by Anne Nelson
Pilette watched them arrive. They were different from the children she knew. Their heads had been shaved for lice and many wore a Star of David on their clothing, required for all Jews over the age of six. She thought they looked like refugees in their ragged clothes and battered shoes with no laces. One stubbly-haired girl of seven gripped a newspaper over her star with one hand and clutched her little brother’s hand with the other. Another arrived with a baby in her arms.
A pair of twin boys arrived wearing matching Dutch boy caps. Pilette was enchanted.
“Mother,” she whispered, “can we take them home?”
“No,” Suzanne answered firmly. “It would be too dangerous.”
By nine o’clock many of the children had arrived—more than expected. There were some happy accidents. Two sisters were reunited with their two brothers who had been separated from them after their parents were deported. Suzanne worked alongside an MNCR activist named Marguerite “Peggy” Camplan, who would become her closest ally. An attractive dark-haired woman in her forties, Camplan was a Protestant by birth and a Communist by conviction. It was whispered that her husband was Jewish and had changed his name from Kaplan.17 Of the five known accounts of the rescue, Peggy Camplan’s was the most detailed. “The crowd of children arrived carrying their meager bundles, and some without anything at all,” she wrote.
They were either trusting or frightened, depending on how much they knew. By that evening there were 60 of them in the Great Hall of Patronage where their destiny would be decided. Madame Spaak was there to receive them, reassure them, amuse them.18
The children were hungry. The soup Pilette ladled out had been furnished by Marshal Pétain’s relief fund, his propaganda showpiece. (“O ironie!” Peggy Camplan exclaimed.)
The children’s next stop was a desk occupied by Suzanne and an assistant. Camplan reported:
The afternoon of the first day of the Coup de l’UGIF was devoted to carefully noting the children’s names, birthdates, family addresses, and addresses of UGIF facilities. Their ages ranged from 3 to 18. We had to think of the possible return of parents who had escaped deportation and searched for their children, which had already happened.19
Once their data was recorded, the children were shuttled to temporary havens. “Everyone helped, the women from the [MNCR], the women from the Oratoire,” wrote Peggy Camplan.
Madame Spaak appeared pleased from the beginning with this success, but she didn’t lose sight of the rapid action required by this business, because it was impossible to keep all of these children in this spot for long without attracting attention.
Their deadline was the midnight curfew; the younger children needed to be safe in bed before then. At ten o’clock, Suzanne took stock. Her goal of placing all of the young children in homes was almost realized.
She had mobilized an extraordinary team effort. “Pastor Vergara telephoned in all directions to find temporary beds,” Camplan wrote.
Madame Spaak provided the example; she took many children herself and placed others with her friends . . . . The women of the [MNCR] also took them and placed them, even with Jews who were already in hiding, and who thus showed proof of their great support.
Pastor Vergara and several of his [grown] children took some in, as well as Pastor Vidal and a large number of parishioners from l’Oratoire. Even people in humble lodgings in the neighborhood, and concierges . . . . It was magnifique! Of course, this temporary distribution was carefully recorded.
A handful of Jewish teenagers remained, but they could spend the night at La Clairière on benches. However, there were still five small children who needed beds. Suzanne located a spot for them with a concièrge on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, but it was a mile away and the escorts were already heading out, anxious to reach home before the Métro shut down for the night. Whoever took the children would have to travel on foot and still make it home before curfew. Suzanne turned to Pilette. She set out into the night with the five children in tow.
The streetlights were extinguished as a precaution against air raids. It was slow going in the dark, and the children were hard to shepherd. They had been starved and shut in for weeks, and now they limped along the blacked-out streets. Pilette prodded them, anxious about the time. Finally she arrived at the address and rang the bell.
The concièrge opened the door and peered out. “Bring them upstairs,” she said. Pilette and the children trudged up seven floors to a small chamber. The woman’s own five children were piled on the bed, sleeping soundly, and she shook them awake. “Allez!” They tumbled out of the bed and the new arrivals took their place. The concièrge’s children stumbled down the stairs to sleep with their mother.
