Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  There were more signs of hope. That fall a man from Luxembourg showed up at the door of Suzanne’s mother saying that his sister was engaged to marry Suzanne’s Gestapo interrogator. Rudolf Rathke had told him that Suzanne was on a farm in Prussia, he said, and for a certain sum of money he could bring her home. But Suzanne’s sister called in the police to investigate his claims, and he was arrested. Such scams were becoming commonplace as hustlers preyed on the war’s distressed survivors.

  Paul-Henri Spaak returned to Brussels, where he resumed his post as foreign minister and eventually took a leading role in the creation of NATO. Then, in October, he received a brown envelope via the Belgian embassy in London containing two letters from his missing sister-in-law, dated August 12, 1944. When Paul-Henri turned over the envelope, a slip of paper fell out. It was the burial record for a grave in the Bagneux cemetery a few miles north of Fresnes.

  Suzanne had entrusted the envelope to the German prison chaplain at Fresnes, Abbé Franz Stock. Stock had served in France before the war and sympathized with the Resistance. Three years earlier, Robert Debré had sought his help for Dexia and the Musée de l’Homme group when they were imprisoned in Fresnes. Over the occupation, the priest and his two aides ministered to some two thousand imprisoned résistants and other political prisoners, smuggling in books, food, and clothes to the captives and messages out to their families.9 Stock couldn’t stop the Nazis’ slaughter, but he served their victims where he could, at great personal risk.I

  Stock confided to a friend, “I witnessed so many deaths, and not just firing squads—humans can be so horrible.” His aid to Suzanne was one of his last acts as chaplain at Fresnes.10

  Suzanne’s letters were penned in her large, round handwriting: one to Claude, one to her children. She wrote to Claude:

  Today I have a great hope because my appeal has been denied, and I really think that’s because you are still free and that soon our dear children will be in your arms again. I write this to you, my dear, because it’s difficult to write a “collective” letter, but I think with great and profound love of all those who love me.

  But she was tormented by the thought of Grou-Radenez.

  I would truly GIVE MY LIFE TO SAVE HIM because I can’t forgive myself for having given his name to the police. My dear, if this terrible misfortune didn’t spare poor Madame Grou, I ask that you offer her all the moral and material aid you can. I would like her to know about my appeal and my letter in June to the children.

  Suzanne berated herself for being “stupid” in giving the couple’s address to Bazou “on that morning in September” without foreseeing the possible consequences.

  Then she recalled earlier times, when life and love were less complicated:

  My dear, I would like to tell you all of the thoughts I’ve had for you since October 18, all of them, with such deep love, but I’m a little annoyed because I can’t find the words to tell you, and I also know that you’ll understand what I mean—yes? Do you remember that beautiful summer twenty-three years ago? I haven’t changed.

  To her children, she wrote:

  I want to express all my love for you and I can’t find the words . . . . My little Bazou, continue to imitate your dear papa. You can’t find a better example, and when you are grown up, ask him to talk to you about my friends, and you’ll see another example to follow.

  My little Pilette, be GOOD, SIMPLE, GENEROUS, and do me a favor: read, and from time to time, reflect on some verses of the Gospel and try to follow these principles that I find so admirable.11

  This religious note was unexpected for the self-described atheist, but perhaps she was reflecting the influence of Father Stock.

  Another slip of paper bore the words, “I’m thinking of Mira.”

  Paul-Henri Spaak took charge of the situation and sent his wife and sister to Paris. They learned that two bodies had been hastily buried in Bagneux in August, identified only as “a Frenchman” and “a Belgian woman.” The Frenchman’s family had recently claimed one body as that of Fernand Pauriol, the radioman who had built and maintained Leopold Trepper’s transmitters. Pauriol’s family had reburied him in the South of France as a hero of the Resistance. The “Belgian woman” had not been identified, and her remains were about to be moved to a common grave.

