Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  Sophie was a gifted student, but her family couldn’t afford school fees and sent her to work in a curtain factory. There she joined a Socialist youth movement and gravitated toward the new, illegal Communist movement. Around this time she witnessed her first pogrom, carried out by Polish soldiers who held Jewish men at bayonet point and cut off their beards.

  The Polish police came for her one morning in 1924 at one o’clock. They threw her into a cell full of prostitutes, interrogated her, then released her. Her father gave her an ultimatum: abandon politics or leave home. She left for Belgium, where she married another Jewish émigré, Lazar Micnik, who had also been expelled from his home for political organizing. In 1929, the couple moved to Paris illegally and found work off the books, thrilling to the rise of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936.

  Sophie joined a committee to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was disappointed that her husband refused to go and fight. “I’ve never held a pistol, I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know what I’d do there,” he told her. The couple settled into a secretive life of undocumented immigrants in an apartment off Place de la République.

  Sophie turned her energies to a new women’s organization created to help the Jewish refugees flooding into France. The working mothers were impoverished and isolated. Her group set up a center in Belleville to provide childcare and friendship. The women met regularly to discuss cultural topics, including the work of their favorite Yiddish author, Sholem Aleichem.

  Aleichem’s tales from the shtetls reflected both the women’s Polish past and their French reality. They identified with his character Tevye the dairyman and with his musings on the Rothschilds, the leading patrons of Jewish charities in Paris.* When a pogrom arrives on his doorstep, Tevye looks to heaven and demands:

  There’s no knowing what goes on in the mind of a rich Jew, of a Brodsky in Yehupetz, for example, or of a Rothschild in Paris—the Messiah may be the furthest thing from it… Dear Lord God, I thought, wouldn’t You like to play one of Your jokes on a Brodsky or a Rothschild for a change?4

  Sophie made friends with a seamstress named Hannah Wozek. Hannah’s husband had answered the call to fight in Spain with the Yiddish-speaking Botwin Company in late 1937. With the defeat of the Republicans, he was interned with other volunteers in a French camp, leaving his wife to care for their two-year-old daughter, Larissa. Hannah earned a meager living working twelve-hour days as a maid for a wealthy Russian family and entrusted her toddler to Sophie’s nursery.

  When war was declared in 1939, the nursery was closed and Sophie turned to Solidarité, work that led her to Suzanne Spaak. As the arrests began, the relatively mild conditions of the French detention camps misled the Jewish community. Families sent parcels, wives could visit, and inmates attended seminars and concerts. Everything, Sophie recalled, suggested that the prisoners would join the same labor details as the French POWs. “There were no instructions from the [Communist] Party that they should escape,” she lamented. “That’s the tragedy.”

  Sophie could do little when her own husband was arrested in 1941, but she could help others under threat. She led the 1941 women’s march on the camp at Pithiviers, and took on the task of finding sympathetic French people to take in Jewish children. The more grueling assignment was persuading their families to let them go. One of the mothers was Hannah Wozek, who held fast to her Larissa.

  On the day of the Grande Rafle, everything changed. Sophie had heard rumors the previous day that the authorities were going to put women and children in the camps, but no one wanted to believe it. At 6:00 a.m. the French police came for Hannah Wozek. She dressed quietly and hugged her daughter tight for the last time, leaving her with a friend. Then she was conveyed to the Vel d’Hiv and disappeared into the Nazi inferno. When Sophie heard the terrible news, all she could think was, “We’ve got to save Larissa.”

  Larissa, just short of her seventh birthday, was transferred to the Lamarck orphanage in Montmartre, repurposed as a warehouse for stranded children.5 Annette Muller, a little girl who arrived around the same time as Larissa, wrote a vivid account of life in the orphanage:

  Bedlam ruled. We slept in large dormitories, beds jammed together and mattresses on the floor, with hardly any way to pass. There was an epidemic of scarlet fever. Every day we had to lift our shirts to show our stomachs, where the spots appeared as the first symptom. They let us go out into a courtyard, and they installed a long table near the door. Sometimes visitors watched us from behind it, but we weren’t allowed to approach them. They threw food to us, fruit, bread that we buried in the dirt to eat later in secret.

  The lice swarmed, and hunting them became a game. Sitting on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, [my brother] Michel put his head on my lap. I looked for lice, which I crushed between my fingernails. Then it was my turn and I offered my head to Michel. All the children did the same, crouching or sitting in the yard like the monkeys in the Vincennes zoo.

  Sometimes they took us to a steamy room in the basement where, to a deafening din, a barber with a little moustache officiated. The struggling children were hauled before him to the boos of the older ones who were already shorn. We sang at the top of our voices, “Go to hell, barber, God created you to make us miserable, you shave our heads all night. When will we hear the funeral bells for the barber?” He was our enemy. We all hated him.

  Every day brought more batches of children, filthy, skeletal, and spotted, who were immediately put in quarantine in a crowded dormitory before they joined the others. They came from Drancy. Lamarck was a hub for deporting children.6

  Sophie watched Larissa join the unhappy throng. Her dark curls were shaved off and a card was hung around her neck identifying her by number. She learned to go hungry. “We ate slowly because there was not enough food,” Larissa recalled. “There was no organization among the monitors. Nobody looked after us or played with us, and there were lots of children.” Within weeks, Larissa had been transformed from her mother’s darling into a juvenile inmate.

  The occupation authorities used the UGIF’s administration of the Lamarck orphanage and various Rothschild institutions to extend their control over the Jewish population and collect fees for their maintenance from Jewish households. Most of the money was stolen, and the UGIF institutions and Jewish indigents received the leavings as “charity.”The UGIF children’s homes registered the whereabouts of the small prisoners and controlled their movements.

  Sophie found Lamarck to be “a fortress: very old, sad, damp, forsaken buildings.” She asked for permission to take Larissa for an outing and briefly considered stealing her away. But she was haunted by the thought of the other children who would be deprived of outings if she failed to bring the girl back.

  Riding the Métro, Sophie regarded the fragile child with her pale cheeks and dark, thoughtful eyes. Sophie noticed that Larissa had hidden the yellow star that her mother had fastened onto her brown coat. The child looked up and asked nervously, “Sophie, can you tell that I’m…you know what?”—not daring to say the word “Jewish” in public. Sophie reassured her, “No, not at all.” Larissa smiled.

  Soon Sophie learned that Larissa had been moved to another UGIF-run home at 9 Rue Guy Patin in the tenth arrondissement. She decided to try the official approach. She went to the UGIF office and announced, “I know that the children might be sent off somewhere and I want the child.”

  The female clerk responded, “If I give you that child, I’ll be the one they take away.”

  Sophie bristled. “Listen, I don’t know how old you are, but you’ve lived your life, and Larissa has her whole life in front of her.”

  The clerk told Sophie she had to seek an official letter at another office. There she was told, “Look, Madame, you can’t have this child. We can only entrust her to a French family that will pledge to provide for the child’s needs and guarantee that she can be located at any time”—to facilitate her arrest. That was when Sophie realized Larissa’s s
afety depended on the assistance of non-Jews.7 She was willing to risk her life on behalf of all of the Jewish children, but there were a few, including Larissa, who were family.

  Sophie kept a low profile, moving around Paris with forged papers that might be detected at any checkpoint. Her husband was lost to her. Lazar had developed tuberculosis in Drancy and was transferred to the Rothschild Hospital, another UGIF institution. Sophie saw him for one last time in the waiting room under the stern gaze of the police. He was deported to Auschwitz on July 22 along with women and children arrested in the Grande Rafle. Sophie was told he died of typhoid, but camp records later showed he was sent to the gas chambers three days after his arrival.8

  In the fall of 1942 Sophie wrote a report in Yiddish summarizing the MNCR’s approach, developed in partnership with Suzanne Spaak:

  After the tragic days of July 16 and 17, hundreds of Jewish families went into hiding from the police. With their children, they stayed shut up in cellars and attics, with eight or ten people in the same place. Our organization immediately got involved in the fate of these unfortunates and sent a number of children into the countryside to stay with farmers. Between July 16 and October 1, nearly a hundred children in groups of three, four and five, were placed in the villages in the departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, Marne, Aisne, Sarthe, Loiret.

  It was not enough to find homes for the children; they required money as well. Many of the host families fostered city children for the income, and even those who acted out of charity usually needed funds and ration cards to provide for the children in a time of scarcity. Sophie wrote:

  We created groups of “godmothers” and about twenty of them agreed to subsidize the upkeep of these children. Fifty-five percent of the children had one deported parent; ten percent had both parents deported. Twenty-five percent had parents in hiding; ten percent belonged to families that were untouched by the raids (e.g., French Jews and/or a father who was a prisoner of war). We paid 600–700 francs per month for each child. Our monthly expenses amounted to 50,000 francs.9

  Suzanne Spaak’s contacts were essential to the plan. So was the money she managed to squeeze out of her allowance. These funds were drawn from her inheritance but still dispensed by her husband—even though her generosity led to bitter fights.

  It was still hard for Sophie persuade the parents to relinquish their children.

  They often replied, “Sure, you Communists are always sowing panic and we’re not budging. We don’t have anywhere to go, and we’re not rich enough to go far.”That was also true, because the rich [Jews] had left for the Free Zone.10

  Some Jewish leaders were opposed to placing children in Christian homes, fearing the action would result in their conversion. The arguments of the MNCR grew fiercer as the convoys continued to roll, with increasing numbers of children aboard.

  Many families who yielded their children contributed to their upkeep when they could, but the collection process was painful. After the Grande Rafle it was nearly impossible to collect these funds from Jewish neighborhoods. One exception, for a time, was the Jewish furriers, who had been exempted from arrest on the grounds that their products were essential to the German war effort. Fur was a luxury in France but indispensable on the eastern front; German troops had already experienced one brutal Russian winter, and another was on its way.

  The furriers became an important source of funds for the MNCR. One day Sophie sent a list of people in need to a furriers’ meeting, with unexpected consequences. The host, Aron Walach, found his son Elie’s name on the list. Elie had joined the FTP-MOI militants (he had helped the daring “Fifi” Feferman steal dynamite) and was under arrest. Walach was distraught. His commotion attracted the police, who arrested all of the furriers present and carted them off to the prison at Cherche-Midi. There Walach saw his son, who had clearly been tortured.

  Sophie was so distressed by the arrests that she cried out, “I want to die!”Two days later a German officer ordered the furriers’ release, but twenty-one-year-old Elie Walach was executed by firing squad at Mont-Valérien.11 The exemption would not last; the following year, the furriers, too, were rounded up.12 Aron Walach was deported and murdered in May 1944.

  The Jewish immigrant community was shrinking as its members were arrested, went into hiding, or fled. The October 1940 census had registered 25,646 immigrant Jewish families in Paris. Two years later, two-thirds had vanished, and the number of households dropped to a 7,926.13

  July’s Grande Rafle had targeted certain Jewish neighborhoods and nationalities, principally Poles and Russians. September brought another round of raids in the form of door-to-door arrests for petty infractions. The new targets were Romanians, then Belgians, then Greeks.14

  A few French Jews, such as Raymond Berr, had been arrested, but in general they remained a category apart. The difference was explained by Maurice Rajsfus, a French-born child of immigrant parents who had registered him for citizenship. After his parents were arrested, he and his sister continued to live openly in Paris, wearing their yellow stars until near the end of the occupation. Rajsfus later wrote:

  There was never a massive roundup of French Jews in Paris, except the one [of Notables] in December 1941. It was not worth the trouble to go door to door. The susceptible Jews were those in groups, in orphanages, nursing homes, or hospitals, who could be picked up easily when [the SS] had room at Drancy or needed to fill a train. No one should ever have remained in a group. All should have been dispersed.15

  This point was critical for the MNCR on two counts. It was essential to persuade both immigrant families and the Jewish leadership of the UGIF that housing the children in their orphanages was an invitation to disaster.

  Following the Grande Rafle, the UGIF sent out a mailing urging Jewish families to entrust their children to them as “the only Jewish organization that is recognized and protected by the occupation authorities.” Sophie Schwartz considered this a travesty. On September 25 she led another women’s march on the UGIF offices and forced the door, demanding a meeting. The UGIF staff threatened to call the police, but the women cut the telephone wires. UGIF’s vice president, André Baur, finally agreed to speak with them.

  The women wanted to know the UGIF’s plans for the children consigned to its orphanages, but Baur and his colleagues could only stammer a response. The women shouted, “Traitors of the UGIF, resign, resign! We’re going to destroy you, we’re going to blow you up!”16 They demanded the UGIF officials’ help in freeing the interned children but left without an answer.17

  Paris was still home to thousands of Jews subject to arrest. It was impossible to know whom to trust. For decades, the Rothschild Hospital in eastern Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement had served immigrant families. Now it had been absorbed into the UGIF, under the administration of Armand Kohn, a banker and distant relation of the Rothschilds. Kohn’s family had lived in France for seven generations. He attended synagogue but otherwise lived the secular life of a wealthy French businessman, and regarded his family’s exemption cards as a perquisite of its social position.

  Kohn brought a methodical approach to his management of the Hôpital Rothschild, which became one more smoke screen for the Nazis. Its wards offered beds to ailing inmates from Drancy, such as Sophie’s husband, Lazar, and women who were about to give birth. But there was every chance they could be returned to the camps or arrested in their beds.

  Armand Kohn found himself in an impossible position. His job consisted of running the hospital according to regulations, and his family’s exemption cards depended on him doing it well. But his efficiency aroused anger among the patients seeking means to escape. After several sneaked out the front door, Kohn ordered his staff to confiscate luggage and street clothes on arrival. Others fled through the basement, and he closed it off. He created a “reeducation system” with solitary confinement for the “delinquent” children of deported parents. The Jewish community began to refer to the hospital as one more sourcière, or “mousetrap,”
in the service of the Gestapo.

  Suzanne Spaak regularly visited ailing immigrants on behalf of the MNCR, helping where she could. One day she met a young member of the Jewish resistance with the nom de guerre of David Diamant. Summoned by a billet vert in May 1941, he chose to go underground, but he fell seriously ill and was obliged to seek treatment at the Hôpital Rothschild. Unlike most patients, he managed to escape.

  Diamant recalled:

  I had had major surgery and left the Rothschild Hospital by miracle, because this place had become a prison. I went back to my hideout [in Belleville], but it was damp and rank, with nauseating mold. That’s when Suzanne Spaak came, on behalf of the MNCR, to place me in a clinic where I wouldn’t have to breathe the foul air.

  Suzanne found Diamant a bed in a non-Jewish clinic where he registered under a false name. She may have located it through Robert Debré and Léon Chertok’s medical network. She kept in touch with Diamant. When she couldn’t visit him she sent him encouraging letters by pneumatic tube, the express postal system that connected the post offices of central Paris.*

  Like Sophie Schwartz and Charles Lederman, Diamant was dazzled by Suzanne. “She was slender, dynamic and full of energy, and she cared for me like a sister.”18

  Drancy’s procession of convoys came to a temporary halt, but significant harm had been done. In the sixteen weeks between June 5 and September 30, thirty-eight convoys had carried some forty thousand Jews—overwhelmingly immigrants—to their fate.† Twenty-six convoys had been concentrated over August and September, departing every two or three days, most of them bearing women and children arrested in July. These four months accounted for over half of the seventy-six thousand Jews who would be deported from France over the five years of occupation.

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