Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  According to Wilhelm Flicke, a German officer who observed the interrogations, Harry was taken to a tiled room, stripped, and seated by a metal bathtub. Three Gestapo agents drenched him in ice-cold water and administered electric shocks. “I’ve told you everything I know,” Harry protested. “I have no idea who gave me instructions or where he lives.” The torment continued until Harry’s face and hands turned blue and he began to convulse.

  They brought Mira in for the next round. She had dressed for the hot summer day in shorts and a light blouse, and shivered in the dank chamber. Flicke reported that she tried to stall.

  “What’s the name of the head of your organization?”

  “He’s called—I—I don’t know.”

  An agent thrust a gun to Harry’s head.

  “Do you want your husband to be—”

  Mira faltered. “His name is— Oh, I don’t know his name; they call him Gilbert.”

  “And where does he live?”

  “They say he lives in Brussels, but I think he’s here in Paris.”3

  The interrogation continued for several months, with ever-increasing brutality. After their initial questioning the Sokols were transferred to Fresnes, the forbidding prison outside Paris. It still held common criminals, but they were joined by growing numbers of Allied flight crews and French résistants.

  The Gestapo was uncertain where the Sokols fit into the picture. Because their transmitter was too weak to reach Moscow, they initially assumed they were working for the French Resistance under London’s direction. But once the captured messages were analyzed, it was clear they matched the earlier transmissions to Moscow the Germans had intercepted from Trepper’s operations in Brussels. In September the Gestapo transferred the Sokols to the SS prison in Belgium, the base for their new investigation.

  Fort Breendonk was a stone citadel surrounded by a moat filled with cold gray water where no living thing could survive. Constructed in 1906, it had been converted by the Nazis into one of their most fearsome prison camps. The commandant was a corrupt, sadistic SS officer named Philipp Schmitt, the master of a vicious German shepherd named Lump that he deployed in his interrogations. Some prisoners held that Breendonk was worse than the industrial-scale prison camps, because its small population allowed the SS officers to know their individual prisoners and tailor their torture accordingly.

  One of the Sokols’ fellow prisoners was Betty Depelsenaire, a Belgian Communist lawyer who had been a member of Suzanne and Mira’s women’s group in Brussels before the war. Depelsenaire had also been arrested for supporting Soviet intelligence efforts and was held in Breendonk from September until Christmas 1942.

  Depelsenaire described Mira’s arrival on a sunny morning in September.4 (Harry Sokol was delivered to the fort separately.) A frail woman of thirty-three, Mira stumbled down the chilly corridors still dressed in her summer shorts and blouse. She had already heard of Breendonk and its horrors.5 The SS officers who ran the prison boasted they would make short work of her interrogation and identify everyone involved in the radio operation. She was handcuffed, placed in a chilly cell, and put on starvation rations.

  Mira was desperate to contact the outside world. Communicating through the pipes, she asked for help from the other political prisoners, who managed to smuggle a pencil and some cigarette paper into her cell. Mira placed it on her table and contorted her body until she could write.

  Dear All: I’m in Breendonk. They have threatened to whip me since it’s impossible for me to furnish the information they demand. I have my hands tied behind my back. I’m holding on, but I think of you all a lot. Help me if you can. I know that you will do everything in your power to get me out of this.6

  It is not known if anyone outside the prison walls ever received that message. Leopold Trepper was silent on the subject. But another message somehow reached Suzanne Spaak in Paris via her sister-in-law Pichenette. “Mira’s in Brussels,” she wrote. “She’s very cold.” Suzanne sent Mira Pilette’s blue-and-white dressing gown made of warm quilted cotton.

  One day Mira received a visit from Commandant Schmitt, accompanied by his German shepherd. Betty Depelsenaire wrote, “All of the hatred of his master was expressed in the movements of the animal’s muscular body, always ready to attack.” The creature growled and bared his teeth, terrifying Mira, who was still in chains. He leaped at her and knocked her over. The commandant watched in amusement, leaning against a table with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  Then he pressed her for names. Who recruited them? Who hid them? Who helped them? Who ran the operation? Mira maintained ignorance.

  “You pretend you don’t know him?” he mocked her. “Ma petite, I pity you. Breendonk is not a pleasant place for a young woman.” The dog snuffled through a box of Mira’s belongings, then urinated on her clothes. The commandant smiled and departed with his pet.

  It got worse. Once Mira’s interrogators were convinced that she had no intention of being “reasonable,” they dragged her by the hair to a torture chamber, where she was tormented with whips, then hoisted by her handcuffs. Mira screamed and lost consciousness, but she did not talk. She was transferred to a hut where Harry was being held following a similar ordeal. The couple was held in separate cells, but at least they could occasionally shout to each other over a ceiling partition.

  The torture sessions continued for four months, but the couple held fast. The Gestapo realized that their greatest vulnerability was their concern for each other.