  Paul-Henri told Claude what they had found: a gravesite, but with no means of identifying Suzanne’s remains without a physician to conduct an exhumation.II

  Once again, Claude hesitated. He didn’t give his children the news until a few days before Christmas, and he was unwilling to go to the morgue himself. He turned to Léon Chertok for help, handing over Suzanne’s dental records and authorizing him to identify the body. Heartsick, Chertok compared the dental chart with the remains and saw they matched. Suzanne was dressed in her burgundy suit and ochre blouse.

  It has never been established who killed Suzanne Spaak, or why. Heinz Pannwitz maintained that Berlin had commuted her death sentence to a prison term with every intention of exploiting her as a hostage. Her execution took place amid pandemonium. American pilots in Fresnes described hearing sporadic volleys of gunfire and the bellowing of guards. “Prisoners were breaking their windows, trying to see what was going on in the courtyard below,” fearing they would all be executed on the spot.12

  In that last frantic week, Germans, Vichy French, and even Ukrainian fascists murdered and pillaged their way across Paris, driven by greed, vengeance, and the desire to obliterate incriminating evidence; there was a massacre of over a hundred prisoners from Montluc. But if a marauding band attacked Fresnes, no report of such an event has survived.

  What is certain is that on August 12, 1944, Suzanne Spaak and Fernand Pauriol were taken from their cells to the prison courtyard. There they were murdered with the infamous Genickschuss—a shot to the nape of the neck—that had stolen the lives of so many Nazi victims across Europe.

  A decade later, a seemingly chastened Heinz Pannwitz told the CIA:

  The responsibility can only lie with the administrative offices of the prison where the commuted death sentence may have been overlooked in the files. It was neither possible for, nor the responsibility of my Kommando to supervise the prison transport from Paris during the final hectic days of the withdrawal.

  It is most regrettable that all our efforts to save this woman’s life were in vain because of a stupid, horrible administrative mistake.13

  Pannwitz implied that the Gestapo held the copy of Suzanne’s stay of execution and that, in the last frantic days of the occupation, the prison guards accidently consulted the wrong file. This suggests that, in toying with her appeals for clemency, Pannwitz had cut the margins too close. His explanation is far from verified, but no more credible account has come to light.

  The confirmation of Suzanne’s death devastated her mother, Jeanne Lorge. When the news arrived, she disappeared for six months to be alone in her grief.

  Claude shut himself away in his study at the Palais Royal. The end of the war restored the property of the Lorges and the influence of the Spaaks, but a deafening silence surrounded the subject of Suzanne. Pilette’s Lorge cousin Tommy Happé recalled, “The family had a great esteem for Suzette, but my parents were eager to protect us from the dramatic aspects of the war, the sad things.” Paul-Henri’s daughter Antoinette added, “The Spaaks remembered Suzette as a beloved family member. But I’m always surprised how little they talked about Suzette and women in the resistance.”

  Pilette and Bazou were left alone in their pain and confusion. According to Pilette, “Marguerite [Paul-Henri’s wife] was the only one who talked to us about mother’s death. She was affectionate and kind. No one else—not Ruth, not Claude—talked about it. We were just pawns.”

  Suzanne was reburied at Bagneux under a simple cross in the military section of the cemetery, amid rows of soldiers from every corner of the French empire, their graves marked with the cross, the Star of David, and the Muslim star and crescent.

  The Oratoire’s
Paul Vergara spoke movingly at her funeral:

  She believed with all her heart in that which is stronger than might, she wagered against might and she won. Nietzsche sneers: “Mercy, and respect for what is right and for the weak are virtues of slaves, good for cows, women, the English, Christians, and other democrats.” Despite these boasts she believed in the “virtues of slaves” that are revealed to be sovereign, and without which men are no more than educated animals.14

  Suzanne’s plot faced another section containing the empty graves of Jews who had died in concentration camps. Photographs mounted in the stones depicted entire families who had been wiped out within a few months.

  Pilette and Bazou weren’t invited to their mother’s funeral; they weren’t even told it was taking place. Pilette finally learned where her mother was buried around 1952, when Bazou showed her a picture of the grave. “That was the first time I really believed she was dead,” Pilette said.

