by Anne Nelson
On May 10 the Germans attacked Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The German ambassador arrived in Paul-Henri’s office to make the formal declaration. Paul-Henri interrupted him, acting “very, very emotional, [his] heart beating at an appalling rate, extremely indignant.” He pulled out a text and read aloud: “For the second time in twenty-five years…Germany is committing a criminal aggression against a neutral and honest Belgium.”7
Later that day, the “suspect Belgians and foreigners” were rounded up, loaded onto sealed train cars, and deported to France. One Jewish survivor reported that townspeople along the way accused them of being German parachute agents.8
Brussels fell on May 18. By the time the German troops reached the Royal Palace, most of the ministers had escaped to France. Paul-Henri dispatched their families to his brother in Choisel along with his own wife and three children. The parade of black Packards stood in a long row outside the house like a funeral cortege gone astray. Claude sent them to a nearby hotel.
On May 25, Paul-Henri fled to Dunkirk. Hundreds of thousands of French and British troops had been driven to the sea and were awaiting evacuation. Paul-Henri and two other ministers went to the head of the line, and their small torpedo boat arrived in London by nightfall. Belgium surrendered two days later. A quarter of the country’s eight million people fled to France, along with a quarter of its nine-hundred-thousand-man armed forces.9
One of the refugees was René Magritte, who had been living in Brussels on Suzanne’s monthly stipend. Five days after the German invasion he fled with some friends, leaving his wife, Georgette, behind. Magritte told a friend she stayed to recover from appendicitis, but she actually refused to abandon a lover.10 Magritte believed with some reason that the Nazis might target him for arrest. He was a sometime member of the Communist Party, and the Nazis condemned surrealists as “degenerate.” He had given a public lecture in 1938 in which he called Hitler a “pain in the ass” and his followers a “fistful of fanatics.”11 Magritte and his companions left Brussels under a hail of German bombs, traveling by train, streetcar, taxi, and on foot—any conveyance that still functioned. Magritte planned to hole up outside Carcassonne in the southwest with some other painters, but he needed money. He stopped off at the Spaaks’ home in Choisel asking to “borrow back” some paintings.
“There’s a rich American who’s sailing for New York, and she’s buying art to take along,” Magritte told Claude. “I think I can sell her something. Don’t worry, I’ll replace it later.” The painter scurried off, clutching a shiny green portfolio filled with a dozen paintings. A few days later he tracked down Peggy Guggenheim at a framer’s shop in Montparnasse.12 He conveniently happened to be carrying La voix des airs, an oil he had “borrowed” from the Spaaks. She bought it from him then and there.*
Claude, Suzanne, and Ruth spent the following days gathered around the radio, listening to the news and reviewing their options. Paul-Henri had quietly advised his family to move money out of Europe and make contingency plans. The previous year, Claude had deposited $10,000 of Suzanne’s fortune in a Manhattan bank under the names of “Monsieur and Madame Spaak.” He transferred more funds to a bank in England, and stored a third sum in gold coins at home in a sturdy leather bag.
Now they should leave, Claude decided, with New York as their ultimate destination. If the Germans continued to advance, there would be mass panic. They should get on the road before the crush. Claude loaded the bag of gold into the car. Suzanne was worried about those under her care. What would happen to Mira? Would the Germans bomb Paris to rubble, as they had Warsaw? What about the Spanish refugees trapped at the border? Bazou wanted to know if his dog, Wotan, would be safe. There was no time to answer.
Claude bundled Suzanne, Ruth, and the children into the black Citroën, squeezing them in amid luggage and provisions, and headed south through a landscape glowing with yellow fields of rapeseed. They sheltered in a farmhouse along the way.
France surrendered on June 17, but some areas of the country were still untouched. Claude decided to strike out for the coast in hopes of sailing to North America. But first they made a stop at the grand château where Claude’s mother, the Belgian senator, had found refuge. They found her resting in queenly fashion in a satin-canopied bed beneath an opulent ceiling covered with clouds and cherubs. They stayed for a week, until the château’s population swelled to nearly a hundred. Claude decided to head south and buy passage to New York, hoping to make it ahead of the German troops.
