by Anne Nelson
Not being a member of a political party, she didn’t believe that she was obliged to submit to strict discipline regarding clandestinity. In her impulsive heart, she wanted to offer her help to all of the resistance networks at the same time.33
Once the situation at La Clairière was under control, Suzanne returned to the house on Avenue Victor Hugo that had been the source of the original warning. She volunteered to take more children. “But please,” she asked, “from now on, not so many at once.”
* * *
I. Jacques Adler, a historian of the Jewish Communist movement, wrote that the warning was sent by the French Communist Party to the MNCR.
II. Pilette did not recall the man’s name. She thought he was the son of the chief rabbi of Paris, but it appears that Julien Weill was childless, making his nephew a reasonable guess. French researcher Gisèle Pierronet believed Suzanne learned of the impending event at a private dinner with Armand Kohn of the Rothschild Hospital.
III. Another uncle was Dr. Benjamin Weill-Hallé, a leading physician who supported the UGIF underground, along with his colleague Robert Debré.
IV. The exact timetable and the number of children rescued vary among the different accounts. However, sixty-three is the most widely accepted number of children involved.
V. The French Resistance had adopted the “V for Victory” slogan, and the Cross of Lorraine was the symbol of de Gaulle’s Free French.
VI. Unfortunately, Hélène Berr’s journal falls silent over the period in 1943 when the operation took place. But other entries mention her collaboration with Denise Milhaud, Lucie Chevalley, and Odette Béchard, all members of Entr’aide who took part in the operation.
11
le grand livre
| FEBRUARY–JUNE 1943 |
The rescue operation needed a business plan. In the months following the rescue at La Clairière, Suzanne Spaak helped build a major financial enterprise with a national reach. Its success was measured in the survival of Jewish children under threat of deportation, and every step had to be conducted secretly. Detection could result in deportation for broker, host, and child.
The groups were mindful of the need for records to reunite hidden children with surviving family members after the war. Toddlers with pseudonyms were likely to forget their actual identities, but that was preferable to their information falling into the wrong hands.
The rescuers devised an elaborate bookkeeping system. The impulse came naturally to the ladies of Entr’aide Temporaire, who, like Suzanne, were the wives and daughters of businessmen. They coded the entries, making them clear enough to read but cryptic enough to confound interlopers.
The Oratoire’s Odette Béchard furnished Entr’aide with a ledger, a large, leather-bound volume with “1921” stamped on the spine. The group dubbed it “Le Grand Livre.” One of the rescued children, Sami Dassa, later wrote a history of the rescue stating that the register commenced with le kidnapping at La Clairière and was maintained by Denise Milhaud.1
The original copy, which rests in the archives of Paris’s Mémorial de la Shoah, offers a glimpse of the process. The entries mixed the actual names of rescued children with information that was backdated twenty years, to correspond to the stamp on the spine; thus a child born in 1939 would be registered as 1919, and so forth. Based on appearances, the Grand Livre was an obsolete registry of a charity for children long grown.
The handwriting and formats vary from page to page, suggesting that different women made the entries. Columns under the headings “Soldes,” “Entrées,” and “Sorties” listed figures for the balances, donations, and expenditures, which were principally payments to the women who hosted the children.
The names of the children’s parents were also recorded. Most of them were assigned one of two designations: “Biarritz” meant a parent was a detainee in Drancy, and “Bayonne” indicated the parents had been deported to Auschwitz.
The information was often inconsistent, surely due to the haste and secrecy with which it was recorded. Birth dates were sometimes omitted. Chronologies were erratic, and there were wild variations in spelling, as French bookkeepers puzzled over Slavic names and immigrants struggled with the French alphabet. These elements render the Grand Livre a difficult document to parse, but it offers many clues.
