Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  “We need a gun urgently,” she told him.

  Heisel answered, “I can get one tomorrow.”

  “No, that’s too late,” she replied, “I must have it today.” Heisel reluctantly handed over his service revolver. “That was really idiotic,” he reflected later. “If [the Germans] had noticed me running around with an empty holster, I would have been in for it.” After the war Heisel learned that the FTP-MOI had used his weapon to assassinate SS colonel Julius Ritter, the director of the despised STO forced labor program. Heisel approved, taking special pride that Leo Kneler, a Jewish fellow German, took part in the attack.14 Besides Kneler, the hit squad consisted of a Polish Jew, an Italian Communist, and a Spanish Republican.15

  The assassination raised the profile of Jewish militants. Himmler took a personal interest in the investigation. Following Ritter’s elaborate funeral at the Madeleine, the Gestapo informed Vichy officials, “Of 102 persons recently arrested as guilty of terrorist attacks, 52 were foreign Jews.”16 The Special Brigades intensified their surveillance, and three of Ritter’s four attackers (all but Kneler) were captured and executed. The Germans resumed their reprisals, which had been suspended over the previous year. In October, fifty Frenchmen were shot in revenge for Ritter’s death.

  The remaining members of Défense de la France also expressed defiance. The arrests had been a major blow, but on September 30 the group published its thirty-ninth edition, titled “The Fruits of Hatred.” It included the first photographs from concentration camps to appear in the French press, showing starving Greek Jewish children and the emaciated bodies of Russian prisoners piled in a pit. The paper reported the mass murder of Jews in Poland and the torture methods the Gestapo used in France. Publishing photographs was a feat. It had required Grou-Radenez’s support to acquire the equipment and the technical ability, which the Jewish publications lacked.

  The photos of the Jewish children had arrived through the Gaullist network: flown in from London, parachuted into Lyon, then passed on to Paris.17 The photos of the Russian POWs had arrived several months earlier, via a Sorbonne professor who was a POW who hid them in a package sent back to France.

  Jacques Grou-Radenez was proud of his apprentices; his star student, Charlotte Nadel, was a cofounder of the movement and ran the newspaper. In only two years, it had evolved from 5,000 copies of a primitive flyer to a serious newspaper with a circulation of 150,000, as well as numerous subsidiary publications and forgery operations. Its stories jolted its readers and provided a striking contrast to official propaganda. The same week Défense de la France published photos of the concentration camps, Vichy’s lackey newspaper Le Petit Parisien reported, “English, Americans and Russians Want to Dominate Europe and Make Its Inhabitants Slaves, says Monsieur von Ribbentrop.”

  The “Fruits of Hatred” was a gesture of defiance, but it was also a strategic act. The students had possessed the camp photos for months but had held them back out of consideration for the families of French prisoners. Now they decided to publish, Charlotte Nadel explained, “to show the Gestapo that they hadn’t beheaded our movement—to demonstrate that they hadn’t arrested our leadership, and thereby exonerate the ones they had arrested.”18

  But following their bold move in September, Nadel decided that greater caution was in order. “I refused to maintain contacts with other movements, especially with Suzanne Spaak, with whom I had regular meetings in the garden of the Palais Royal. Spaak and her husband were involved in a Belgian intelligence network, and they also hid Jewish children with Jacques Grou-Radenez.” In Nadel’s judgment, the contact with Suzanne Spaak wasn’t worth the risk.

  Her precautions were not sufficient. Nadel herself was arrested the following year. By the end of the occupation, some two hundred members of Défense de la France would be deported or killed.19

  Suzanne Spaak’s position grew lonelier. She may have wondered, given the relentless pursuit of her coconspirators, why the surveillance teams of the Special Brigades had not found their way to her door.

  * * *

  I. Remarkably, both de Gaulle and Lusseyran survived the war. Lusseyran was an inspiration for Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See. See the Goodreads interview with Doerr (https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/995.Anthony_Doerr) from December 2014.