The Spaaks left on a sultry Sunday morning that would be torrid by nightfall. The road was empty as far as the eye could see, both ahead and behind them, a perfect allée that stretched between two sentinel rows of trees. No one talked. From her window Pilette could see a dejected Belgian soldier sitting by the side of the road in his red-tasseled cap, chewing on a blade of grass. Later she realized that if the soldier had walked a kilometer west, he could have made it back to Belgium. But he stayed put, suggesting he would spend the next four years as a prisoner of war.
At one point Claude’s hands gripped the steering wheel. “Don’t turn around; act normally,” he said tensely. Two German soldiers on motorcycles had appeared in his rearview mirror. They sped up and passed the car. A few hours later the family pulled up at a railroad crossing and saw townspeople crowded at their windows. Pilette was taken aback to see how excited they were, “as though they were waiting for a bullfight,” watching the two German motorcyclists, who had stopped at the barrier. The Spaaks learned that Bordeaux would be occupied the next day. They would not be going to America.
Instead, Claude veered east to Carcassonne. The overloaded Citroën kept blowing out tires. He found a room for the women and children and went to see Magritte, who was staying outside town. Claude invited Magritte to join them, but Magritte preferred to sulk. He wrote to a friend, “I wish I could drop dead very soon.”13
The next day Claude drove the family to Sainte-Maxime, a small town on the French Riviera, where he found a villa to rent. The children thought it was paradise, with a garden of mimosa and fig trees and a terrace overlooking Saint-Tropez across the bay. The rooms were cool, bright, and serene. Claude settled into an office on the second floor, where he wrote and tutored his daughter.
Bazou pined for his Wotan, and his mother decided to take the train north to fetch him. Suzanne spent the first night in Marseille in a bedbug-infested hotel, where she filled a large bucket with water and slept in a chair placed in the bucket. But she accomplished her mission and returned with the dog.
At this point the children thought they were “happy and complete,” but Suzanne knew otherwise. Claude went back to his writing and Ruth withdrew to her room, but Suzanne spent much of her time in tears, worrying about her Spanish refugees and her friend Mira. She besieged Claude with a constant refrain: “I want to do something.” Europe was in flames, her refugees were in crisis, and here she was, trapped at a beach resort. Finally, in September, he relented.
Claude obtained a laissez-passer that authorized the family to return to the Occupied Zone, and the Spaaks, Ruth, and Wotan piled back into the Citroën. As they approached the border of occupied France, Claude scanned the horizon, fearing he might be arrested and sent to Germany. At the checkpoint, he handed the pass to the soldier on duty, who put it in a pile to process. Claude turned to his family and said, “Let’s let Wotan pee one more time in the free world.”
He walked the dog and returned for the pass. The sergeant stared at him in dismay, then looked down the road. He had mistakenly given it to another driver, now long gone. The family could get another permit, but it would take weeks. Claude installed them in an inn and set to work getting a new pass. A recently demobilized French officer named André Mercier helped, and Claude offered him a ride back to Paris in return. The additional passenger made the squeeze even tighter; Wotan’s food, a huge bag of rice, hung precariously from the antenna. The Spaaks later learned that Mercier had hidden his revolver in his luggage. If the Ge
rmans had found it at a checkpoint, it would have endangered them all.
The Spaaks made their way back to Choisel through a new landscape. Roads bore signposts in German; clocks were set an hour back to Berlin time. German soldiers guarded each junction. The Spaaks’ house appeared unscathed, but when they entered the salon they found two uniformed German officers seated in the armchairs. They greeted the Spaaks politely. “We’re veterinary officers from the Wehrmacht,” one of them announced. “We’ll be staying for three days.” Assigned to care for army horses, they stated their presence as a fact.