Pilette left for the Palais Royal, skirting police patrols and peering into the shadows. The darkness made it difficult. Some women installed small bulbs in the toes of their shoes to light their way, powered by batteries in the soles, but Pilette had no such device.
When she finally arrived at the apartment, all was silent. She tiptoed into Bazou’s room. Her brother was sound asleep in his bed, Claude was off with Ruth, and Suzanne was, yet again, absent. Pilette had just completed the most terrifying mission of her life—but there was no one to tell.
Suzanne and her colleagues spent the night at La Clairière working on the formidable record-keeping challenge. They had assembled a list of people in the countryside who had agreed to accept a child, recording their preferences for a boy or a girl. This was compared with a roster prepared the previous day, listing the children and their attributes.20
“The next day, Tuesday, February 16, ten new children arrived,” Camplan wrote.
Like those who came earlier, they were fed and sheltered at La Clairière until we could find them a temporary spot. But the big job of the second day was to work out, in writing, the permanent distribution of this continually growing flock.
Suzette—Madame Spaak’s codename—had gathered an entire staff around her at La Clairière. The children were distributed among the placements on offer, taking into account as much as possible the requests regarding age and sex.
The next group to join the effort was the Oratoire’s Girl Scout troop. Its twenty-three-year-old leader, Simone Chefneux, sent the girls to La Clairière to receive their assignments as convoyeuses, or children’s escorts. Madame Camplan reported:
On the third day, Wednesday, February 17 (which saw fifteen new children arrive), we executed the plans of the previous day. Each convoyeuse was given her assignment to take the children to either a temporary hiding place or to the countryside, where they would be introduced to the neighbors as a little refugee. The child was saved!
The departures followed rapidly, but children from the Jewish quarter continued to arrive. By the end of the week, Marcelle Guillemot found the number of young guests had risen to ninety.21
She had reason to be anxious. The sudden influx of children had naturally aroused curiosity on the street. Nosy shopkeepers were told that the children had been bombed out of their homes in the suburbs by British air raids. Still, there were informers everywhere, and the unusual events at the soup kitchen could turn curiosity into suspicion. Once the children were safe, the women set to work erasing all traces of their operation. Camplan wrote:
On the fourth day, Thursday the 18th, we burned all of the papers and labels bearing the compromising names. We took the boxes of the remaining clothes to a neighboring seamstress and gave a brave grocer the lists from the children’s files. She hid them for months in a bottle rack in the back of the store, and we opened a private door when we wanted to consult them.22
The seamstress removed the yellow stars from the children’s clothes and burned them, then dismantled the garments and stored them with her rags.
On Thursday police appeared on the Rue Greneta asking questions. Shortly afterward, officers from the Vichy Commission for Jewish Affairs descended on the Oratoire, but by then all evidence of the operation had vanished. Peggy Camplan wrote:
&nb
sp; From that point on, we adopted more discreet tactics. The children didn’t come from the UGIF any more, because the Coup had been so successful that it couldn’t be repeated without danger.
The operation’s success caused more complications. News of the rescue at La Clairière had flown through the Jewish community. Relatives, friends, and neighbors appeared on its doorstep, pleading on behalf of their children. The women at La Clairière gave them temporary addresses from their list of reliable hosts, and Suzanne or a colleague from the MNCR came by every day to drop off the name of the contact who would oversee the permanent placement. Remarkably, La Clairière continued to function as a soup kitchen and community center with only a brief pause.
After the war Claude Spaak reported that a dozen Jewish children were taken to the Spaaks’ country house in Choisel—a fact that Suzanne successfully hid from her own children.23 The other host families ran the gamut of French society. Many of Pastor Vergara’s parishioners were families of professional men who collected the children from La Clairière the same day they were called.24 The Meunier family had been hiding Jewish children since the Vel d’Hiv. Now the pastor turned to them again, asking them to take a group of children between the ages of four and seven. Michèle, sixteen, worried about her family’s “mean concièrge.”
