Suzanne's Children

by Anne Nelson

  Rudolf Rathke, the burly Gestapo agent who dropped her off at her grandmother’s, told Pilette she had to report back the next morning. Her grandmother was surprised to see her but took her in and lovingly cooked her an egg—the best thing she had ever tasted.

  The following day Pilette left, accompanied by her grandmother’s elderly friend, and equipped with a bar of soap and a towel in case of an extended stay. The Gestapo agents questioned her for a few hours, then sent her back to her grandmother. That same day, they arrested Suzanne’s sister Teddy Fontaine and her husband, Maurice.

  Pilette’s grandmother packed a box of food donated by friends for their relatives in custody. These were luxuries by occupation standards: wrinkled yellow apples, sardines, and other rarities. Pilette’s eyes widened at the sight of Godiva chocolates, an unheard-of extravagance in wartime Brussels. Her grandmother shooed her away. “Those are for the people in prison.”

  The next day the Gestapo called and told her to come pick up some paperwork. Instead, SS officer Heinz Pannwitz detained her. “At first he tried to be nice and gentlemanly,” Pilette recalled, “but then he started shouting. To his left a soldier on one knee was aiming a machine pistol at me. The officer screamed like a mad puppet. He slapped me and at one point he rushed at me and punched my shoulder.”

  “Do you know Trepper?” Pannwitz demanded. “Was he on the train with you?” Pilette was rattled, but she kept her head and gave nothing away.

  Rudolf Rathke was gentler. As he waited with her between interrogations, he turned on the radio and adjusted the dial. When he reached the BBC, he paused for a moment, regarded her apologetically, and kept turning. At the end of the afternoon, Pilette sat alone watching the Gestapo office workers go home for the day. Rathke came in and told her they would take her to prison as soon as they had a car. He handed her a phone and told her to call her grandmother.

  The Gestapo agents drove her to Saint-Gilles prison, constructed in the nineteenth century to resemble a massive medieval fortress. By the time Pilette arrived, everything had been locked up for the night. She passed through a huge rotunda that reverberated to the sound of metal doors, heavy boots, and barked commands. The guards took her up to a second-floor cell, flipped on a light switch, and opened the door. Her aunts Marguerite and Pichenette were in the cell, sitting on straw mattresses.

  Her father’s sister Pichenette said, “What are you doing here?” Laughing, Pilette answered, “I came to say hello.” To her amazement, they believed her. Pichenette pointed a finger at the door and said, “Pars—tout de suite!” (“Out—now!”), thinking she had a choice. The guards brought in another straw mattress and a threadbare blanket and told Pilette she had two minutes to undress and go to bed.

  Pilette’s mother was hiding in the Ardennes, and her father and his mistress had disappeared, but the family grapevine still functioned. Claude’s mother was friendly with a woman named Ventia who had been Claude’s lover when he worked at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. She was in touch with a friend of his in Choisel named Monsieur Brousse—the only person who knew Claude’s whereabouts—and he passed the word. This was how Claude Spaak learned that his daughter had been imprisoned by the Gestapo and was being interrogated about his activities.

  The Nazis frequently practiced Sippenhaft: arresting family members of suspects as hostages and for blackmail. They rounded up more Spaak relations, over a dozen in all. The family was concerned for Suzanne’s nephew, who was of an age to be shipped off to Germany for forced labor.

  There were more secrets: the Spaaks maintained contact with Paul-Henri in London. His position linked him to both the Belgian resistance and the Allied command, and his son Fernand served in the British navy. Before his wife, Marguerite, went into German custody, she warned her teenage daughters, “Remember—you know nothing about anything!”

  Pilette’s interrogation ended, and she realized she was being held as a hostage. Unlike other prisoners, she wasn’t allowed to receive visitors or walk around the prison courtyard. She was hungry: “The food was pretty bad, mostly soup with peels, ladled out by prostitutes.” But the day after her incarceration, her grandmother’s package arrived, and Pilette devoured the Godiva chocolates.