The Spaaks had traversed the country, witnessing defeated soldiers, throngs of refugees, and country folk greeting German troops. They had imagined another existence in New York, where Claude might open an art gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Suzanne could knit stockings for the Red Cross, and the children would go to the zoo in Central Park—a place where the Nazis were a distant headline in the New York Times. That future was not to be.
The invasion had altered the demographic map of France. The casualties were never accurately recorded, but it is believed that between fifty thousand and ninety thousand French soldiers were killed, and nearly two million taken prisoner.14 Eight million people had fled, six million of them French, and the rest refugees from Belgium and neighboring countries.15
Claude’s associates returned to the theater, and Suzanne’s refugees went to ground. Hard times were coming, but the Spaaks were buffered by wealth and privilege. They could lie low until it was over. They had the ability to choose, and the sensible choice seemed obvious.16 Nonetheless, events were transpiring that would complicate that choice.
On June 14, the same day that Paris surrendered, twenty uniformed Gestapo officers checked into the Hôtel du Louvre. The next morning one appeared at the Prefecture of Police to demand the French dossiers on left-wing opponents: Communists and Freemasons, in addition to the interned German and Austrian exiles, many of whom were Jews.
The French police had the files ready and handed them over without objection. The exiles who had been rounded up by the French as suspected German agents were now subject to arrest as enemies of the Reich.17
The French government was paralyzed. Winston Churchill urged its leadership to set up a government in exile in London like the Belgians’ and fight on with their troops overseas. But the French were beaten and ready to cut their losses. On June 16 a new French government was formed by men who were prepared to negotiate a surrender.
On the seventeenth the Spaaks, like millions of others, heard Marshal Philippe Pétain deliver his first broadcast as chief of state. “It is with a breaking heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting,” he announced.18 His message was met with both sorrow and relief by an audience that was haunted by newsreels of Warsaw in ruins and that still grieved for the last war’s casualties. Pétain, the heroic field marshal of the First World War, promised them survival with a modicum of dignity.
The next day, the Spaaks gathered at the radio to hear Charles de Gaulle’s broadcast from London contesting Pétain’s message. “It is absurd to consider the fight to be lost,” he said. “The flame of French resistance is not extinguished, and must not be extinguished.” Few Frenchmen heard this broadcast; the BBC had to repeat a similar version of the address four days later.
What did it mean? The “flame of French resistance” was invisible, and the officer purporting to fan it was an unlikely leader. At six feet five inches, de Gaulle was almost a foot taller than the frail Pétain and the pudgy Churchill, with beady eyes, a double chin, and a beaked nose. His green uniform’s taut shoulders and billowing breeches exaggerated his awkward build. They called him “the great asparagus.” His voice was high and reedy, and he spoke with fussy precision. But he was prepared to lead. Although de Gaulle lacked the authority to establish a government in exile, he announced that he was organizing a Free French army in London. Suzanne and Claude heard the news with interest, although Suzanne had reservations about him as a conservative military man.
The dust began to settle. Most of the one hundred thousand French soldiers who were evacuated at Dunkirk returned to France voluntarily within a week, including many Jews. Only a few thousand remained in Britain with de Gaulle.
On June 1, 1940, as the fighting continued, Adolf Hitler made a surprise trip to Belgium to confer with his generals and revisit his old stomping grounds from the First World War. Family lore held that Hitler stayed at the home of Suzanne’s sister Bunny after the Germans requisitioned it. Three weeks later he arrived in Paris to inspect his next conquest. He had never traveled beyond German-speaking territories and knew Paris only through pictures. He roamed the empty streets at dawn in an open staff car crammed with four underlings, bypassing the city’s most exquisite sights in favor of its monuments to grandiosity.
Life changed for the Spaaks at Choisel. As a British citizen, Ruth faced internment, so she departed to the Free Zone, and Magritte returned to Brussels. The Spaaks prepared for a long haul. Suzanne went to the yarn shop and bought up the available stock, then purchased four pairs of shoes for each family member, the children’s in four different sizes. “Four pairs for four years, to last the war,” she said. Within weeks the shoe stores were empty, but her family was shod.