  Deprived of nutrition and subjected to constant abuse, the prisoners wasted away. Betty Depelsenaire recorded an exchange in the prison clinic:

  Everyone who was tortured had to go for a medical check-up today. This wasn’t to diagnose or cure illnesses, but rather to let the camp authorities collect statistics and eventually isolate the incurable. Everyone had to get weighed. The results are catastrophic.

  “How much do you weigh, George?”

  “119 pounds! I weighed 171 two months ago.”

  “And you?”

  “I lost 44 pounds.”

  “And you, Mira?”

  “I lost 33 pounds.”

  “And you, Robert?”

  He hesitated to answer.

  “Don’t be afraid, dear.”

  “83 pounds.”

  Mira was choking, but she found the strength to joke, “At least you’re staying slim.”7

  After six months in detention, Harry’s face, once round and puckish, was hollow-cheeked and empty-eyed, and his weight dropped to eighty pounds. The camp doctor was overheard to exclaim, “My God, he’s not dead yet! He’s a tough one. It’s amazing how long the human organism can hold out.”

  Harry died in January 1943, hanging by his wrists, whipped and beaten by guards, and mauled by the commandant’s dog. Four months later Mira was sent to a concentration camp in Germany and was not heard from again.8

  The Sokols possessed all the information necessary to destroy Trepper and his operation. They could describe the man and his habits, and they knew the Soviet radio code. They could have identified Trepper’s second in command and offered other information leading to Trepper himself. They did not.

  The loss of the Sokols was the first of the many disasters to afflict Leopold Trepper over 1942. Shortly after the June arrest, the Gestapo created a unit called the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra Task Force) to coordinate the various threads of the Trepper investigation.

  It proceeded efficiently. At the end of June the Gestapo arrested Trepper’s only remaining radio operator in Brussels, and his entire network in the Netherlands was rounded up. In July, German army analysts succeeded in cracking the Soviet code with the help of material they had captured with Trepper’s team the previous year in Brussels.

  In late August, the Gestapo used its breakthrough to obliterate Trepper’s Berlin contacts and their associates, who made up one of the most extensive and effective anti-Nazi resistance networks in Germany. Based in Berlin, it consisted of dozens of smal
l affinity groups whose only shared characteristic was their abhorrence of Hitler and his crimes. Beginning in the mid-1930s, its members infiltrated the Nazi regime in order to undermine it from within. They sent extensive intelligence to the Allies, first through the US embassy, then through Trepper’s network and other conduits.

  The Gestapo investigators grouped the Germans together with Trepper’s operation under the rubric of the Rote Kapelle (“Red Orchestra”), even though none of them had ever heard the term or met Trepper.II The Germans included artists, academics, and government officials—in addition to a few paid Soviet agents. Their resistance work included activities that were strictly forbidden to actual Soviet intelligence operatives, including publishing anti-Nazi flyers and sheltering persecuted Jews.

  The German resistance group was crushed as a result of Soviet bungling. In October 1941, Trepper received a message from Moscow instructing him to send an agent to Berlin to set up radio communications. The transmission included the Germans’ names and home addresses. “I was startled by their recklessness,” Trepper wrote later. “I knew that no code, however skilled, was unbreakable.”9 Once the code was broken, the Gestapo placed the group under surveillance and widened the list of suspects. Over the fall of 1942 they arrested over 150 people, almost half of them women. Over fifty were executed by the Nazis. Women and minor figures died at the guillotine. The alleged ringleaders were subjected to a new method approved by Hitler himself: slow strangulation from meat hooks. The Berliners’ resistance work and their Jewish rescue operations died with them.

  Now the Gestapo task force concentrated on Trepper and every individual he knew, no matter how slight the connection. The Sonderkommando regarded all of them as “agents” of the Rote Kapelle and Leopold Trepper as the mastermind. The Sokols were an important link in the chain.

  Trepper learned of the Sokols’ arrest from Fernand Pauriol, the young French Communist who had cobbled together their transmitter. Pauriol had been monitoring Harry’s transmission when it suddenly stopped. Trepper sent a messenger to the Sokols’ safe house in Maisons-Laffitte to confirm their arrest, then dispatched a crew of “house cleaners” to their apartment at 27 Rue Chevert to remove any evidence.10

  Trepper went into hiding, consoled by his young mistress Georgie de Winter. But his network was shattered and his transmitters were no more. The Gestapo had closed him down in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Marseille. Dozens of his agents were undergoing Gestapo interrogations across Europe, and some of them would turn, begging to work for the Germans in return for their lives. Trepper had only a shadowy idea of what was transpiring in the Gestapo cells and had no choice but to lie low, knowing it was only a matter of time before someone gave him away. The astonishing thing was how many didn’t.

  In his book on the Rote Kapelle, Gilles Perrault described the difference between the professional and the amateur intelligence agent. The professional, he wrote, regards an interrogation as a game of chess, recognizing that it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice pawns, and considering himself a prime asset. Both sides understand that they may benefit more from a sophisticated exchange of information than a crude confession extracted under torture.

