Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  The threats to the Jewish children mounted. In March a member of the Communist Party brought fearsome news to Denise Milhaud’s father, a partner in the rescue efforts: the Gestapo had planned another roundup of “all the Jews still free in Paris, and in particular the children who had been entrusted to the UGIF.”

  The Entr’aide network prepared to take action, aiming to “kidnap” as many children as possible. The organizers took their plan to the UGIF officials in charge—the group’s new president, Georges Edinger, and Juliette Stern, a social worker—but the two rejected it, fearing they would personally suffer the consequences.

  With the approach of the Allies, the choices became even more agonizing. On July 20, Alois Brunner, the SS officer in charge of Drancy, told a detainee there that the arrests were about to take place. On July 21—the day after the German coup attempt—Brunner dispatched police officers to nine UGIF centers to arrest the children.12

  Once again, Denise Milhaud’s father was the first to hear the news. He reported that the police had taken all the children except for the twenty-eight who remained in the UGIF orphanage at Neuilly, just west of Paris. The UGIF’s Georges Edinger authorized his staff to release the children to the rescuers.

  The twenty-eight children were spirited away from the orphanage, but Juliette Stern panicked and sent her staff members out to retrieve them before they could be hidden. The UGIF telephoned the orphanage every ten minutes to find out how many children had been rounded up. Stern’s staff brought back twenty of the twenty-eight, who were promptly taken to Drancy with an escort of Jewish policemen. One of them, a boxer, flew into a rage of remorse when he arrived at the orphanage, shouting that he didn’t think any children remained at Neuilly.

  Between July 21 and 25, the Germans arrested more 250 children, aged three to thirteen, 80 of them from 16 Rue Lamarck. They arrived at Drancy in a state of pathetic confusion, wandering around the camp alone or in small groups. A few days later they were joined by orphanage attendants who had refused to abandon their charges.

  SS officer Brunner told his subordinates that they faced a “painful task” in loading the children into boxcars, and he praised their “alacrity and skill” in carrying out the job.13 Of the 250 children arrested in the rafle, 232 were deported to Auschwitz on July 31, and, of those, 199 perished.

  Georges Edinger submitted a report on the incident to the General Commissariat on Jewish Affairs. He merely recorded the arrest of the children, but he condemned the arrest of his staff. “The children housed in the Neuilly home were the object of an administrative measure by the authorities of the camp at Drancy, on Tuesday the 25, numbering 16. We must deplore any measure taken against our personnel in this home.”14

  There is no doubt that Juliette Stern and others used their positions in the UGIF to support large-scale rescue operations of the children in their care, but the survivors would never forgive the UGIF for the events of July 1944.II As historian Paula Hyman wrote, “Even in 1944, when the Nazis’ genocidal intentions were obvious, the new head of UGIF North, Georges Edinger, refused to destroy its files and hide the children still under its supervision.”15 The debate would continue for decades.16

  The railway was busy at Fresnes. On August 8, Johnny Barrett and twenty other SOE agents were loaded onto a train for Buchenwald. Barrett would be executed along with three other SOE agents on October 5.

  On August 10, Georgie de Winter was escorted from her cell. Her guards returned her possessions, including her jewels, and showed her to a waiting car. “Where are we going?” she asked anxiously. “It’s summer, my girl,” the guard answered. “We’re taking a spin.” They reached the Gare de l’Est, where she found Pannwitz and his men waiting. The platform was wild with panic as invalid German soldiers and women clutching small children fought for places on the train.

  Pannwitz tried to reassure Georgie, saying, “You’re leaving for Germany. It’s impossible to guard you here, you’d be in danger. I’ll join you before long, and we’ll probably have news of Trepper.” She asked about her small son, Patrick. Pannwitz gave a menacing reply. “If you escape, I’ll send him to the Black Forest and you’ll never see him again. If you don’t try to flee, I promise that all will go well.”17 Pannwitz was only half-right. All did not go well; within weeks Georgie found herself in the first of a series of concentration camps. But in the end she was reunited with her son.