One entry recorded a contribution from “Madame Lorge” (Suzanne Spaak’s maiden name) for 25,000 francs, the equivalent of over $100,000 in 2017. Pilette believes that this was a contribution that Suzanne coaxed from her mother. Suzanne made donations from her household allowance when she could, but she risked rousing her husband’s ire. Claude saw his wife’s fortune as a path to the good life, and he frequently upbraided her for being too “proletarian.” Suzanne, on the other hand, was almost superstitious about her fortune. She often told Pilette, “To have money is good if you share it with others. If you keep it, it makes you unhappy.”2
Suzanne appeared again in the Grand Livre ledger later as a “sortie.” This could have been a term for removing children from a home or an institution to take them into hiding. One “sortie” was initially assigned to “Madame Lorge,” but the name “Lorge” was crossed out and replaced by “Beaux Arts”—the name of the Brussels cultural center and museum where Claude Spaak had worked.I
The benefactors in the Grand Livre included many names associated with Entr’aide: in code, abbreviated, and in full. Odette Béchard made frequent sorties, as did Denise Milhaud, Lucie Chevalley, and Hélène’s mother, Madame Berr.
There is an entry for “Madame la Baronne de Forest”; Peggy Camplan recorded that the Countess de la Bourdonnaye participated through her assistant, “Madame Laforest.”3 Several Rothschilds were named as donors, including the “Baronne de Königswartes,” Pannonica Rothschild, who worked for the Free French and would later become the fabulous “jazz baroness.”
Then there were the children. They were often listed in groups of siblings, with their birth dates and orthographically challenging surnames: the Boczmaks, the Nepomiatzis, and the Szwarcbarts. Many entries tell a heartbreaking story in shorthand. René Beugelmans, the ledger reports, was entrusted to Entr’aide by his aunt after his Russian-born father and Scottish-born mother were deported to “Bayonne” in 1942. The rescuers were able to save Henri Lemel but not his older sisters, enfants bloqués. There’s a painful entry in red pencil for twelve-year-old Eugene Sommer: “pas parti, refus de sa mère” (“Didn’t leave, refusal by his mother”).
The women kept a careful eye on the hosts. Some were altruists; others were motivated by money and eager to exploit the situation. One entry fumed, “Upkeep paid from 1 July to 31 December. We learn that the nourrice has a sum of 16,000 francs from the parents, and we demand that the upkeep be deducted from this sum.”
Most of the stipends ran about 1,000 francs a month, the going rate outside Paris, though some were as little as 600. The hosts were paid on a monthly basis, which required extensive travel on the part of the women serving as messengers. Many of the hosts expected to be paid in advance, and some took it out on the children when a payment was delayed. But in general the children were well fed, housed, and protected.
Suzanne Spaak’s and Léon Chertok’s working relationship with Robert Debré and the countess led to other collaborations. In May 1943 the French Communist Party asked the MNCR’s Charles Lederman to find a way to contact London, and he learned that Debré’s Gaullist contacts had the means for transmissions. Once the two men reached an accord regarding the radio, Lederman turned to Debré’s partner. The countess ran Debré’s clinic at the Hospital for Sick Children, which maintained extensive files on the children under his care. This gave Lederman an idea. Could the MNCR, he asked, secrete dossiers on its Jewish children in hiding among the hospital’s files for safekeeping? The countess agreed immediately. The hospital guarded the secret files until the end of the occupation.4
Suzanne traveled frequently by train to the outposts of other resistance groups. One of her missions was to tra
nsport identity cards, some of them forged blanks, others pilfered from government offices or recovered from bomb sites. She would return on the train with a dozen of them packed into her girdle, looking stouter than usual.
Sometimes Suzanne conducted the scrubbing at home. She and Pilette worked from a table placed in front of a window (where “anyone could see what we were doing!” Pilette marveled later). Suzanne carefully schooled her daughter in the technique: first, place the old identity card under a damp cloth, then apply a hot iron. The old ink would come up into the cloth, leaving a ghostly blank. This was where the Jewish child’s new identity would be filled in.
Suzanne also located homes in the countryside. One day Pilette asked her how she did it. She explained that her method was to get on a train and choose a small village not too far from Paris. She would enter the local church and ask the priest to hear her confession; then, from the privacy of the confessional, she would confide that she needed to place some children from Paris. Could the Father suggest any suitable homes in the community? She never mentioned that the children were Jewish; her wards could have been the children of prostitutes, factory workers, or war orphans, or perhaps they had been bombed out of their neighborhoods. The priests could advise which local families would be inclined to help or needed the income.