“We were afraid she would turn us in, so the children came and went quickly so as not to attract attention,” she recalled. “The children weren’t traumatized. They didn’t realize what had happened to their parents, and we didn’t either. But one little boy, 5 or 6 years old, would pray, ‘Mon Dieu, please bring my parents back.’ ”25 Over the coming months, Vergara continued to send children to the Meuniers until they could find places in the countryside. Michèle estimated that her family sheltered some fifteen children over the year.
Many more havens were needed, and Suzanne sought out every node of her network, including the Countess de la Bourdonnaye. Dexia had been assisting Robert Debré and was known as his nurse (though some called her his “secretary”). She supported the operation at La Clairière and offered her luxurious apartment on 55 Rue de Varenne as a hiding place. She took in over a dozen children, including Armand Boruchowicz, the boy from Guy Patin whose friends had been caught hiding in the basement.26
For Dexia and Debré, resistance was a family affair. Their older children by their first marriages were fighting with de Gaulle’s forces, but Dexia’s youngest daughter, Oriane, was still living at home. She had sung the “Marseillaise” in the famous student demonstration against the Nazis on the Champs-Élysées in 1940; now she had to be more discreet. Nevertheless, she maintained her feisty spirit: “We used to cut Métro tickets in a V and the Cross of Lorraine and leave them on the floor of the subway.”V
Oriane’s new task was to hide the children. The countess’s apartment had six bedrooms, a garden, and a grand salon, but there were logistical challenges. Her elegant street served as a thoroughfare for the occupation hierarchy. The Wehrmacht’s military tribunal was located a few doors down, and Pierre Laval had lived next door at the Hôtel Matignon until the previous November. Only a year earlier, the countess had gone to prison and risked deportation for hiding her fellow Musée de l’Homme resisters in her apartment.
Dexia and Oriane sneaked the Jewish children, aged seven to ten, past the neighbors and the concierge and installed them in Oriane’s room. “We played little games. They were adorable, hiding in the banquettes.” Oriane also witnessed their pathos. “One of them said, ‘Madame, can you tell me, did they arrest Maman because I didn’t know my catechism?’ ”27
Before they could be moved to the countryside, the children needed a new identity and ration cards. The rescuers started out by obtaining blanks or “scrubbing” old cards. Suzanne took on the task of scrubbing them using Dr. Debré’s hospital laboratory. “Madame Spaak was in charge of the first ones,” Camplan noted, “but her methods took a long time because she had to go through a group that worked outside Paris. She often traveled with the fake cards in her bodice or sent them through the mail, one by one, under the cover of a new hardback book marked ‘printed matter.’ ”28
More shelters were needed, and Suzanne continued to reach out. One contact was Jacques Grou-Radenez. The master printer, known as a “friend of the poets,” dined with the Spaak family on occasion. His most recent project was training members of the Gaullist student movement Défense de la France, offering them a printing press and lightning apprenticeships for their underground newspaper of the same name.
Grou-Radenez and his wife had five children of their own, but at Suzanne’s request they took in five Jewish children and welcomed more over the coming months.29 It was a courageous decision; Grou-Radenez was already placing his family at risk through his work printing Défense de la France. But he and his wife, deeply principled Catholics, would not turn the children away.
Next, Suzanne contacted the ladies of Entr’aide Temporaire, perhaps through the Oratoire’s Odette Béchard. Suzanne began by meeting with the group’s president, Denise Milhaud of the UGIF underground, and Hélène Berr’s cousin Nicole Schneiderman.