  On November 9, Pilette’s aunt Pichenette was taken away for questioning. Suzanne’s brother-in-law Maurice Fontaine was already in the Gestapo vehicle. Upon their return, Pichenette noticed that his face was flushed, and he stayed behind in the car. She guessed that he had talked. The next day, Pichenette learned that “another Madame Spaak” had been arrested.

  It is likely that the Gestapo threatened Maurice Fontaine that if the family didn’t surrender Suzanne, all of them would face the consequences. His wife and son were in custody. Family members believe that he broke down under pressure and agreed to take his interrogators to Suzanne’s hiding place in the Ardennes.

  The Gestapo agents parked the car near a bridge behind some foliage. Fontaine walked down the steep hill approaching the cottage and Suzanne came out to meet him. Fontaine told her about the arrests, and she answered that she would turn herself in to free her family. He didn’t tell her that the Germans were waiting for her just across the bridge.

  Pilette had no idea that her mother had been brought to Saint-Gilles, but she noticed that her aunts were unusually tense. She would tap-dance in her cell to pass the time, and one day her aunt told her sharply to stop. Later she wondered if her aunt wanted to spare her mother the pain of hearing her familiar steps.

  On November 10, Rudolf Rathke signed a memorandum stating that Suzanne Spaak had been taken into “preventive detention” at Saint-Gilles and would soon be transferred. He took her to the station to board the train under guard, bound for the Fresnes prison in Paris. As they waited on the platform, Suzanne slipped off her engagement ring, a platinum band with a small pearl, and asked Rathke to give it to her daughter. (Pilette would wear the ring for decades until the pearl wore away to a grain of sand.) Then Suzanne told Rathke, “I forgive the man who gave me up.”

  Shortly afterward, Maurice and Teddy Fontaine were released.

  The Gestapo was not finished, however. Bazou had been brought in twice for interrogation, under his uncle’s instructions to tell them about everything he knew except Leopold Trepper. The agent told Bazou that his mother had run away with a lover named Trepper, and his father had asked them to help find her, but Bazou didn’t blink. Then the agent took another approach. As Bazou recalled:

  The Boche interrogator read me a list of names that included Trepper’s. I pretended I didn’t know it, and the others on it I actually didn’t know—except for a certain Grou-Radenez, whom I had met many times because Maman entrusted me with messages that I took to him so he could transmit them to London by radio.

  At that time the Germans, aided by the French police, often rounded up people on the streets. Since children were spared, Maman gave me these messages to give to Grou-Radenez.3

  On November 12, the Gestapo came for Jacques Grou-Radenez: father of five, protector of Jewish children, and master printer for the largest underground newspaper in France. Then they came for his wife, Madeleine Legrand. She wrote later:

  Seven men in raincoats. Seven goons with their hands in their pockets, and their pockets containing revolvers.

  “German police. Madame (they tried to be polite, forgetting their hats, of course), we’ve come to conduct a search because your husband is distributing Communist propaganda.”

  But this astonishes me, because we’re not Communists. So, why?

  Why? It doesn’t matter. They have us now.4

  Legrand was taken to the Gestapo headquarters on Rue de Saussaies. Her husband was tortured, and both of them were transferred to Fresnes and held for trial.

  The Gestapo agents were pleased to have Suzanne Spaak in custody, but they were more interested in her husband, whom they regarded as the likelier conspirator and bait for their quarry, Leopold Trepper.

  The arrests in Paris continued. Claude�
�s brother Charles and his pregnant wife, Claudie, were next on the list. Charles, on contract for the Germans’ Continental Films, was midway through a script of the Georges Simenon novel Les Caves du Majestic (The Cellars of the Majestic). The murder mystery took place in the opulent Paris hotel, which was currently requisitioned as the headquarters of the German high command.II Charles was struggling with the screenplay—the Germans had ordered him to change the main characters from Americans to neutral Swedes, which obliged him to alter other elements of the plot.