  The amateur, on the other hand, is often motivated by idealism, which can include an idealized sense of self. The interrogator can expect an “all-or-nothing” set of behaviors: the amateur will either impart nothing or, giving way, spill everything he knows and even offer to assist his captors.

  By this measure, Trepper’s radio team in Brussels and the Sokols were amateurs of the idealistic, unbending sort, while Leopold Trepper was a consummate professional.

  Mira and Harry Sokol disappeared into historical limbo. Harry’s story was consigned to the murky annals of Soviet espionage, while Mira was recorded in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem as a victim of the Holocaust. Her scant file there states mistakenly that she spent the war in Belgium and adds, probably accurately, that she was murdered in a concentration camp in Germany in April 1943.

  For the Soviets, the Sokols were two pawns on the chessboard. For Suzanne Spaak, the loss was immeasurable. Furthermore, she had reason to believe that even though Mira had implicated her by hiding Trepper’s money in her home, she had never, throughout her long ordeal, uttered her name.

  * * *

  I. That is, the first publication of the French editions, Le Grand jeu and L’Orchestre rouge, respectively.

  II. The Germans called a transmitter a Klavier, or “keyboard,” and a network a Kapelle, or “chamber orchestra.” Rote, or “red,” signified a Soviet connection.

  6

  spring wind, winter stadium

  | JULY 1942 |

  Mira Sokol’s arrest was a terrible blow, but Suzanne Spaak had little time to absorb the impact. Scarcely a month later an event occurred in the heart of Paris that would shake her world to its foundations. It had been clear for a while that something was in the works, but it was impossible to tell what. In March the convoys began heading east from Drancy, each carrying about one thousand Jewish men, and little was heard from them afterward. At the end of May the imposition of the yellow star was announced—but to what end? These questions haunted a brilliant Sorbonne student named Hélène Berr, whose mission would soon intersect with Suzanne Spaak’s.

  Hélène was the daughter of Raymond Berr, a prominent businessman with impeccable credentials. The son of a judge from an Alsatian Jewish background, he had been wounded and decorated for valor in the First World War; his twin brother was killed in action. Berr rose to the position of managing director of Établissements Kuhlmann, one of France’s leading chemical manufacturers. Kuhlmann was considered vital to the German war effort, and Berr’s expertise won him a privileged position. His wife, Antoinette, like many women of her class, devoted herself to her five children and charity work. The Berrs had close ties to other members of the French Jewish elite, including the eminent physician Robert Debré. Hélène was good friends with Debré’s son Olivier, an art student, and one of her sisters was married to his nephew Daniel Schwartz.

  Initially Hélène felt no compunction to “do something.” A student of literature and a talented violinist, she embraced life with a twenty-one-year-old’s passion and expressed little interest in either Judaism or politics. But it was impossible for her to ignore what was happening around her. In 1941 Hélène and her mother joined a private charity, Entr’aide Temporaire (Temporary Assistance), which dated from the First World War. Its founder, Lucie Chevalley, was a distinguished Protestant lawyer who took up the cause of refugees and enlisted the wives of wealthy businessmen and professionals, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. With the occupation, Entr’aide concentrated its philanthropy on immigrant Jews.

  Between 1942 and 1944 Hélène Berr kept a journal. It began as a college girl’s musings on her studies and her latest crush, but as conditions deteriorated it became a testimony to Jewish life in Paris under the occupation. The journal was hidden away for over fifty years, but when it was finally published in 2008, it became a classic work of Holocaust literature, earning its author the title of “the French Anne Frank.” Anne Frank may have resembled Berr, a striking young woman with a cloud of dark hair, had she been allowed to reach the age of twenty. Hélène Berr would not live to be much older. The publishers of Hélène’s journal were unable to identify some of the names and events she mentioned. It is only by placing Hélène Berr within the context of Suzanne Spaak’s network that these coded references become clear.

  The Berrs moved comfortably among Jewish and non-Jewish elites, but they had little contact with Jewish immigrants beyond their charity work. Hélène played Mozart in her string quartet; it’s doubtful she ever heard a klezmer band. The Berrs spoke exquisite French; Yiddish was an alien tongue.

  On June 8, 1942, Hélène described the glorious summer morning, but added:

  It’s also the first day I’m going to wear the yellow star. Those are the two sides of how life is now: youth, beauty, and freshness, all contained i
n this limpid morning; barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star.1

  The next day she learned that the stars would be used to segregate Jews into the last cars in the Métro. The German ordinance also banned Jews from restaurants, theaters, swimming pools, parks, racetracks, museums, and libraries.2

  A few weeks later, Hélène’s father was arrested on the grounds that his yellow star was stapled to his clothing, not sewn on according to regulation. Raymond Berr was sent to Drancy. His colleagues at Kuhlmann launched a campaign for his release, a process that dragged on for three months until he was allowed to go free.

  Suzanne Spaak and the MNCR viewed the yellow star as a warning of worse things to come. They had received disturbing news from one of their sources at police headquarters. In early June they learned that the police were planning a roundup of Jews on an unprecedented scale.

  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.