“We didn’t know about the action of La Clairière when Madame Spaak proposed to me that we take in children,” recalled Milhaud. “I hesitated, because I wasn’t even sure it was Madame Spaak.”30 But Milhaud decided to trust her, and Entr’aide joined Suzanne’s rapidly expanding network.VI
The children were safe from immediate danger, but now the next stage began. More ration and identification cards were needed. Sophie Schwartz and Solidarité contributed counterfeits from the Jewish Communists and the FTP-MOI underground. Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot set up forgery workshops and collection points for Red Cross supplies in church facilities.
The Oratoire’s Girl Scouts rode the rails accompanying the children to the countryside, and a young congregant named Maurice Nosley took children to four host families in Saône-et-Loire, working with Entr’aide Temporaire and Hélène and Denise Berr.31
Finally, the children were all registered, documented, and placed. After a cooling-off period, the rosters were placed in hermetically sealed jars and buried in a garden in the suburb of Goussainville, where Sophie Schwartz had her lodgings.
Sophie Schwartz’s lieutenants served as a vital link between the rescuers and Jewish families in hiding: if relatives could be convinced to bring their children directly to the network, they would lessen their risk of arrest in the UGIF facilities. Sick children were sent to Léon Chertok and his MNCR medical committee, with the support of Robert Debré. Debré and his colleagues were often able to place them in non-Jewish clinics.
But the network required money, in large quantities. The MNCR paid an average of 1,000 francs a month per child to cover room and board in the metropolitan area. Areas outside Paris were less expensive but still cost around 750 francs a month. In one day, the operation at La Clairière added sixty-three children to the account, which meant an additional 60,000 francs a month. This was a daunting figure, even for a Belgian heiress.
Suzanne embarked on a massive fund-raising campaign. She had formerly shunned Parisian high society, but now her pedigree was useful. Pilette was delighted to see her dowdy mother decked out as a woman of fashion. The burgundy suit and hats were called into action, and she kept her hair trimmed and coiffed in the updated style that flattered her new nose. Claude had given her a gold bracelet the previous year. By the time she added her new fur coat, Pilette thought “she looked like a star!”
Suzanne continued to expand her network. Robert Debré connected her to the leading physicians of Paris, while Entr’aide Temporaire introduced her to banking and business circles. Scores of participants from half a dozen groups had taken part in the rescue; now they would cover the expenses of hundreds of Jewish children at a cost of some 300,000 francs a month.32 The Oratoire took up regular collections, and Pastor Vergara commissioned a church deacon named Maurice-William Girardot to deliver the funds to Suzanne at the Palais Royal.
Suzanne gave her donors a choice of payment plans. Some of them opted for a onetime contribution; others chose a subscription plan. Suzanne’s artist friend Valentine Hugo made a single contribution, while her screenwriter brother-in-law Charles Spaak signed up for a 5,000-franc monthly subscription, enough to support five children. (This would have surprised his critics, who took a dim view of the screenplays he wrote for the German-owned Continental Films.) Suzanne gave what she could from her own allowance and asked her relatives for more. Every possible source of funding was explored, from far-flung Rothschilds to destitute Jewish families in Belleville.
But Suzanne scored her biggest coup closer to home. She knew that Colette was sympathetic to the cause, but her neighbor had become more reclusive, tormented by her arthritis and her fears for the safety of her Jewish husband.
A few weeks after le kidnapping at La Clairière, Suzanne knocked at her door and explained the situation. The next day Colette’s housekeeper, Pauline, appeared at the Spaaks’ bearing a large donation, along with a long typewritten list of names and addresses: two single-spaced pages, front and back.
Suzanne showed the list to Pilette. Colette had scoured her address book for friends who were good for a contribution or a place to stay, and above all who were absolutely trustworthy. With one gesture, Colette added scores of aristocrats, artists, and perceived collaborators (like herself) to a mission that had been launched by Polish Communist Jews and Protestant reformers.
This convergence suited Suzanne—it was, at heart, the quality that defined her. One of her Communist Jewish partners, Jeanne List-Pakin, saw Suzanne’s political independence as both her strength and her liability.