  Claude told Gilles Perrault that it was only with great difficulty that he brought himself to visit the cemetery. He found “a vast necropolis where three thousand soldiers were buried,” he said. “There were flowers everywhere . . . and in the middle of these men, Suzanne and another one, the only women.”15

  Claude wrestled with Suzanne’s legacy. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, one of Suzanne’s fellow inmates visited him to express her admiration for his wife, who had been a great help to the other prisoners. “She especially asked me to tell you to visit her cell,” she added. Claude wrote to the prison to ask permission, but the director brushed him off. The prison was full of collaborators now, he said. (One was Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, who would be shot in the Fresnes courtyard after arguing that he had sacrificed immigrant Jews to save French citizens.)

  No one had seen anything special in Suzanne’s cell. Claude persisted, and the director finally acquiesced. It turned out that the cell had been converted into a storage room, and no one had seen anything because it was stacked high with objects blocking the walls.

  Now Claude regarded the narrow surfaces, covered from floor to ceiling with three hundred inscriptions in her hand. Suzanne had always been an avid reader, and she had battled despair by mining quotations from the recesses of her memory, each imbued with a profound meaning.

  “To understand all is to forgive all.”

  “Oh! Let my keel split, let me fall into the sea!” (from Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre).

  “You might have found a better wife than me, but I have given you our son.”

  “Ah, I am sitting in the shadow of the forests . . .” (from Racine’s Phèdre).

  “My enemies can kill me. But they cannot harm me” (Socrates).

  “Alone with my thoughts, I am still free.”

  “Greetings and courage, comrades.”

  “Where the children are, the mothers should be, so they can watch over them” (Kipling, drawn from The Jungle Book).

  “Melodious nightingale, sing a song to close my eyes” (from Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

  “I regret nothing.”16

  Claude later told Gilles Perrault:

  I don’t remember how long I stayed. Sobbing, I went from one wall to the next, copying all of the inscriptions on a piece of paper the prison director had given me. There were sayings, poems, and also kind of a journal she kept over her final days. She noted with hope that American tanks had reached Chartres. She was also surprised that she was still in Fresnes, since most of her companions had been evacuated.

  “There’s something else I can’t forget,” Claude added. “That large brown stain that I saw on the floor of her cell.”17 It may have reminded him of the other brown stain at the Gestapo quarters on the Rue de Courcelles. Was Suzanne tortured? Her family would never know.

  Suzanne had left a sizable estate, and a family council gathered to discuss its disposition and her children’s future. Pilette and Bazou had been left at loose ends. Claude married Ruth in 1946, a year after Suzanne’s death was confirmed—the minimum period for respectability. The couple didn’t inform the children that the wedding was going to take place, nor did they invite them to the ceremony.

  “You will call Ruth ‘Mother’ from now on,” Claude told Bazou. Pilette rebelled at the idea and clashed with her father. She watched resentfully as Ruth took her mother’s place in the home and even started wearing Suzanne’s gold necklace. As Pilette matured, she increasingly resembled Suzanne. One day she was experimenting in front of a mirror and pinned her hair up in her mother’s style. When she emerged from the room, Ruth flinched as though she’d seen a ghost, and harshly told her she must never do it again.

  Soon after Claude’s death, Pilette and Bazou learned that he had burned their mother’s letters and photographs, as well as their own. Only a handful of papers remained. Claude never offered an explanation for his action, but his favorite great-nephew, Anthony Palliser, had an idea. “Claude spoke about Suzanne with respect, but he didn’t speak about her much. He felt a little guilty. He hadn’t behaved like a perfect gentleman.”18

  Claude had a hard time living with Suzanne’s letter containing the Gestapo’s offer to spare her if he turned himself in. Yes, it was ambiguous, and she did employ their private code indicating that he shouldn’t take her words at face value. But the fact remained that while she was preparing to die a hero’s death, he was holed up with his mistress, ignoring their children and her distress.