  II. Mercifully, she survived the war.

  13

  flight

  | SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1943 |

  The Spaak family arrangements continued in their peculiar fashion. Suzanne and the children occupied the apartment at the Palais Royal. Claude usually stayed with Ruth, who had returned to Paris in July and rented a pied-à-terre over a couturier’s shop off the Champs-Élysées.

  “Our parents were never home,” Pilette recalled. Suzanne still slipped out the door before dawn, riding the train to who-knew-where and creeping back at midnight. The apartment was haunted by a procession of anxious strangers. One “maid” stayed for months; a bright Jewish student tutored Pilette in math in return for hot meals until Suzanne found him a refuge in a seminary in Normandy. (Pilette claimed the math lessons were an utter failure.)1

  School vacation ran from July to October. Suzanne sent Pilette to Belgium for the summer, which suited her fine. Her aunt Bunny Happé owned a large country house in the town of Limal, south of Brussels. “I was happy in Limal and miserable in Paris,” Pilette recalled. Bunny gave her new dresses, and her house had a cook, a live-in maid, and gardeners who put fresh food on the table. The visit also gave Pilette a chance to spend time with her beloved grandmother Lorge, who had moved in with the Happés when the Germans took over her Brussels mansion. Bazou stayed in Paris with Ruth.

  • • •

  In Paris, the atmosphere was tense. French police officers spent the summer of 1943 rolling up resistance groups and helping the Gestapo’s task force hunt down Allied intelligence agents. Leopold Trepper’s network was high on their list. The Allied intelligence services had, in many respects, converged. The British and the Soviets had agreed to offer “every possible assistance in making contact with their respective agents” since 1941, and in late 1943 the new US intelligence service, the OSS, would initiate collaboration with the Soviets.2 There was no doubt among the Allies and the French Resistance that if the Soviets crushed Germany on the eastern front, victory in the West would follow.

  Leopold Trepper was in detention, but his network still operated, and the Rote Kapelle task force was dedicated to its destruction. Over the summer of 1943 it made rapid progress. Trepper’s network had already lost a string of radio operators, including Harry and Mira Sokol. Fernand Pauriol had a better run of luck, building and operating clandestine transmitters. But in August 1943 the Gestapo lured him to Paris, arrested him, and sent him to Fresnes. Pauriol’s interrogation was crueler than the “special treatment” Trepper received over his months in captivity.

  Trepper’s interrogators, like his other acquaintances, were impressed by his intelligence and sophistication. They dispatched three SS doctors to examine him, and an officer informed him that they “concluded, on the basis of anthropological criteria, that you aren’t Jewish.” Trepper maintained that he was. Finally a Gestapo search unearthed his authentic passport, listing his birthplace. The Gestapo sent investigators to the site, but the town’s Jewish population had been wiped out the previous August.

  Trepper’s interrogator read the report aloud: “Neumart is judenrein. The records have all been burned. The cemetery has been destroyed and plowed up, so it is impossible to search the tombstones for the name of Trepper.” This is how Leopold Trepper learned that his family had been exterminated: mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins; forty-eight in all. He managed to conceal his emotions and received the news with a smile.3

  That August a new Gestapo officer arrived from Berlin to oversee the Paris investigation. Heinz Pannwitz, thirty-two, was a baby-faced former Boy Scout who had worked directly under Reinhard Heydrich as a Gestapo and SS officer in Prague. Trepper ingra
tiated himself with Pannwitz and his men, tantalizing them by writing reports on his operations, naming members of his network, and setting up deceptive radio transmissions to Moscow. He later claimed that he wrote the messages in a code designed to alert the Soviet recipients, protecting Soviet intelligence interests rather than the hapless beings he sacrificed.

  The Gestapo fanned out to arrest over a hundred of his agents and employees, many of whom were tortured and executed. Trepper avoided naming certain strategic contacts, above all those who might hold the keys to his future survival. These included Claude and Suzanne Spaak.

