by Anne Nelson
In Spain, Fascist forces battled the democratically elected Republican government, and French newspapers warned there was worse to come. In April 1937 German and Italian planes bombed the town of Guernica, killing hundreds of civilians. Tens of thousands of refugees poured across the border into France. Suzanne helped those she could, including a girl named Carmen, who taught the children to dance the jota. Suzanne sewed Spanish costumes, and she and Claude took them to neighboring towns with the family gramophone. Locals gathered in the town square to watch them perform. Suzanne unfurled a banner—“Open the borders to Spain!”—as Bazou passed the hat. A photo shows Suzanne and her entourage raising their fists in a “No Pasarán!” salute.
The French public tended to regard the conflict as a Spanish problem. They were convinced that a broader war was unlikely and that their army and defenses shielded them. But the November 5, 1938, edition of Le Figaro challenged their complacency:
Monsieur von Rath [sic], third secretary of the German embassy [in Paris], was grievously wounded in his office. The aggressor is a young refugee of Polish origin who is not authorized to reside in France.
Le Figaro concluded that the attack was a tragic consequence of France’s lax immigration policies.
France’s ongoing excessive tolerance creates a battleground for those who are not interested in serving our country’s interests, only in undermining them.
The teenaged Jewish gunman, Herschel Grynszpan, was a magnet for French anti-immigrant sentiment. He had acted in response to an immigration dispute between Poland and Germany that had left his elderly parents stranded in a refugee camp on the border. He walked into the German embassy and randomly chose his victim, who died three days later. On November 9 the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht in Germany, burning synagogues, murdering dozens, and sending more than thirty thousand Jewish men to concentration camps. Some families ransomed their relatives and sent them abroad, driving another wave of Jewish refugees into France.
On November 11, Le Figaro expressed shock at the German violence:
A kind of madness seized the German population, and the hatred of the Israelite race today reached its paroxysm.
The paper included a response from the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger calling on the French government to expel the foreign troublemakers who “make their nest in Paris” and urging it “to begin with those who bear arms for Jewish Bolshevism.” France’s “excessive tolerance” toward Jewish refugees was now under internal attack.
Suzanne had sympathized with the Jewish exiles in Brussels, among them Miriam Sokol. One day in 1938 she and her husband, Hersch, appeared on the Spaaks’ doorstep in France. The tiny, raven-haired Mira had met Suzanne through her women’s committee. Born in Vilnius, she had earned a PhD in social science in Brussels, where she met “Harry” Sokol, a young physician from a prosperous Jewish family in Bialystock.
The Sokols, like many of France’s immigrant Jews, came from the tumultuous zone that spanned the Russian-German divide, where it was possible to live in three different countries over thirty years without moving house. They had been born in Czarist Russia, grew up under German occupation, and came of age in the newly reconstituted Poland. Each disruption brought more travails for the Jews. It was not uncommon for Jewish families to send their children as far away as possible, praying they would never come back.
Harry Sokol was a short, slight man with alert brown eyes and a puckish smile. He had studied and worked in England, South Africa, and Switzerland, and spoke English, French, and German. When he met Mira in Brussels he was completing his medical studies, but his immigration status made it impossible for him to practice. They attempted to emigrate to Russia, but the Soviets turned them down with the excuse of a housing shortage in Moscow. They applied again in 1935 with the same result.5
Mira found a job working for a Socialist member of the Belgian parliament, and Harry became a traveling medical supplies salesman who gave Marxist lectures on the side. This violated Belgium’s rules barring aliens from political activity, and they were expelled in 1938.6 They made their way to France with little more than Suzanne Spaak’s address.
Suzanne was glad to see Mira. The two women shared interests and social concerns, as well as their outsider status. The salons of Paris had little to offer a shy Belgian housewife with a bookish turn of mind. Things were far worse for Mira, a penniless Jewish émigrée. Her husband’s medical degree and her doctorate meant nothing in France.