  On August 12 the Germans loaded another convoy with 2,500 prisoners from Fresnes, most of them members of the French Resistance. They also included 168 fliers from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Other prisoners were added along the way. Suzanne Spaak would have recognized names from her past: one was Christian Dior’s twenty-five-year-old sister Catherine, a courier for the Resistance, who was shipped to Ravensbrück and would barely survive the war.18

  The final weeks of August brought strikes and street fighting across Paris, but SS officer Alois Brunner was ready to compromise military objectives to pursue his bloodlust. He prepared to fill another convoy, but the German army thwarted his plans by requisitioning the train to evacuate a thousand troops. Brunner bartered food and weapons with the Wehrmacht in exchange for three railroad cars. He filled them with Jewish members of the Resistance imprisoned at Fresnes and prominent Jews who had been held as hostages. They included Armand Kohn, the director of the Rothschild Hospital, along with his family. Brunner rode out of Paris on the same train on August 22.19

  In Paris the hidden threads of the Resistance appeared and entwined. Hans Heisel, the boyish German sailor who had joined the French Resistance, could finally take off his loathed German uniform to fight alongside the French. His comrades renamed him “Albert Roche,” and he fought the Nazis until liberation.

  British and French SOE agents surfaced from the shadows and leaped into the street fighting with gusto. Across from the Palais Royal, resistance fighters fired from the sandbags piled in front of the Comédie Française.

  Robert Debré and his medical committee assumed an official military role. The doctor came out of hiding and took charge of the field medicine for the resistance forces across the Paris region. Jean Moulin would have been pleased to see the fruits of his labor: Debré’s colleague Frédéric Joliot-Curie had supported Moulin from the start; now he alternated first aid with the expert production of Molotov cocktails. Another member, Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, had been working with the SOE for over a year. He used his position to place orders with London for drugs, antiseptics, and surgical instruments to care for wounded agents and résistants.20 The doctors were supported by Léon Chertok, who added his contacts in the Jewish underground.21

  Hitler ordered the commander of the German forces in Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, to reduce Paris to a “field of rubble,” but the general had no stomach for vindictive slaughter or a suicidal last stand. In the final days of the occupation, the Swedish consul, Raoul Nordling, pressed Choltitz to surrender after presenting a token resistance; Nordling made an additional plea for the lives of the political prisoners in Fresnes and elsewhere. The German general finally conceded and agreed to a fragile cease-fire. The fate of the prisoners was not a central concern; Choltitz’s goal was to get his men out of Paris ahead of the Allied advance. Sporadic skirmishes held them up, but on August 25 Choltitz signed the surrender, disobeying Hitler’s orders.

  The streets of Paris erupted in celebration, and Free French forces poured into the city. It was a homecoming for many. The Countess de la Bourdonnaye’s oldest son, Geoffroy, met his mother and sister Bertranne for the first time in four years. The young officer, lean and weathered, posed beside his battered tank, the Wagram 30, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. He had joined de Gaulle’s forces at the beginning of the occupation, and he would fight almost to the end. Bertranne had run a celebrated escape operation for downed Allied airmen. There was no news of the countess’s younger boy, Guy, not yet twenty, who had been captured as he tried to slip across the Spanish border to join the Fre
e French.

  Robert Debré entered Paris with his Medical Committee of the Resistance. Once the wounded were treated, he turned his attention to public health issues. Debré’s son Michel had also joined de Gaulle, but he was in London working directly under the general, planning the architecture of France’s postwar government.

  Parisians emerged into the bright light of August looking to pick up the pieces. On the twenty-fifth, de Gaulle stood before a cheering throng at the Hôtel de Ville looking out on Notre Dame. His speech set the tone for the mythology to come as he greeted

  Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!

  —ignoring the scores of British SOE agents, thousands of American infantrymen, and millions of Russians who lost their lives on the way to France’s liberation.