The Germans were commandeering French vehicles and gasoline, so Claude reluctantly parked the black Citroën in the garage and covered it with straw. Now getting to Paris meant a three-mile walk or bicycle ride to the train station for an hour-long trip. A Life correspondent wrote that the absence of traffic left Paris “weirdly silent,” like a “lost city discovered by archaeologists.”19 Claude had to fiddle with the radio dial for illegal BBC transmissions to find out what was going on in the world; the French newspapers and broadcasters had been taken over by Vichy propagandists and Nazi censors.
Two million Parisians had fled, and half had not returned by September. If the decision was difficult for most Parisians, it was harder for Jews. They were aware of the Nazis’ abuses elsewhere, but French Jews believed that their citizenship would protect them. Leaving France required money, visas, and a perilous journey, as well as the willingness to abandon family and property.20 Only five thousand Jews left the country between June 10 and 25, and another fifteen thousand by the end of the summer, barely 5 percent of the Jewish population.21
Many of the initial German occupiers were young, handsome, and correct. When they commandeered a dwelling they usually apologized, and there were reports of them offering their seats on the Métro to elderly Jewish ladies. German troops helped refugees return to their homes and distributed food to their families. “Poor French people,” one leaflet stated. “See how your government and its prefects have abandoned you, how they have lied to you and presented us as barbarians… But since they are not doing anything for you, the German army will come to your aid.”22
The illusion of civility would not last, and the early warning signs came from the French. In July, roving bands of young thugs appeared wearing the pale blue shirts of the French Fascist party. They began by putting up anti-Semitic posters along the thoroughfares and moved on to smashing the windows of Jewish shops on the Champs-Élysées.23
The Germans took over the administration of the northern Occupied Zone, headquartered in Paris, while Pétain and his government installed themselves in the southern spa town of Vichy, chosen for its extensive hotel accommodations. The democratic French République was no more, replaced by the authoritarian État Français. Laws made in Vichy applied to both zones, but the Germans could overrule or amend them. Pétain urged his countrymen to turn away from the divisive democratic politics of the past—namely, the Popular Front of Léon Blum—and instead embrace the authoritarian values of “travail, famille, patrie” (“work, family, and fatherland”) in a spirit of submission and resignation. Pétain’s portrait hung in every church and school. Every morning, Pilette and Bazou stood to attention with their classmates to sing the new anthem, “Maréchal, nous voilà!” (“
Marshal, We Are Here!”)
Pétain promoted a vision of “France for the French”: a nation that was white, French born, French speaking, and Catholic (although Pétain himself was lapsed). Over the next six months, his government began to rid the country of immigrants—many, but not all, of whom were Jewish.* In July 1940 his interior minister sealed the French borders “so that foreigners cannot trouble public order.”24 The following month, the government decided to revoke the citizenship of those it deemed “unable to assimilate into French society.”25 Over fifteen thousand individuals were affected, 40 percent of them Jews.26 Another law restricted the practice of medicine and law to those born of French fathers. These restrictions affected Polish, Italian, and Spanish Catholics, as well as Jewish immigrants.27
But the next phase targeted the Jews, under the direction of SS captain Theodor Dannecker, the Paris representative of the Nazi Office of Jewish Affairs (Judenreferat). Dannecker was the paragon of a Nazi storm trooper: stone-faced, brutal, and corrupt. The twenty-seven-year-old officer combined anti-Semitism with fierce efficiency, a violent temper, and a taste for the louche life. He was responsible for coordinating operations with the French police and reported directly to Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel in charge of eradicating the Jewish populations of conquered lands. Dannecker’s mission was to eliminate the Jews of France without upsetting the political equilibrium.
Dannecker began by ordering a census in the Occupied Zone to register “all those who belong, or used to belong, to the Jewish religion, or have more than two grandparents who are Jewish.” French police were instructed to collect the records.28 Nearly 150,000 Jews complied, including 60,000 immigrants. The French police typed the information on small index cards in accordance with Gestapo guidelines, which required them to be:
