by Anne Nelson
He returned to Paris on leave, after driving a transport through Poland to the front in the Ukraine. Along the way, he heard German officers talking about the tests for killing Jews with gas. In Krakow, not far from Auschwitz, he was able to confirm the murder of the deportees from France.
Hearing the news was one thing; knowing what to do with it was another.
Publish? Don’t publish? If we circulated this information, didn’t we risk provoking a reaction of fear and panic, and plunging people into despair and resignation? But what a responsibility it was not to divulge it! And what if it wasn’t true, which is what we hoped in our hearts? Our leadership was distraught and torn before these questions, which couldn’t be dealt with coolly from a distance any more, since it directly concerned people like us.1
Rayski decided to publish. The October 10 issue of J’Accuse had been relatively restrained. Quoting Cardinal Saliège’s pastoral letter, it described the suffering of small children in the camps and urged, “Let every French family take in a persecuted child.”2 There was nothing restrained about the October 20 edition:
Deportations of French following those of Jews.
Thousands of interned French are in danger of being deported and exterminated in the Nazi prison camps.
The Boche torturers burn and asphyxiate thousands of Jewish men, women and children deported from France . . . .
The news that is reaching us, despite the silence of the official press, announces that tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children deported from France have been either burned alive in sealed rail cars or asphyxiated to experiment with a new poison gas. The death trains have delivered 11,000 corpses to Poland.3
These notices reveal the limitations and the achievement of the Jewish underground press. The staff of J’Accuse was working from anecdotal reports from Poland. Their article underestimated the number of victims at this point, reporting eleven thousand when the figure was closer to forty thousand. Nevertheless, these flawed reports were more accurate than anything published elsewhere in the French news media through the end of the occupation.
The French public’s lack of knowledge could be blamed on the blanket of censorship. This was not the case in Britain and the United States, where officials lingered in a state of willful denial. They received early reports of the mass killings of Jews in the East in the “Holocaust by bullets,” but these were difficult to verify and could be ascribed to battlefield casualties.
Over the summer and fall of 1942, accounts trickled out from concentration camps, some from escapees, others from German dissidents. In July 1942, the anti-Nazi German industrialist Eduard Schulte informed the Jewish World Congress in Switzerland about the plans for the Final Solution. The following month, the German diplomat Rudolf von Scheliha secretly confirmed this information to the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was arrested by the Gestapo in October and executed in December.4
British and American officials were disbelieving. In the summer of 1942, a US diplomat in Switzerland wrote, “There is what is apparently a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears that the Nazis will exterminate all at once (possibly with prussic acid) in the autumn about 4 m. Jews whom they have been assembling in Eastern Europe.” In late 1942 (after Schulte’s and Scheliha’s reports), an official from the British foreign ministry called the idea of the Final Solution “a rather wild story.”5
But the evidence continued to mount, and in November the US State Department confirmed the reports. The following month, the Allies issued a denunciation of the planned extermination of the Jews of Europe—two months after J’Accuse published its report in Paris.
On the night of November 7, the Allies attacked strategic Vichy French ports and airports in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Their victory gave them a foothold in North Africa, exposing the southern coast of Europe to an Allied attack.
Hitler responded by sending troops to occupy the French Free Zone. This had enormous consequences for Jews and their supporters. Vichy France may have been a puppet government, but it had been able to extend some protection in small ways, such as refusing to require Jews in the South to wear the yellow star and relaxing controls at the borders. Lyon, the home of France’s second-largest Jewish population, served as the base for the MNCR’s southern branch.
With the events of November, threats to Jews mounted, and an important escape route was cut off. That month a twenty-nine-year-old SS officer named Klaus Barbie arrived in Lyon to head the Gestapo office, keen to pursue fugitive Jews and members of the French Resistance. He installed a suite in the Hôtel Terminus where he oversaw the torture and murder of men, women, and children by the hundreds. To the extent that the Southern Zone had been a haven for Jews, it was no more.
The MNCR responded by stepping up its criminal pursuits, and at the top of the list was forgery. The French government revered complex administrative processes, and the French public respected them—in the case of immigrant Jews, to their detriment. Everyone needed a panoply of official papers, or, in the case of résistants and fugitive Jews, skillfully forged facsimiles. Travel, work, and school depended on identity cards. The purchase of food, clothing, and fuel depended on ration cards. Manufacturing these became a central occupation of the underground. A few individuals, such as Léon Chertok, acquired the legitimate documents of a deceased non-Jew, but most turned to art and artifice.
The MNCR assembled its own forgery shops. Rayski favored a mobile operation, spiriting equipment from attic to cellar as required. Robert Debré had a more institutional approach, installing one in his medical laboratory at the children’s hospital, which Suzanne Spaak used to forge documents for the fugitives in her care.6 Errors could be fatal. Creating documents from scratch required the skills of a professional forger; it was far easier to alter existing papers. There was a brisk market in virgin documents from government offices with blanks that could be filled in as needed.