  De Gaulle’s speech also advanced the myth that “all France” had fought for liberation under his banner. His version of history would overlook crimes of the Vichy bureaucracy, the French paramilitary Milice, and the nefarious General Commissariat on Jewish Affairs. It would shortchange the roles of immigrant Jewish resistance movements and, indeed, of foreigners in general, whether they were German sailors, Spanish veterans, or Belgian housewives.

  The occupation of Paris was over, but secrets remained. Vichy officials buried their tracks and offered elaborate excuses for their actions over the previous four years. Records went missing. The Germans had destroyed vast numbers of documents concerning the occupation, and others vanished as Vichy officials fled their sinking ship.

  But one record that remained was the manifest for the trains from Fresnes to Germany, and one name on the list was Suzanne Spaak.

  * * *

  I. De Gaulle was only partially successful. The Communist Party benefited from its record in the Resistance, reflected by its large number of seats in the postwar French Parliament.

  II. The historian Serge Klarsfeld criticized the UGIF’s actions of 1944 but, pointing to its broader record, wrote, “This shameful task forever tainted the UGIF, leading people to neglect the contribution of this institution, originally designed by the Germans to facilitate the Final Solution, which, undeniably, statistically did far more to help the Jews than to do them a disservice.” As previously noted, André Baur, the vice president of the UGIF, was deported with his family in 1943 and murdered. Juliette Stern would survive the war. In the final days of the Occupation, a Jewish resistance group seized the UGIF offices and arrested its president, Georges Edinger. He and other UGIF members were questioned by a Jewish honor court after the war for their failure to protect the children. See Simon Perego, “Jurys d’ honneur,” in Jewish Honor Courts, eds. Laura Jokusch and Gabriel N. Finder (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 144.

  16

  liberation

  | AUGUST 1944–JANUARY 1945 |

  On August 26—the day after the official liberation of Paris—Leopold Trepper finally seized his moment of glory. Moscow had given the green light for him and the Jewish street fighters to attack Heinz Pannwitz’s headquarters on the Rue de Courcelles. They engaged in a brief skirmish with German stragglers near the Hotel Majestic along the way, but otherwise Trepper’s expedition was mere drama. When they reached the headquarters they learned that Pannwitz and his men had fled two hours earlier.1

  That afternoon, Claude Spaak and Ruth Peters returned to the Spaaks’ apartment in the Palais Royal for the first time in ten months. The Gestapo had looted almost everything they could carry, leaving behind only the largest pieces of furniture, the books, and the scorned surrealist paintings—the most valuable items on the premises. The Gestapo agents had sat in the salon day after day, waiting for Claude to return. He marveled at his luck: beside the mantel was the large wicker trunk the family had used for its various moves. Had the Gestapo bothered to turn the trunk around, they would have found the address of Claude’s hiding place in Saint-Cloud written on the side.2

  Claude and Ruth had barely settled in when Colette’s maid, Pauline, appeared at the door on behalf of her mistress, who wished to see him. “Do you need anything?” she asked him. He said he did not, but he did accept a bar of soap.3

  There was no word of Suzanne. Claude traveled to Fresnes to look for her. There he found the printed roster of the prisoners who had been deported to Germany in the final days of the occupation, with Suzanne’s name among them. So there was hope. In the months following her arrest, Claude’s brother Paul-Henri used his position to make back-channel inquiries to the Germans. They sent back heartening responses, assuring him they had no wish to antagonize him.

  On September 4, Brussels was liberated. The next day, Claude hitchhiked there to see his family and fetch the children. Pilette and Bazou moved back into the Palais Royal with Claude and Ruth ten days later, finding their old home oddly familiar yet also much changed. No one knew where their mother was. The Gestapo had stolen their silverware. In the formal gardens outside their windows they could see American GIs mysteriously hurling a large ball through a basket nailed to a post.

  One day a man who worked for a moving company brought news. “Last March I came here with the Germans and hauled a big load from your apartment to a private mansion on the Rue de Courcelles,” he reported. Claude set off to investigate, and took Pilette along.