Suzanne helped the Sokols find a place to live, and Mira visited her frequently. Years later Claude recalled, “My wife and I belonged to a group of left-wing intellectuals, which is why our assistance was sought… My wife was very fond of [the Sokols]. For my part, I found their sectarianism a little excessive and rather oppressive, but I admired their idealism, the absolute purity of their convictions.”7 Claude found Harry strident and doctrinaire. The Spaaks’ young son, Bazou, called him “Monsieur je-sais-tout,” or “Mr. Know-it-all.” Pilette agreed. Harry was a “cold fish,” but Mira was “soft, loving, a true friend.”
When the Sokols arrived in France, Stalin’s purges were imprisoning and murdering tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Still, in Harry’s eyes Stalin could do no wrong. The Spaaks’ circle of friends included Communist Party members, but they considered Stalin and Hitler both to be monsters who had to be stopped. Suzanne was willing to help Communist refugees, but she had no interest in joining the party.
Mira was Jewish? A litwak? A Communist? For Suzanne, these labels were of no interest. She could talk to Mira about family and literature. They discussed politics, but they were more concerned with humanitarian issues than ideology. For Suzanne, Mira’s Jewish identity was a subject of interest, not prejudice.
Jews had lived in France since Roman times. The Revolution granted the country’s Jews full rights of citizenship, as it did France’s other persecuted minority, the Protestants. Most traditional French Jews had roots in the Alsace-Lorraine, the territory that straddled the French-German frontier. They began moving to Paris in the early nineteenth century, and soon gained entrée into elite schools, professions, and neighborhoods.
In the late nineteenth century, assimilation was tested by Jewish migration from Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1925, 3.5 million Jews left the region, 2.5 million of them for the United States.8 But in 1924 the US Congress passed severely restrictive immigration laws whose stated goal was “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”9 Within a year, France overtook the United States as a destination, largely because it needed immigrant labor to compensate for its disastrous losses in the First World War. In 1927 the French parliament passed a law allowing fifty thousand Jewish and other immigrants to obtain French citizenship, inspiring more Eastern European Jews to “Lebn vi Got in Frankraykh” (Live like God in France).10
Then came the crash of 1929. The appetite for immigrant labor vanished, but Jewish immigrants continued to arrive, spurred by the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany. Between 1914 and 1939, the Jewish population of Paris doubled, and over 90,000 of the city’s 150,000 Jews were foreign-born. The newcomers were highly visible, expanding the Jewish quarter of the Marais and spilling over into Belleville and Montmartre.
France was also straining to cope with refugees from Spain. The Spanish Republican government collapsed in March 1939, and Fascist forces took control of the entire country. Refugees crossed the Pyrenees into France until their numbers approached half a million. The French government’s response was wretchedly inadequate. Some ten thousand Spanish refugees perished of cold, hunger, and disease.
The Spaaks completed their handsome renovation of the house in Choisel, and it stood blanketed in blossoms and tranquility. But history was intruding, as Europe headed for war. In the summer of 1939 Suzanne suffered what her daughter later described as a breakdown. As the children played with the dog in the garden, Suzanne watched immobile from the chaise. Why did their mother look so sad? the children wondered. Something had gone terribly wrong. S
uzanne, who didn’t drive, was trapped in Choisel. At thirty-five, she had no control over her life. Claude was pulling further and further away. Her marriage was a failure, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave him while the children were young. She was cut off from her friends and family in Brussels, as well as the activist circles that gave her purpose. She feared an impending war that threatened to destroy everything she loved.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union announced a mutual nonaggression pact. In political terms, this was impossible to grasp: the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were blood enemies. It made sense only in that both countries wanted something, and they needed to cooperate in order to get it. What they wanted was Poland, a country glued back together from the fragments of Russian- and German-speaking empires twenty years earlier. Stalin and Hitler denied Poland’s right to exist. Germany claimed the port city of Gdansk, formerly Danzig, and the western territories that had previously been East Prussia and expanses of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Soviets coveted western Ukraine and the Baltic regions.
Since 1918, Poland’s government had been run by a series of generals and dictators. Anti-Semitism was rife, and the political system was corrupt. Nonetheless, France and England had signed mutual defense treaties with Poland. For three years they had stood by as Hitler grabbed the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in violation of international law, but Poland was where they drew the line.
The French Communist Party, subservient to Moscow, was trapped in contradiction. Many of its members were Jews and Communists who had fled the Nazis. Now they were expected to support their persecutors as allies against the “Western Imperialists” in Britain and France.
As the war approached, Ruth Peters returned to Europe and joined the Spaaks in Choisel. France was in disarray. Léon Blum, the Socialist Party leader, begged the French Communist Party to renounce its allegiance to Moscow. When it refused, the French government dissolved the party, and it went underground. Mira and Harry Sokol’s situation was more precarious than ever. They risked arrest or deportation as undocumented immigrants, and the Soviet Union was the only imaginable avenue for escape.
The Sokols might have paused had they known more. Stalin’s purges had decimated his army officer corps and the intelligence service, and he had extended his accusations to the international Communist movement. Within a few years he slaughtered hundreds of members within his reach, including most of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party (many of them Jewish). Following the pact with Hitler, he ordered his agents to round up six hundred German Communists who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union (many of them Jewish) and deliver them to the Gestapo.
The Sokols’ failure to emigrate may have prolonged their lives, but their prospects were dim. They were stranded in France, jobless, homeless, stateless, and friendless—except for Suzanne and Claude Spaak.
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* The painting was acquired by the Tate Collection in London.
* Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels also banned it in Germany, while in the US, Eleanor Roosevelt screened it at the White House.
2
the real war
| 1939–40 |
On September 2, 1939, the morning papers reported that Germany had invaded Poland, though Le Figaro still found room for a list of sportives at the Grand Prix in Deauville. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. The French army quickly mobilized five million men, but there was little panic. The French had built costly fortifications on the border, known as the Maginot Line, and the government assured the public that the country was safe.
On September 17 the Soviets attacked Poland from the east. Poland’s last defenders were crushed. They surrendered on October 6, leaving the victors to divide the spoils.
Neither France nor Britain had a strategy in place. The French made a few incursions into Germany and withdrew. The Royal Air Force dropped leaflets on the German naval base at Kiel, warning, “You cannot win this war.”Then the Germans paused. The drôle de guerre, or “Phony War,” had begun.
A French officer expressed his country’s misplaced optimism in his diary:
We know that our land is safe from invasion, thanks to the Maginot Line; no one has the least desire to fight for Czechoslovakia or for Poland, of which ninety-five Frenchmen out of every hundred are completely ignorant and unable to find on a map. We have no belief that Hitler will hurl himself on us after having swallowed up the little nations, one by one. We tell ourselves that having obtained what he wants, he will leave us in peace.1
The governments in London and Paris distributed gas masks and evacuation plans, but civilians grew weary of waiting on permanent alert and went back to their business. Members of the Spaaks’ circle, including Claude, Charles, and Harry Sokol, weighed their sense of duty against their family obligations. Millions of conscripted Frenchmen lined up to get their hair cropped and mustaches trimmed, but once they reached the “front” they spent their days drilling, drinking, and mugging for the cameras.