The autumn of 1942 brought mixed signals. The convoys had abruptly halted at the end of September, but Adam Rayski received the horrific news of the gas chambers in October. The trains resumed with a vengeance in November, with four convoys departing between the fourth and the eleventh. Convoy 44 bore Greek Jews who had been arrested on November 5, along with their French-born children. Witnesses reported that the French police who escorted the internees onto the trains were friendly, offering words of encouragement.
The deportations were still largely invisible to the French public, and French newspapers were preoccupied with other problems. One was the national groundswell of support for de Gaulle: Allied and Free French forces had landed on France’s doorstep, and much of the French navy had defected to their side. Pétain was losing his luster as the “protector of France.” The German occupation of the Free Zone violated the terms of the armistice, and the marshal’s countrymen increasingly regarded him as Hitler’s dupe. British air raids were pounding German cities to dust, and the Soviet army was closing in on German forces in Stalingrad, cutting them off from the reinforcements and supplies they needed to survive the winter. The war hung in the balance, and with it the French Resistance.
On November 20, 1942, Le Matin, the leading collaborationist newspaper, published a speech by Marshal Pétain preaching his gospel of sacrifice and denial more urgently than ever: the French people should disregard the events around them and cling to the established order. He aimed his chastisement squarely at the new enthusiasts for the Resistance:
You have only one duty: to obey. You have only one government: that which I have been granted the power to govern. You have only one fatherland, which I embody: France.
That week the MNCR published a new issue of J’Accuse, delivering a dramatically different message:
Two thousand Jewish children, aged 2 to 12 years, have just been sent to the East, to an unknown destination. Endless trains with sealed cars have delivered them to torture and to death. The heart-rending cries of innocent victims, drowning out the sound of the wheels, sowed terror and
horror all along the road . . . .
French Mothers!
When you kiss your child in bed at night and see your child’s first happy smile upon waking, think about those hellish trains . . . .
Is there anything in the world, is there anything in modern history more atrocious, more inhuman, more barbaric, than the torture of innocent children? . . . These children are just like yours, and their parents were ready to defend them. But they were ripped away from them mercilessly with an animal savagery . . . .
These horrors happened here, in our sweet land of France, with the complicity of the French government collaborating with those who starve us, plunder our wealth, hold our people captive, and murder the patriots fighting for a free and happy France . . . . Do not, by your silence, become accomplices of these murderers.7
The appeal rang in a new voice. The author was anonymous, but the language was fluent, vivid and poetic, reflecting the emotions of someone who had cared for small children. Reading it years later, Pilette found the language familiar. “It’s just what mother would say.” Suzanne Spaak was one of the few native French speakers in the group, and she was probably involved with the tract in some way, whether writing, editing, or typing it.
The MNCR was doing everything in its power to warn the Jews and alert the French to the deportations. Then, in mid-November, the convoys stopped again, this time from a shortage of rolling stock. With the Battle of Stalingrad in its final throes, the German army needed every available train to supply the eastern front. The SS had to wait.
The MNCR needed new strategies and alliances. Tens of thousands of Jews had been deported to their deaths, but tens of thousands remained at large in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and other pockets of the country. What could be done to help them survive?
The MNCR found itself in a lonely position. The Allied governments in London and Washington had denounced the Nazi genocide, but time and again Jewish leaders were told that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible. The Soviets were in no position to help, locked in their own life-and-death struggle. Charles de Gaulle was mired in political infighting in London, struggling to lead his movement in the face of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s intense dislike.
In France the will to resist the Germans was growing, but the Resistance was split into a dozen factions, few of which considered the Jewish cause a priority. De Gaulle instructed his followers to lie low until the Allied invasion. But the members of the Yiddish-MOI had watched their friends and relatives disappear into the camps by the tens of thousands; why should they tell their youth to wait when they might find themselves on the next convoy? Better to let the youngsters build their bombs and shoot their antique weapons. The French Communists continued to let them down. The Jewish leaders of the MNCR, Adam Rayski wrote, were “sure they could count on the help of the Party, which could assign a number of non-Jewish members to make up the nucleus.”
But this didn’t happen. The Communist Party in Paris had its own problems, and suffered from a shortage of manpower aggravated by frequent arrests. To fill the holes in their various divisions, the PC [Communist Party] kept coming to us to find men.
In other words, at the height of the Jewish deportations, the French Communist Party asked its Jewish members to redeploy their militants from Jewish rescue operations to general party functions.
In the meantime, the occupation authorities used petty anti-Semitic ordinances to regulate the flow of arrests. Fred Milhaud, the doctor from the UGIF underground, had observed the arithmetic:
The rhythm of the arrests were governed by those of the deportations, which were governed by the crematoria. The Nazis didn’t want all the Jews of Paris to be arrested in one week, as would have been the case if the infractions had been better monitored. It was enough to use them as harassment to maintain a certain anxiety among the Jews and to arrest some every day based on their infractions. When these arrests weren’t enough, they carried out random rafles.8
The MNCR reviewed the overall situation and resolved to put the children first, in part because they represented the art of the possible. Children were simpler to hide and easier to explain, and more likely to speak fluent French than their elders.