  The Gestapo consigned Charles to Fresnes as well, more as a means to get to his brother than for any information he had. His German bosses from Continental were livid; their production was under way and they needed their script. A representative visited him in detention. “It’s evident that the murderer isn’t the same as the one in the novel, but it’s no less evident that you’re the only one who knows what it’s about. So, Monsieur Spaak, would you please give us the key to the mystery and tell us who the killer is?”5

  Spaak used his unfinished screenplay to win concessions: improved rations, writing materials, and cigarettes—but no matches. The tobacco addict sat stewing in his cell until he finally asked his guard, “Feuer, bitte.”

  Continental sent assistants to Fresnes every day to pick up the new pages covered with Charles’s tiny handwriting.III His wife was imprisoned for three months; he was held for five. For the rest of his life, the only explanation he offered for his detention was that “his younger brother and his wife were involved in resistance activities and were threatened as a result,” never hinting at his contributions to the upkeep of Suzanne’s Jewish children.6

  Suzanne entered the women’s wing of the “factory of despair.” If Saint-Gilles resembled a medieval castle keep, Fresnes was an industrial-age horror, constructed at the turn of the century on the so-called telephone-pole design, with cellblocks branching off from a main corridor. (New York’s Rikers Island was another example.)

  There were currently 1,200 cells for males and a separate section for 300 female prisoners. The usual population of thieves and pimps had swollen with the addition of hundreds of political prisoners: authors of tracts, scribblers of graffiti, and collectors of airdrops. Its female inmates had included members of the Musée de l’Homme group, including the Countess de la Bourdonnaye and the students from Défense de la France, including General de Gaulle’s niece Geneviève, who had barely escaped imprisonment with the Musée de l’Homme. Suzanne and Geneviève de Gaulle would be neighbors in the women’s block for several months before Geneviève was deported to Ravensbrück.IV

  Political prisoners in Fresnes could be held for days, weeks, or months. They were shuttled to the Gestapo headquarters on Rue de Saussaies at a moment’s notice for interrogation—often, but not always, accompanied by torture. The Gestapo favored a form of water torture that involved holding the prisoner’s head under freezing water to the point of drowning. Their chambers were full of bathtubs requisitioned from the homes of Jews and arrestees across Paris for this purpose.

  The common criminals in Fresnes usually stayed on-site to serve out their sentences, but for most politicals sentenced by German military courts, Fresnes was a way station to a darker destination. For many, including the gallant men of the Musée de l’Homme, the next stop was the firing squad at Mont-Valérien. (One Marxist philosopher shouted his last words to his German firing squad: “Imbéciles, c’est pour vous que je meurs!”—“Imbeciles, it’s for you that I die!”)

  Other political prisoners were deported to German concentration camps—generally the men to Buchenwald and the women to Ravensbrück. There they frequently perished from starvation, exhaustion, and disease, the women at a far higher rate than the men.

  Over the summer and fall of 1943, Fresnes also collected a number of SOE agents, many of them female radio operators and couriers. The men’s blocks accumulated Allied crew members shot down over France. Airmen occupied a dangerous middle ground between POWs and political prisoners, especially bomber crews captured wearing civilian clothes. The Germans designated these men Terrorflieger and treated them similarly to SOE agents.

  Suzanne underwent extensive questioning. The record of her interrogation has not been found. It was initiated by Heinz Pannwitz only days after he had questioned her two children in Brussels. Pannwitz was aware that Suzanne was the sister-in-law of the Belgian minister and held special value as a hostage.

  The French author Gilles Perrault later recorded Pannwitz’s claim that he had gone easy on her and had taken measures to prove it:

  He asked two friends, both of them war correspondents from the German army, to attend all of Suzanne Spaak’s interrogations, so they could eventually testify that he had behaved correctly. This was a flagrant violation of the task force’s requirements for secrecy, but the chief considered it a reasonable precaution for the future.7

  After the war, Pannwitz gave extensive interviews to the CIA in which he described Suzanne’s interrogation.

  She talked openly and freely, withholding nothing in the belief that we already knew too much. He testimony agreed with the facts as we knew them. What we did not know and learned from her was that she had supported the SOKOLs, she claimed, out of pity. She had sent a message through her contacts to her brother-in-law (Paul Henri SPAAK) concerning TREPPER and had arranged with TREPPER to use this channel of escape.