  In mid-September Gestapo agents told Trepper they were on the verge of breaking the code, which would endanger both the operation and Trepper himself. He had to take action. He decided to exploit his friendly relationship with his Gestapo guard, a lumbering sad sack named Willy Berg, who suffered from chronic bellyaches. Trepper had told him he knew of a surefire remedy but withheld the details. Then, on September 13, he answered Berg’s groans by volunteering to obtain the medication at the Pharmacie Bailly on the Rue de Rome. As the gullible Berg waited patiently in his car, Trepper entered the crowded drugstore and slipped out the back door.

  Trepper thought the French Communist Party was his surest route to safety. His first step was to locate his young mistress, Georgie de Winter. She hadn’t seen him for months, but immediately came to his aid. However, in order for her to help him, Trepper had to correct some falsehoods. Earlier he had told Georgie that he was working for British intelligence. Now he admitted that he was a Soviet intelligence officer and needed to establish contact with the French Communists.

  Georgie followed his instructions. On September 17, Trepper succeeded in meeting with a Communist Party contact. They exchanged information, and the contact gave Trepper a cyanide pill in case things went wrong.

  On September 18, the French police distributed wanted posters for Trepper illustrated with a Gestapo mug shot. The three-quarter view showed the suspect with a tense mouth and narrowed eyes.4 The poster, placed in post offices across France, was captioned “Leader of a dangerous terrorist group.”

  The person represented here is a foreigner who directs a group of foreign terrorists and who in recent months has continuously executed acts of sabotage against the installations of the French State. As a result, the provision of vital necessities to the French population has been compromised. It has been established that the group works in close collaboration with communist circles.

  This was a fabrication. Trepper steered clear of military operations. His front companies were major suppliers to the German army. But the occupation authorities were continually trying to win public support by inflating the threat of terrorism.

  Otherwise the text offered an accurate description, indicating that its authors had studied him closely:

  Height 1m70. Stature: short and stocky. Broad back. Stiff posture. Rounded chest and head held back. Left eyebrow raised. Eyes blue-gray. Birthmark on left side at cheekbone height. Short, thick neck. Sometimes wears glasses. Slow pace with small steps. Slightly overweight.

  When walking, he points feet out [walks flat-footed]. Recently he was dressed in a blue suit without stripes, single breasted with a single row of buttons. He wore a light gray shirt with narrow dark stripes, a burgundy tie and low shoes. Without hat or coat.

  Trepper’s walk was an interesting detail. The German and French police knew that their quarries were adept at changing clothing, facial hair, and other aspects of their appearance, so they were trained to recognize a subject’s stride. (Some British agents put cardboard in their heels to alter their gait.)5

  Trepper and Georgie de Winter spent a week moving among her friends’ apartments, aware that the Gestapo was close behind. On Saturday, September 25, Trepper sent his mistress to the Spaaks’ apartment to ask for help.

  Claude recalled:

  A very pretty woman called at my home in Paris and said she had been sent by Trepper. She said to me, “He would like your wife to go and see him at once.”

  Trepper was hiding out in an apartment in western Paris, she added. “He can’t leave because the Gestapo is looking for him.” Claude gave her the money he had been keeping for Trepper and set off to see him.6

  There was obviously some danger, so I preferred to go myself. This was in Suresnes, in a big building. He opened the door and threw himself into my arms. Then he said, “The Gestapo is on my heels. Can you help me?”7

  Trepper told Claude he needed to get back in touch with the French Communist Party, this time at a higher level, but his channels of communication were cut off. He needed an intermediary. The Soviets told their spies to keep their distance from local Communist parties, and Trepper was forbidden to meet with French party representatives more than once a year. Furthermore, the Communist leadership had gone deep underground following the attrition of the previous summer. Trepper believed that Suzanne’s contacts at Solidarité could help. The Jewish members of the party leadership maintained an intense interest in the children’s rescue operations.

  Suzanne’s role took on new implications. The same web of contacts that had saved the lives of Jewish children represented Trepper’s best hope for escape. Her network connected to the London-based Gaullist intelligence bureau (BCRA)I and wove through British intelligence, the MNCR, and various Communist organizations. Suzanne agreed to contact Léon Chertok and Charles Lederman.