  The building in question was the elegant Hôtel Veil-Picard at 63 Rue de Courcelles. Formerly the home of an Alsatian Jewish banking family, it had been taken over by the Gestapo’s Rote Kapelle task force.

  When Claude and Pilette arrived at the gate, they were admitted by a female caretaker. As they stood waiting in the vestibule, Pilette spotted some glowing blue opaline glass on a shelf inside the house. She recognized it instantly; it was part of a group of seventeen pieces that had once belonged to Victor Hugo. Claude had bought the pieces from their friend Valentine Hugo (the former wife of the writer’s great-grandson). “That’s when we knew we were in the right place,” Pilette recalled.

  Year later, the French author Gilles Perrault recorded Claude’s recollection of the visit:

  They were taken to an immense room with sumptuous boiseries, but the only furniture was a table, two chairs and a stove. Prostrate beside the stove, wrapped in his overcoat and wearing a hat, a small elderly man shivered: Monsieur Veil-Picard. He summoned the caretaker, and she took Spaak to the second floor, which was piled high with furniture. She told him with a sweeping gesture, “Go ahead, help yourself, don’t hesitate. The owners are dead.” [Claude] . . . energetically refused, to the caretaker’s surprise, to take a superb oriental carpet that didn’t belong to him.

  The bathtub from Choisel was in the cellar.4

  They departed through a gallery whose carpet was stained with blood. Claude and Pilette returned to the Palais Royal with only his opaline glass.

  The months wore on. Over the fall of 1944, battles raged on both the western and the eastern fronts as Allied forces fought their way to the heart of the Reich. Hundreds of thousands of French POWs and political prisoners were still captive in Germany and Poland, but some began to trickle back from liberated zones.

  Suzanne’s friends from the MNCR started a weekly group for returned deportees and their families at the Pam Pam Café on Rue Marbeuf, near its offices. Pilette went a few times, but she found it difficult. “Mother was supposed to be in Germany, and people would spend all their time talking about atrocities in Germany. I stopped going—I couldn’t bear hearing it.”5

  Then the MNCR pressed her into service to raise money for Jewish orphans. One day they sent her to a sumptuous apartment near the Opéra to ask for a donation. “It was a huge room with mirrors everywhere, and on the desk there was a scale for gems and precious metals,” she recalled.

  She was surprised to recognize the man sitting at the desk. Two years earlier her mother had sent her to a shabby apartment near the steps
of Montmartre, where she made a seven-floor climb to a small attic. There she had found an elderly man in a shawl and a woman shuffling about in slippers. “They were going to give me a child, eight or nine years old, to hide.” She took the child back to Suzanne, who guided him safely into her network.

  Now she saw the same old man sitting before her. “I told him who I was and that mother was in Germany, she hadn’t come back. We needed money for the rescued children. He sat down at the immense desk and said, ‘Everyone’s asking me for money, but in honor of your mother I’ll contribute.’ ” He wrote out a check for 50 francs—the equivalent of a dollar. “I took it back to the group and said, ‘I’m not doing this any more.’ ”6

  With the liberation of Belgium, Paul-Henri Spaak was more prominent than ever. The Allies had groomed him to lead the reconstruction of Western Europe. Amid his official duties, he worked tirelessly on behalf of his family members. For several months after Suzanne’s flight, he lived with the knowledge that his wife, daughter, sister, and other family members were held hostage in a Belgian prison under threat of deportation.

  He also worried about his uncle, the elderly former prime minister Paul-Émile Janson, who had been arrested in 1943. After the other family members were released, he applied to the Belgian ambassador to Berlin to negotiate his uncle’s and Suzanne’s release. But it was already too late for Janson; he was deported to Buchenwald and died on March 3, 1944.7 However, Spaak did receive a message from Heinz Pannwitz, now back in Germany. Don’t worry, it promised, every possible measure was being taken to protect the life of his sister-in-law. She would wait out the hostilities in full security.8