Furthermore, the Jewish children could blend into the ranks of other children farmed out to the countryside. Many of these were the offspring of Parisian factory workers and prostitutes, and others were war orphans designated as les pupilles de la Nation. Infants and tiny children were lodged with nourrices, or nursemaids, while older children were placed on farms where they were expected to do their share of the chores. Others found refuge in Catholic convents and boarding schools. To hide a single child was fairly simple, but hiding masses of them under an urgent timetable was fiendishly difficult.
Suzanne Spaak devoted her days to the children’s cause. Now she routinely left the house at 6:00 a.m. and returned around midnight. The curfew was a bother, but she could talk her way out of any problems with the French police.
There had been no further word from Harry and Mira Sokol; once they disappeared into the grip of the Gestapo they would not emerge. But dangerously, invisibly, the Spaaks’ connection to their network remained alive in the form of Leopold Trepper. Living with his mistress in a pleasant apartment in Paris, he continued to run his intelligence network across Nazi-occupied Europe.
His operations grew increasingly precarious. Trepper had been trained by Moscow’s top professionals, but many had perished in Stalin’s purges. Now he answered to the same nervous amateurs who had kept Harry Sokol on the air for the lengthy transmissions that led to his arrest. Trepper added his own risky behavior to the mix. As the Gestapo swept across Europe in search of his agents, Trepper recruited phalanxes of clumsy replacements, some of them zealots from the international Communist movement, others naive chance acquaintances.
Whether it was fact or bluster, Trepper counted the Spaaks among his assets. He later informed his superiors that after their initial meeting, Claude helped him transfer money between Brussels and Paris. “I didn’t recruit Claude Spaak as an agent,” he reported, “but he worked openly with me, that is to say, he knew that his activities benefited the Soviet intelligence service.”9
In the same report, Trepper stated that “I proposed to Madame Spaak that she help us in our work, which she accepted. Until my arrest, fully aware that she was working for the Soviet intelligence services, she passed information to me openly and periodically.”10 Trepper didn’t specify what kind of intelligence Suzanne possessed. It’s difficult to imagine any, beyond information shared among various resistance groups. If Trepper’s statement was true, she would have been aligned with Allied policy. The previous August, Winston Churchill and W. Averill Harriman, a US envoy, flew to Moscow to advance the Anglo-Soviet alliance, and de Gaulle’s Free French were engaged in a full-scale collaboration with the French Communists.11
The Spaaks may have seen helping Trepper as a practical contribution to the Allied cause. If this was the case, it was fraught with risk. The Soviets’ sloppy operations had already reaped disastrous consequences across the continent, including the arrest of the anti-Nazi Germans in Berlin.
The Gestapo’s success in Berlin energized its search for Trepper. The Rote Kapelle task force worked its way through its lists of suspects in Brussels and Amsterdam and made a new round of arrests in Lyon and Marseille, following the trail of evidence.
On November 24, 1942, they came for Trepper himself as the master spy sat in Dr. Albert Malaplate’s chair, preparing to undergo some overdue dental work. The Gestapo officers, thrilled with their prize, decided to give Trepper favored treatment in the hopes that he would turn double agent and dupe his handlers in Moscow. He received comfortable accommodations, good food, and friendly conversations. Trepper considered his options, and talked.
The Gestapo officers were pleased. After the war, their chief told Allied intelligence officers, “From the moment Trepper was in our hands, the roll-up of the remaining R
ote Kapelle was assured.”
Trepper was much too clever to wish to die for a “lost cause.” It was made clear to him that even during a war, men of his stature and importance did not need to be tried and die although law throughout the world condemned such men to death. Trepper did not need time to think over the proposition. He knew immediately what he wanted to do and, perhaps, what he had to do. Without hesitation he betrayed one colleague after the other. He made meeting arrangements so that we could pick them up while he was meeting them . . . .
Trepper told us much more than we ever hoped and much more than was necessary under the circumstances.12
The Gestapo cells in Berlin had already filled with suspects from the Rote Kapelle. Now the doors of the prison in Fresnes swung open to consume the fruits of the investigation in France.
In January 1943, at the same time Harry Sokol was meeting his death in Belgium, a German officer issued orders governing Trepper’s associates in Fresnes. Several of them had tried to kill themselves. His memorandum, found in a prison garbage can after the war, stated:
To avoid every possibility of meetings or contact with accomplices, the prisoners of the Rote Kapelle conspiracy will henceforth be detained without names or personal details.
The prisoners will be kept in strict isolation. They must not have any possibility of being seen or getting in touch with each other. Therefore they will not go to the baths, or be allowed to walk. They will not leave their cells except under special orders. They will not leave for interrogation at any given moment, only on the orders of [SS] Captain Reiser and Secretary Berg.
The guards will only enter the cells in pairs.
The lights will stay on all night in these cells.
In the case of a male, and if there is no written counter-order, the prisoner will always be bound and on his back.
Be especially careful regarding escape and suicide.