  Although she didn’t yet admit it, Suzanne was highly exposed. According to Claude, “She received several warnings that she ignored. Once, for example, a priest came to tell her that she should be careful, she had been reported to the local police station.”8

  The Spaak children were unaware of these developments. At the end of the vacation, Pilette wrote to her father from Limal, asking if she could stay. Claude replied, “If you want to stay you can, but we’d be very sad, especially now that Ruth is in Paris. We want to make a fresh start being a family.” She reluctantly boarded the train for Paris.

  Trepper was nervous about prolonging his stay in Suresnes. On September 26 he showed up at the Spaaks’ apartment, and Pilette answered the door. He tried to remain calm. “Would you tell your father Monsieur Henri is here?” he asked. The girl conveyed his message to Claude. To her amazement, her father leaped out of bed “like a jack-in-the-box” and, still in his dressing gown, pulled Trepper into the library.9 For the next three nights he slept in Pilette’s bed while she camped out in her mother’s sitting room.10

  Trepper asked the couple to help send word to Moscow via London that the Germans were about to break their radio code. Suzanne’s friends in the Gaullist resistance had radio contact with London. With La Clairière’s activities suspended and Robert Debré in hiding, the most direct route to the Gaullists was through Jacques Grou-Radenez. She dispatched the faithful Bazou with a message to the printer’s home.

  The Spaaks had moved mountains to help Trepper, but he wasn’t sure they suited his purpose. He found Suzanne’s rescue operations especially inconvenient:

  In spite of the great confidence I had in the Spaaks, the fact was that this was the least safe of all the places I had hidden since my escape. I knew that both the Spaaks belonged to the resistance, but at that time I did not suspect the degree to which Suzanne, in particular, was involved in a variety of underground activities.

  In 1942, she had devoted herself to rescuing Jewish children, and had been a militant in the National Movement Against Racism. But I did not realize that by September 1943, at the time she took me in, she was also working with several Gaullist and communist organizations. She took part in the most perilous actions, without regard for danger. Consequently she was very much exposed. We decided it was wiser to part company.11

  For Trepper, “parting company” meant taking advantage of other members of her rescue network. First Suzanne took Trepper to the Oratoire du Louvre. She had remained in touch with church elders after Pastor Vergara’s and Marcelle Guillemot’s flight. Despite the increased
risk, parish families continued to hide Jewish children, and deacon Maurice-William Girardot continued to deliver funds to Suzanne at the Palais Royal.12

  Now Suzanne asked the Oratoire to harbor another Jewish fugitive, this one a full-grown Soviet agent, and his young mistress. The pastor agreed, though with reservations. Trepper and Georgie de Winter spent the night of September 28 as guests of the Oratoire, but they were sternly required to sleep in separate rooms and depart at dawn.13 They were back at the Spaaks’ the following night. Trepper gave them a colorful account of his adventures, emphasizing the importance of the intelligence he’d gathered. Next, Suzanne found a place for him at La Maison Blanche in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb south of Paris where she had found two boarding houses to use as stops on her underground railroad.

  Again, Trepper considered Suzanne’s rescue operations a personal inconvenience. “I noticed that several of the boarders seemed to be having as much trouble as I did in playing the role of peaceful old men,” he reported. He feared that that the Jews in hiding would endanger him, but events would prove just the opposite.14

  As Trepper bided his time, the Gestapo task force worked its way through Georgie de Winter’s circle of friends. Each arrest and interrogation prompted another round of arrests, leading the Gestapo closer to its quarry.

  Trepper decided it was safer to separate from Georgie de Winter. He knew that as long as she relied on her own circle, she was leaving a trail that the Gestapo would find easy to follow. Nonetheless, Georgie continued to tap her friends for places to stay; more surprisingly, Trepper also asked them for help. One of them was an elderly widow who went by the name of Madame May. She agreed to move into the retirement home in Bourg-la-Reine as Trepper’s “nurse” and carry messages to the Spaaks at the Palais Royal.15

  Trepper was desperate to reach the French Communists, especially Édouard “Arek” Kowalski, the leader of the FTP-MOI’s immigrant fighting units.16 He had met Kowalski before the war, and Léon Chertok knew how to reach him.