded her impressions of Sophie they have been lost, but she might have described her as a hearty woman with unruly dark curls, dressed in her usual sober suit and white blouse; sturdy, spirited, and strong.

  They met at the behest of Charles Lederman, who worked closely with Suzanne in the children’s rescue efforts. Suzanne had opened an office in a pretty villa in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse using the government-sponsored relief fund Secours Français as its front operation. She maintained the house as a communications hub for Lederman. A well in its herb garden served as a repository. Lederman and his associates rigged up a watertight container on a near-invisible wire that allowed them to lower documents into the water, where they could be stored until needed.1 It was highly unlikely that the police would come knocking at a remote outpost of Marshal Pétain’s favorite charity.

  The women’s encounter on the Ligne de Sceaux was the first of many. Their meetings were cautious and brief. Sophie recalled, “She gave me the money and she gave me addresses—the ‘good addresses,’ as we called them, for hiding the children. I don’t know how many times I saw her, but each time we met, it was a Tuesday.” Personal information was exchanged only on a need-to-know basis: “We didn’t talk very much, she was very discreet, a grande dame.”2

  For Suzanne, the idea of deporting Jewish children was an abomination, but the children themselves were still something of an abstraction. Sophie’s crèches had brought her into daily contact with the children and their mothers. Now that their parents had been arrested, the children were left to the whims of politics and circumstance. For Sophie, they were not just names on a list—they were flesh and blood.

  Sophie had been born in 1905 (the same year as Suzanne) in Lodz, an industrial city southwest of Warsaw. Another outpost of the troubled Russian Empire, Lod
z was occupied by the Germans during the First World War, an experience Sophie found redolent of “misery, typhus, and death . . . . They snatched the boys from the street and sent them to Germany to work, and they died of hunger there.” The fifteen-year-old girl saw soldiers stumbling back from the front: “the ones that had been gassed, the ones with damaged lungs, people who were starving, broken, physically and morally.”3

  After the war, Lodz fell within the boundaries of the newly reconstituted Poland. Its 230,000 Jews represented a third of the city’s population, making it the second-largest concentration in Poland after Warsaw. But the war’s legacy was ongoing disruption. The region had passed from the rule of a distant czar to an arrogant kaiser to autocrats in Warsaw. The schools’ language of instruction changed from Russian to Polish. As Sophie and her schoolmates gathered to learn the puzzling new alphabet, they began to question everything: government institutions, patriarchal family structures, and social inequalities.

  Sophie was a gifted student, but her family couldn’t afford school fees and sent her to work in a curtain factory. There she joined a Socialist youth movement and gravitated toward the new, illegal Communist movement. Around this time she witnessed her first pogrom, carried out by Polish soldiers who held Jewish men at bayonet point and cut off their beards.

  The Polish police came for her one morning in 1924 at one o’clock. They threw her into a cell full of prostitutes, interrogated her, then released her. Her father gave her an ultimatum: abandon politics or leave home. She left for Belgium, where she married another Jewish émigré, Lazar Micnik, who had also been expelled from his home for political organizing. In 1929, the couple moved to Paris illegally and found work off the books, thrilling to the rise of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936.

  Sophie joined a committee to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was disappointed that her husband refused to go and fight. “I’ve never held a pistol, I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know what I’d do there,” he told her. The couple settled into a secretive life of undocumented immigrants in an apartment off Place de la République.