Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  The group was worried about the Jewish children. Over the spring of 1942, French police officers had started to arrest Jewish women, leaving their children behind. Some were entrusted to neighbors and relatives who had no means to support them; others were left to fend for themselves on the street. The Vichy government instructed the UGIF to deal with the problem by registering and housing the children in the shelters and orphanages under its direction.

  The core members of the MNCR, including Suzanne Spaak, Léon Chertok, and Charles Lederman, raced to expand alliances beyond Jewish enclaves and the Communist Party. Léon Chertok’s friends from the Left Bank cafés were vital, as were Suzanne Spaak’s connections.

  The group was determined to save Jews from deportation to concentration camps and contest the premise of Nazi ideology. Nazi anti-Semitism was grounded in the pseudoscientific argument that “inferior races” created social blight. This theory conflicted with France’s traditional legal definition, which considered Judaism, like the two other state religions, Catholicism and Protestantism, a matter of personal choice. Before the occupation, French Jews were not only granted freedom of religion, they could become Christians upon baptism or conversion. Under the new laws, birth was destiny. To win French support for the immigrant Jews, it was essential to combat the Nazi concept of race.

  The leaders divided their tasks along accustomed lines. Adam Rayski worked on tracts, Charles Lederman ran his network in the South, and Léon Chertok appealed to the medical profession and his female admirers. Suzanne Spaak became banker, business manager, and ambassador to the elite non-Jewish world.

  The group noted that the four convoys leaving Drancy in June had emptied the camps, suggesting there would be another round of arrests. By July, they had assembled the names of some two hundred Protestant and Catholic institutions that might be willing to shelter Jews.3

  The tip-offs from the police source lacked an important detail: the date when the mass arrests were to take place. Nonetheless, Solidarité published a Yiddish tract headlined “The Enemy Is Preparing an Unheard-of Crime against the Jewish Population,” offering what the group had learned so far:

  Brothers and sisters…according to the information we have received from a reliable source, the Germans are going to organize a massive round-up and deportation of Jews…The danger is great!…The question before every Jew is: what can you do to avoid falling into the hands of the SS bandits? What can you do to hasten their end and your liberation?…

  1. Don’t wait at home for the bandits. Take every measure to hide yourself and your children with the help of the sympathetic French population.

  2. After assuring your own freedom, join a patriotic combat organization to fight the bloody enemy and avenge their crimes.

  3. If you fall into the hands of the bandits, resist in every way, barricade the doors, call for help. You have nothing to lose. It may work and save your life. Try tirelessly to flee. Every free and living Jew is a victory over our enemy, who must not and will not succeed in our extermination.4

  Suzanne Spaak joined the teams of Jewish activists who went door-to-door alerting the residents of immigrant Jewish neighborhoods, working alongside members of Zionist and Communist youth groups. They slipped flyers under doors and handed them to worried tenants, asking everyone to pass along the information.

  Adam Rayski fumed over the denial encountered by Suzanne and her fellow canvassers:

  The MNCR activists hit a wall of incomprehension everywhere they went. Non-Jews reproached them for over-dramatizing the situation. Among the Jewish families—where they were trying to convince mothers to send the children to the countryside, or to entrust them to be sent to a safe place—they met with nothing but astonishment and refusal. This situation led me to launch this appeal, in a tract for Jewish mothers:

  “Today, the danger is such that your maternal instinct must oblige you to separate from your children, and not, as usual, hold them close.”5

  Jewish men, spurred by the previous arrests, took heed, usually acting on their own. Up to that point, the arrests had swept up able-bodied men who were candidates for forced labor, and they had no reason to think this raid would be different. Thousands of husbands and fathers went into hiding in garrets and cellars, believing that their wives and children would be safe at home.

  Solidarité was not the only Jewish organization to receive advance word of the July roundup—but it was the only one to publish a warning. The UGIF remained silent.

  The UGIF’s decision was made by its vice president, André Baur, the son of a prominent banker, a nephew of the chief rabbi of Paris, and a member of the Berrs’ social circle. On July 1, an official from the Vichy agency for Jewish affairs (CGQJ) sent a letter to Baur ordering him to take up a collection of shoes and clothing from the Jewish community sufficient for seven thousand people, in preparation for another deportation. The letter came from Pierre Galien, a notorious French anti-Semite who had ingratiated himself with SS officer Theodor Dannecker, reportedly by shepherding him to bars and brothels.6

  Baur was distressed by the request, but he also believed the information should be withheld from the immigrant community. He cautiously replied:

  It seems particularly dangerous to us to let the Jewish population know that it may expect a vast new deportation initiative. It is not our role to sow panic by giving it even partial foreknowledge of your letter.7

  The French police would call the operation Vent Printanier (“Spring Wind”), but it went down in history as the “Vel d’Hiv.”* It had been months in the making. The previous March, over a thousand Jewish prisoners had boarded passenger cars confident that they were en route to farms and factories. Several months passed without additional convoys while the Germans assembled the necessary railway cars.