  But Claude also struggled with the contrast between his wife’s actions and his own. After the war, some of the rescued Jewish children wrote letters expressing their gratitude to Suzanne and trying to contact her children. Claude destroyed those letters, too—Pilette and Bazou never knew they existed. For years they wondered why the beneficiaries of their mother’s efforts remained silent. Finally, after Claude’s death, some now-grown children reached them. One of them was Larissa Gruszow, the child who was hidden in Normandy, who became a close friend.

  Money was another factor. Claude and Ruth liked the good life. Suzanne’s estate gave Claude the use of her property, but it was ultimately tied up in a trust for the children. He was required to show proof for anything he purchased himself for reimbursement. Pilette recalled him rifling through files, looking for receipts for petty household items such as towels and napkins. Ruth was in line to inherit a handsome fortune, but it had to wait for her mother’s death a decade later.

  It was Suzanne who came, posthumously, to the rescue. Claude learned that if Suzanne was officially recognized as a casualty of the Resistance—Morte pour la France—he would receive tax benefits on her estate. He submitted the petition, and it was done. The phrase was added to the cross marking her grave, although Suzanne would have protested that she hadn’t died for France; she was serving humanity.

  Another asset was the art collection purchased with Suzanne’s fortune. This included two dozen Magrittes, some of them masterworks, and an equal number of Delvauxs. Claude lived off the collection for years, selling a painting whenever he needed to raise some cash.

  Claude couldn’t deny that Suzanne’s death financed his life with Ruth. One day when Bazou was in his teens, Claude mused, “I really don’t know what I would have done if your mother had come back.” Bazou never forgave his father for that remark.

  Claude’s precise relationship to Leopold Trepper and Soviet intelligence has remained a mystery. After the war, British and US intelligence agencies conducted investigations of Trepper’s network from their new Cold War footing. The CIA, noting Paul-Henri’s alliance with the British, observed “an unusual thing among the Belgians which was that one side of the family would have Western sympathies and the other was inclined toward Moscow. This was a form of re-insurance for the family.”19

  The CIA report limited Suzanne’s connection to Trepper to aiding his escape and introducing him to someone who had radio contact with London.

  The British Study places all emphasis on Claude Spaak as Trepper’s assistant. The Personality Index of
the Study under Claude Spaak has the following: “The confidence which Trepper reposed in Spaak suggests that he was a well-known and well-tried friend of the USSR if not of the GRU [Soviet military intelligence].” . . . Ruth Peters, who was living with Claude Spaak, became Mme. Claude Spaak No. 2 and was working with him in assisting Trepper during the time Suzanne Spaak was in prison according to the Study.III

  The CIA officer added a chilling speculation based on the British research:

  The British should have fairly positive information regarding Suzanne Spaak’s execution unless Claude Spaak, wanting Suzanne out of the way in order to marry Ruth Peters, and [Gestapo agent Horst] Kopkow, to protect himself, did not give the facts.20

  As intriguing as they were, the intelligence reports were far from authoritative. Heinz Pannwitz’s testimony reflected his self-interest, just as Leopold Trepper shaped his version to his. The various accounts created a patchwork fraught with errors.

  Pilette and Bazou grew up and pursued independent lives. Through her uncle the prime minister, Pilette met a handsome North African who was an adviser to the king of Morocco. After they married, he pursued political ambitions that played out on three continents but left him disappointed in the end. He spent much of her sizable inheritance chasing his dreams. However, the couple shared some happiness and produced a fine son along the way.

  Bazou went to the Sorbonne and decided to study a dead language. He became an eminent Sanskrit scholar who divided his time between Paris and India, marrying an Indian wife and fathering two accomplished sons.

  Pilette and Bazou nursed a lasting ache for their mother and a simmering anger toward their father. As Claude sold off the family’s art collection, the luminous Magrittes and Delvauxs took their places on the walls of Hollywood mansions and leading museums. Bazou still owns the Magritte painting of the two children, and Pilette his portrait of their mother.