Pilette asked, “Couldn’t it be dangerous?”
“Yes,” Suzanne admitted. “Mais il faut le faire. It’s got to be done, and it never fails.”
Pilette took pride in serving as her mother’s assistant and sometime confidante. Bazou was a different story. The boy loved his mother intensely and missed her terribly. He became a latchkey child of the Resistance, coming home more and more often to an empty house. Sometimes, when pressed, Suzanne asked him to carry out small errands—harmless, she thought. The blond schoolboy never attracted suspicion, and the task was simply dropping off an envelope here and there, perhaps at the printer’s shop of their friend Jacques Grou-Radenez at 11 Rue de Sèvres. The message might concern a resistance meeting, an exchange of information, or perhaps a Jewish child to hide. Bazou, always eager to please, never asked and never found out what the envelopes contained. Suzanne was constantly in motion, riding the rails to villages to seek host families, setting out for Lyon to pick up forged documents, or traveling south on the Ligne de Sceaux to hand off money and “good addresses” to Sophie Schwartz.
Most of the Jewish children were processed and placed without their guides ever knowing their real names, but sometimes there was a personal connection. This was the case for Sophie Schwartz and Larissa Wozek. Sophie visited her at the orphanage when she could, distressed by the child’s mournful expression and keenly aware that, as the child of a deportee, she was in constant peril of deportation. There were frequent reminders; Larissa recalled that one Sunday in the orphanage “there was a rafle of the parents who came to visit. It was terrifying, because the adults were hiding everywhere.”5
Sophie wanted to remove Larissa from the orphanage as soon as possible, but there were complications. First she needed a place to take her. She found a couple, both hairdressers, who agreed to take the girl and signed a paper to that effect. But when Sophie went to fetch Larissa from Guy Patin, she was sick with a high fever. She needed a safe haven. Sophie dropped her off at a friend’s and turned to Suzanne Spaak for help.
Suzanne reached out to Paul Vergara, who knew the perfect spot. The pastor’s family had a small country house in Normandy in the colorfully named region of Faute d’Argent (“lack of money”).6 Vergara had many friends among the local inhabitants; he had already placed two Jewish children, Denise and Monique Jackiel, with a retired schoolmistress. He knew another family that would be perfect for Larissa.
In April, Larissa, now six, was taken to the Cardons, a prosperous Catholic family with a lovely eighteenth-century château in Bézancourt. Its grounds teemed with their cheerful offspring, and they immediately took to Larissa. Her new name was “Madeleine Petit,” but the Cardons called her “Mado.”
It would be one of the sunniest periods of her life. The child thrived on a diet of affection, hearty food, and fresh air. The Cardons took a picture of Larissa sitting proudly astride a horse led by their son Pierre. Another photo shows her in a meadow wearing an airy summer dress and white sandals, dancing dreamily to a gramophone with Paul Vergara’s handsome son Sylvain, jaunty in his plus fours. Vergara’s daughter Éliane Bruston danced with another Jewish child while other hidden children and Cardons watched, seated in the grass.
Despite the wholesome surroundings, Larissa experienced moments of alienation. She recalled later:
[The Cardons] explained to me that if anyone asked who I am, I would say that I’m a niece from Paris who came to restore her health, that I’m from the same family. Also, they told me that there was a good God, and that I had to pray every night to God and the Virgin Mary for my mother to return. Of course, I prayed. And I went every Sunday to Mass. They weren’t bigots, but, well . . .7
The Oratoire’s Girl Scouts continued to serve as escorts for the children, as did churchwomen, social workers, and members of the Jewish women’s group. Their destinations included many Protestant enclaves, including the village of le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Before the war the village pastor André Trocmé had served as a presbyter at the Oratoire alongside Michèle Meunier’s father. Now he shared the Oratoire’s mission. According to Michèle, “Many of the children rescued by the Oratoire went to Chambon-sur-Lignon.” In all, the village was credited with saving the lives of at least eight hundred Jews.8
The Countess de la Bourdonnaye had offered her vast apartment on the Rue de Varenne as a way station for some time. Robert Debré wrote admiringly that she hosted
successive groups of children torn from the rafles. It was necessary to accept them when they were ill. She washed them in soapy water, got rid of their parasites, clipped their long hair, broke them of the habit of covering their heads with grimy caps and dressed them properly. They were transformed, really unrecognizable, and after some nourishing meals, recovered their natural high spirits. Then they were ready to be dispersed into the provinces.9
Other members of the network used their own contacts to find havens. Léon Chertok went back to the remote hamlet of Noirvault, the home of his friend Eva Fradin. In 1941 Chertok had begun visiting Fradin’s mother as a respite from the “hell of Paris.” The Fradins had taken in Adam Rayski’s son, Benoît, after the Vel d’Hiv arrests; now they took in three more.10
When children contracted minor illnesses, their hosts were obliged to take them to local doctors. If they needed hospital care, they were tended by the Countess de la Bourdonnaye and Denise Milhaud, who brought them to Debré’s clinic. Debré’s network extended beyond his medical staff.
We weren’t only helped by the complicity of our fellow radiologists and laboratory technicians, but also by certain officials, including some in the police. My laboratory at Enfants-Malades was far from being the only one that distinguished itself as forgery dispensary.11
Debré also offered his services to a broad array of resistance organizations.
In the hospitals, who were we not able to hide, to “camouflage,” you might say, among those the police were pursuing!
Many victims of racial persecution, communist militants, resistants threatened by the different police forces, [were] treated for imaginary diseases in the hospitals, where some nocturnal admissions and narrow escapes were quite dramatic.12
One member of Debré’s underground medical committee was Robert Merle d’Aubigné, a pioneering orthopedic surgeon and the bearer of an old Huguenot name. His wife recruited leading specialists to care for the hidden children’s ailments.13 Another member was Louis Justin-Besançon, a professor whose wife, Madeleine, worked with Entr’aide. As the French Resistance gained momentum, the doctors were pulled in different directions, hiding fugitives and documents, treating wounded militants, and secreting medical supplies. Everyone was constantly asked to do more.
/> Suzanne had already hosted clandestine meetings for the Jewish underground in her apartment, but now “her apartment became the headquarters where representatives of different resistance movements met,” one of her associates wrote later. “Over twenty-four hours, university professors, workers, priests, Jewish social workers, Communists and Gaullists would pass through.”14
Suzanne drew her famous neighbor further into the intrigue. Adam Rayski wrote, “The leadership of the [MNCR] met over a certain time at Colette’s apartment on the Rue de Beaujolais, where the windows opened on the gardens of the Palais Royal. The relations were established thanks to her neighbor, Suzette Spaak.”15
But then, to his alarm, Rayski learned that Colette’s husband was Jewish and under threat of rearrest, even though he slept in the attic and never left the building. “We gave the leaders of the MNCR—for reasons of security—the order not to meet there any more,” he wrote.16
Few people outside Rayski’s circle were aware of Colette’s involvement, even though she was one of the best-known writers of her time. Her masterly biographer, Judith Thurman, wrote:
Colette’s reluctance to take any sort of stand, even privately, or to voice any sentiment of outrage at the persecutions, even in her letters, is a symptom of that moral lethargy she admits so candidly in “Bella-Vista,” where the narrator bears witness to crimes she does nothing to stop. “I was born under the sign of passivity,” she writes then. And she writes, now [to a friend in 1942], “Save your aggression for your work. For the rest of your day-to-day life, passivity suffices.”17
Years later, Jean-Louis Debré (the grandson of Robert), echoed this judgment:
The attitude of Colette during the Second World War is disappointing and disconcerting . . . . Of course, Colette needed money, but her attitude is ambiguous, as though, outside reality, she was turning her back on events.18