Immigrants were eager to enlist. For Spanish Republicans, military service was an instant ticket out of the camps, even if these soldiers’ informal style came as a shock to their French officers. (One startled young lieutenant reported that his jolly Spaniards greeted him every morning with “Buenos días, Papá!”2)
Some thirty thousand Jewish immigrants enlisted, making up almost a third of the foreign recruits.3 But here, too, anti-Semitism persisted. Jews had no chance of becoming pilots, and seasoned soldiers found themselves reporting to French officers their juniors in age and experience. They were relegated to “special units” in the French Foreign Legion, described as “poorly equipped, poorly trained, and poorly armed.”4
One day Bazou Spaak accompanied Suzanne to Paris to visit the Sokols, who had moved into a small flat near the École Militaire. Bazou asked Harry, “Who’s going to win the war?” Harry answered, “France, of course!” and signed up for the French Foreign Legion not long after. Harry’s national origin temporarily worked in his favor. Had he been German or Austrian, he would have been designated an enemy alien. The French arrested some eight thousand Germans and Austrians, three thousand of whom were Jews and other political exiles.*
The Spaaks were technically immigrants, but their circumstances were more favorable. France welcomed Claude as an artist, and his family’s independent income was another advantage. He had a minor heart condition that exempted him from military service, freeing him to concentrate on theater. His producers had rented the Théâtre des Mathurins, a playhouse just north of the Madeleine. They needed a comedy and hoped that Claude could fill the bill. The production team settled on a new adaptation of the Restoration comedy The School for Scandal.
It was a family affair. Claude trimmed superfluous characters and streamlined the action. He asked Suzanne and Ruth Peters to collaborate on a new translation, for which he took credit. The play, which had premiered in London in 1777, seemed an odd choice for Paris in 1939, but it turned out to be perfect. The producers reckoned that Parisians needed to laugh, and the social machinations of Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite offered a welcome break from their diet of dread. The cast was fresh and lively and the costumes scintillating. The producers gambled on a little-known thirty-five-year-old designer named Christian Dior, who had been mobilized for farmwork but allowed to return on leave. The unlikely soldier sat in the back of the theater, a slight man with soft features, already starting to bald. A friend described his costumes as “almost caricatures. His hats were exaggeratedly large with upturned brims, and his use of color was quite novel, bright as those acid drops the English are so famous for.”The bold black and pink stripes on one gown inspired the audience to break into spontaneous applause. The play made Dior the talk of the town.5
The playbill was illustrated by Claude’s friend Jean Cocteau, who was launching his own play next door. Cocteau had recently been convicted of drug trafficking, a consequence of his long-standing opium ad
diction, and he was worried about his handsome young lover, Jean Marais, who had just been called up for military service. When he wasn’t appearing in court, undergoing rehab, or shadowing his lover, Cocteau dashed off a torrent of poems, plays, and illustrations.
L’École de la médisance opened in February 1940. It was an instant hit, and the company settled in for a long run. At the theater, Suzanne stood quietly in the background with Bazou and Pilette as Claude accepted the accolades. But Claude was surprisingly ambivalent. He spurned evening attire, hated curtain calls, and often fled before the end of the performance. But he avidly consumed the reviews and called the theater every night from Choisel to check on the box office receipts. He finally decided to stop—at which point the operator, who had been eavesdropping, called and asked, “Monsieur, don’t you want to hear how the box office did tonight?” As the play approached its hundredth performance, it seemed as though Claude’s writing career had finally taken off.
In April the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark to wrest control of matériel and supply lines. Then they turned westward, and, as in past wars, the path to Paris ran through Belgium.
Occupying center stage was Claude’s brother Paul-Henri, who labored for peace where none was at hand. He was not yet forty and had recently rotated from the post of prime minister to foreign minister. As a youth he had returned from prison camp to a blasted homeland and a starving population. Why, he asked, should the Belgians offer up their country as a battlefield when they had nothing to gain?
Paul-Henri served as the cabinet’s intermediary to the Belgian king, a foppish young man who looked down on plebeian politicians. Paul-Henri, his occasional golfing buddy, was the only minister he liked. As a hereditary German prince, Leopold III hoped to ingratiate himself with the Nazis and preserve his dynasty. The Germans had pressured the Belgians again and again to prove their submissiveness, and they complied. Spaak’s uncle, Paul-Émile Janson, the minister of justice, drew up a list of “suspect Belgians and foreigners”—including Jewish refugees—who would be arrested when it “proved necessary.”6