  The next round was set in motion on May 6, when Reinhard Heydrich, a leading architect of the Holocaust, came to Paris to meet with René Bousquet, the head of the French police in the Occupied Zone.8 Heydrich told him that he expected the French to fully execute the mechanics of the arrests and deportations.

  The pace accelerated in June. A convoy departed on June 5, and three more in a single week at the end of the month, each bearing around a thousand people, including women. These prisoners boarded cattle cars, and they were far from confident.

  Still, Berlin was unhappy. The Nazis viewed the French deportations as shoddy and inefficient, nothing resembling the industrial process laid out at the Wannsee Conference six months earlier. In order to meet Berlin’s demands, every step had to run smoothly. The French police, responsible for the supply, needed to arrest enough Jews to meet the quotas when the trains became available. The French and German railways had to provide trains and railway personnel on a dependable basis. This complex coordination—replicated across occupied Europe—required energetic, competent administrators committed to the task.

  A new series of parleys took place in early summer between René Bousquet and SS general Carl Oberg. Oberg, a pudgy, bespectacled veteran of the First World War, had run a tobacco stand in Hamburg before he joined the SS in 1932.9 SS officer Dannecker, charged with making the trains run on time, was party to the talks. It was not going well. If the Final Solution was designed as an industrial operation, Oberg and Dannecker were responsible for the first link in the supply chain. They found the obstacles maddening—not just the shortage of the rolling stock, but also the endless dithering of the Vichy officials.

  It wasn’t a question of the Vichy regime opposing the deportations. Prime Minister Pierre Laval had described the Jewish immigrants as déchets, or “dross.” He told a US diplomat that “these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France and that the French government was glad that a change in German attitude towards them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.”10

  Vichy officials viewed the deportations as a solution for the violence erupting on the streets of Paris. Following the execution of French hostages, Vichy secretary of state Fernand de Brinon blamed th
e “Jewish authors” of the attacks rather than the Germans’ policy of blind retribution. He informed Göring that he and “the entire French people” deplored “the actions of criminals incited daily by radio broadcasts of Jewish émigrés in the pay of the British government and the Bolshevik plutocrats.”11

  Brinon’s own circumstance illustrated the fault line between French and immigrant Jews. His wife, Lisette, was the daughter of a Jewish banker and a Catholic convert who lived through the occupation as an “honorary Aryan.”12 Brinon negotiated desperately with the Germans to halt the executions of French hostages as reprisals for attacks on German personnel. In exchange, the French agreed to step up their efforts against “terrorism, anarchism and communism.”

  In mid-June the Germans presented the French with a new list of demands. Berlin wanted forty thousand Jews, male and female, between the ages of sixteen and forty. This demographic would support the explanation of work details. The arrests were to include thirty thousand adults from the Occupied Zone and ten thousand from the Free Zone. Sixteen thousand were to be French Jews.

  The Vichy officials objected. It was unacceptable to include sixteen thousand French citizens. Laval called for a new census in the Free Zone to distinguish between French Jews and “the trash sent by the Germans themselves”—Jews deported to France from other Nazi-occupied territories.13 The parties began to bargain. If the Germans expected the French police to carry out the arrests, the arrests should apply only to foreign Jews. The Germans acquiesced. They had little choice. The SS officers knew that they could not succeed without the support of the French police. As of 1942, there were fewer than three thousand German policemen in all of France, a country of forty million. In contrast, the French police numbered over thirty thousand in Paris alone.14

  Under the revised plan, the July roundup would arrest 22,000 foreign Jews, as identified by the French police’s color-coded index cards. It would target Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and those of “unknown origin.” It would include both males and females between the ages of sixteen and fifty (instead of forty). Pregnant and nursing women would be exempted, as would some of the sick and the elderly, but the “sorting” would take place after the arrests.

  Children under the age of sixteen were to be placed in the care of the UGIF and distributed among Jewish orphanages. Dannecker, outlining what he called the “transplantation” of the Jews, mentioned “the possibility of later sending the children under 16 years of age who have been left behind.”15

  The Paris police force would make the arrests and convey the prisoners to the stadium on the Left Bank known as the Vel d’Hiv. From there they would be transferred to Drancy and other camps to await deportation to the East.

  By July 2, rumors were swirling through the Jewish neighborhoods of Paris, even penetrating elite households that had never heard of Solidarité. In her diary, Hélène Berr agonized over whether her family should flee the country, still barely possible via the Free Zone, or stay and resist. Leaving would mean sacrificing her sense of dignity and “that sense of heroism and struggle that you feel here. There is also giving up the feeling of equality in resistance, if I agree to stand apart from the struggle of other Frenchmen.”That evening a friend of her mother’s burst into their home with the news of an “order for July 15 to lock up all Jews in concentration camps.”16 If her eminent father could be arrested on spurious charges, no one was safe.

  Now she decided it was time to take action. Entr’aide Temporaire was well and good, but she would go a step further. On July 6, Hélène, her sister Denise, and Denise’s sister-in-law Nicole Job arrived at the UGIF headquarters on the Rue de Téhéran in a state of nervous excitement. The reception was less than enthusiastic: the secretary-general shouted, “You’ve no business here! If I have one piece of advice to give you, it’s: Get out!” But the three young women were determined.