  Suzanne knew that Trepper’s operation had been rolled up, and that she was giving nothing of value away. On that count she was secure.

  But the Gestapo officers had no idea that the gracious lady sitting in their office held the key to numerous resistance groups, as well as the directory to a network sheltering hundreds of Jewish children.

  Suzanne’s genius lay in convincing the Gestapo that she was utterly inconsequential. Pannwitz observed:

  In spite of her involvement with TREPPER, Mme. SPAAK was a very likeable woman who made an unforgettable impression. She was a serious, calm woman who looked at everyone with her large, protruding eyes in a composed fashion. Obviously she had followed her parlor-pink sympathies.

  Pannwitz regarded Suzanne as a lady of leisure.

  She regarded all of her actions as an intellectual game and could never bring herself to sacrifice her comfortable living to become an effective and active worker for any cause. She was above all an artist with very modern taste in painting, which the pictures, painted by her and hung in her apartment, indicated.8

  In other words, Suzanne convinced the Gestapo that, instead of devoting herself to rescue and resistance, she spent her time dabbing the paintings that hung in her home, among them the two dozen Magrittes.

  Now her long months of waiting began. The cells at Fresnes were spartan and cramped. A postwar visitor described them as resembling

  a large, immobile ship. The 1500 cells are identical, naked. A mounted shelf, a chair on a chain, a comfort station in the corner (the word doesn’t work, there is no comfort in Fresnes), a bare bulb, and four walls. Four white walls to write on, four cold walls to talk to, damp walls on which to complain.9

  The registers of the prison were destroyed at the end of the war, but the walls bore witness to the life within. One stated, “Arrived July 7, 1943, condemned to death January 1944 . . . . Juliette.”10 “Juliette” was the nom de guerre of Huguette Prunier, who cheered other inmates with stories of her husband and children. There were also messages of contempt: “Les Boches sont foutus,” wrote Monique. “The Germans are fucked.” Allied airmen scribbled messages in the margins of a book called Wild Justice: “If you are a First Lieu. in the USAAF and the war lasts two years you will have saved approximately seven thousand five hundred dollars.” Another complained, “If they took the bugs out of the soup, we would all starve to death, dry up and blow out the window.”11

  The prisoners found some relief by speaking through windows and into heating pipes, even if they had to “perform acrobatics” to get to them. Sometimes they managed to send messages through chai
ns of prisoners to specific individuals.

  One of Suzanne’s fellow prisoners was Madeleine Legrand, the wife of Jacques Grou-Radenez. After the war, Legrand wrote a vivid account of her time in prison. “The soup has arrived. It’s a tepid liquid the color of sand. Stirring it, I find five noodles and two pieces of unpeeled potatoes.” She and her cellmates recited the rosary for les garçons in the adjoining block. They heard the airmen’s shouts when Allied planes passed overhead, and the voices of those who would die at dawn singing their anthems: the “Marseillaise,” the “Internationale,” and “God Save the King.”12

  Anyone caught exchanging messages or gifts was subject to solitary confinement. One day Legrand heard someone calling out for “Suzanne” and began a conversation through a brave intermediary, a prisoner named Chantal. But then a German guard arrived with a gun, an attack dog, and a new batch of prisoners. Legrand tried to warn Suzanne, but she was identified. “Suzanne punished is Suzanne in solitary,” Legrand wrote. (She didn’t specify whether her “Suzanne” was Suzanne Spaak).13

  The prisoners’ only exercise was taking walks around a courtyard that contained a cabbage patch and the graves of inmates who had succumbed to injury, illness, or suicide.14 Sometimes women were hauled off to trial and sentenced to deportation to Auschwitz; on those days the “Marseillaise” sounded in treble voices. One day Legrand was ordered to pack her things; the Gestapo was waiting. “You’re going to be deported for two years,” they told her. But then, to her surprise, she was released.

  The Gestapo may have believed that holding Claude’s wife and daughter hostage would bring him out of hiding; if so, they were wrong. Claude and Ruth remained ensconced in Saint-Cloud in silence.