  The Berr women understood that the UGIF was an instrument of the occupation, but it also offered the means to support immigrant Jewish families. The young women received UGIF certificates that exempted them and their families from arrest, though Hélène found them “distasteful.” She regarded working for the UGIF as “a sacrifice, because I detest all those more or less Zionist movements that unwittingly play into the Germans’ hands; and in addition it’s going to take up a lot of our time. Life has become very peculiar.”17

  The plan for the July arrests, known as the Grande Rafle, stuttered again. The Germans wanted the arrests to take place over Bastille Day, but the Vichy officials insisted this was out of the question. Parisians traditionally celebrated the holiday with protests and demonstrations, and they wanted to avoid trouble. The Nazis agreed to postpone the arrests by two days.

  Now the question of the children resurfaced. Pierre Laval was disturbed by the vision of thousands of Jewish children left behind. Who would be responsible for them—if not his own government? Dannecker sent Adolf Eichmann a telex asking for instructions:

  Urgent, for immediate distribution.

  Re: Jewish deportation from France.

  Negotiations with the French Government have led to following result: all stateless Jews of the occupied and unoccupied zones are to be made available for deportation. LAVAL has proposed that Jewish families from the unoccupied territory bring along children under the age of 16.

  The question of Jewish children remaining in the occupied territory does not interest him.

  I therefore urgently request a decision as to whether, starting with the 15th Jewish transport from France, children under 16 can also be included.

  Finally, it should be noted that in order to get the action fully underway, for the time being only stateless Jews, or rather foreign Jews, are under discussion.

  In the 2nd phase Jews who were naturalized after 1919 or after 1922 are approached.18

  Four days later, Dannecker sent Eichmann another telex. He expected the raids to produce about four thousand children. There were good reasons for deporting them, he said: one was to prevent “promiscuous” interactions between them and the non-Jewish children in care. The UGIF facilities could hold only four hundred children at a time, and the others would have to go somewhere, presumably to non-Jewish institutions.19

  Serge Klarsfeld, the leading historian of the Holocaust in France, has argued that the French had additional reasons for requesting the children’s deportation. First, they expected the raids to fall short of the German quotas. Every immigrant Jewish child on the train would fill a spot that might otherwise be assigned to a French Jew. Second, the feeding and housing of four thousand children would represent a major financial burden for the French government. Finally, if the children accompanied their parents to the camps, the public would not witness terrible scenes of separation.20 The four hundred UGIF beds would be filled, but thousands of other children would go to the detention facilities along with their families.

  On July 14 the UGIF’s André Baur extended limited protection to the organization’s staff members. His social workers were assembled to make four hundred labels for the children who would be lodged in UGIF facilities following the arrests. The next day, the Vichy official Pierre Galien ordered Baur to “abstain from communicating any biased information or any commentary whatsoever” to the Jewish community about the impending action.

  The Grande Rafle commenced at 4:00 a.m. on July 16. It was a massive operation. A small army of French police officers—according to some accounts, over 8,000 men organized into 888 teams—fanned out across the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods of Paris carrying 27,000 colored index cards bearing the names and addresses of Jewish families.21 They were instructed to arrest men, women, and children—including those who obviously had no place working on a farm or factory floor.

  Parisians were shocked to see French policemen shoving their Jewish neighbors down stairwells and herding them into green and cream-colored city buses. A nurse on her way to work witnessed a scene outside the town hall: “A poor woman was d
ragging her little boy. His suitcase fell open and all of his things spilled on the ground, and the cop was shouting, ‘Go! Go! There’s no time, there’s no time, hurry up!’ He stopped her from picking up the things and was pulling her by the hair… It was awful.”22

  Children didn’t know whether to cling to their parents or obey their instructions to hide. Parents were uncertain whether to hold fast to their infants or thrust them into the arms of strangers. There were multiple suicides: one woman in the Marais threw her two young children from a fifth-floor window and leaped after them. All three died.23

  Parisians had witnessed the deportations of POWs, the capture of résistants, and the mass arrests of Jewish men, but no one ever had seen anything like this.

  The procedures were far from uniform. Some policemen, especially those operating singly, gave Jewish families advance notice, hoping to find their apartments empty on their return. Some officers allowed children to slip into neighbors’ homes, and others refused to take French-born children. But many more executed their orders with chilly efficiency, and even hostility.

  The MNCR, unaware of the date for the action, was caught by surprise. Suzanne Spaak had delivered advance warnings, but now she was out of commission. School had let out on the thirteenth, and the next day she had taken the children to the country house in Choisel for the summer. She was cut off with no access to information from Paris. Claude was in the Free Zone with Ruth. There was no possibility of using the car, and the railroad station was over three miles away. Her friends from Solidarité were scattered across Paris, all potential targets of the raid.

  Adam Rayski had been staying in a rented maid’s room near the Eiffel Tower, apart from the home of his wife, Jeanne, and their four-year-old son, Benoît, in Belleville. He thought his family was safe, and he was especially pleased at having procured a “genuine fake” baptismal certificate for his son.