Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  In January 1943, at the same time Harry Sokol was meeting his death in Belgium, a German officer issued orders governing Trepper’s associates in Fresnes. Several of them had tried to kill themselves. His memorandum, found in a prison garbage can after the war, stated:

  To avoid every possibility of meetings or contact with accomplices, the prisoners of the Rote Kapelle conspiracy will henceforth be detained without names or personal details.

  The prisoners will be kept in strict isolation. They must not have any possibility of being seen or getting in touch with each other. Therefore they will not go to the baths, or be allowed to walk. They will not leave their cells except under special orders. They will not leave for interrogation at any given moment, only on the orders of [SS] Captain Reiser and Secretary Berg.

  The guards will only enter the cells in pairs.

  The lights will stay on all night in these cells.

  In the case of a male, and if there is no written counter-order, the prisoner will always be bound and on his back.

  Be especially careful regarding escape and suicide.

  [Signed] Major Gieseler13

  ____________

  * Todt was a massive engineering conglomerate that executed many of the Third Reich’s construction projects, both before and during the war.

  10

  la clairière

  | NOVEMBER 1942–FEBRUARY 1943 |

  In December 1942 the Germans told André Baur to hand over the addresses of the UGIF’s children’s homes.1 The UGIF tried to filter children out to rural areas of the Southern Zone, but its leaders were constrained by fears for their safety. By 1943 most Jewish institutions reached the conclusion that they needed Christian allies.2

  The rescue committees turned their attention to locating the children scattered across Paris. In this regard, the Nazis had an advantage. Immediately following the Vel d’Hiv arrests, the SS instructed the UGIF to notify Jewish households that it was establishing “a central file of all Jewish children whose parents were arrested over the past few days. If these children were collected by a private organization or individual families, please report them immediately.” A few days later, Vichy president Pierre Laval made his formal request to the SS to include the children in the upcoming deportations.

  The convoys had paused at the end of November, but the wheels of bureaucracy continued to turn. On January 5, 1943, the UGIF’s André Baur told the authorities that 386 of the 414 beds in the organization’s children’s centers were filled. “We are obliged to keep a certain number of beds free to be able to receive children who are continually being sent to us, either by prefectures outside Paris or by internment camps… As a result we are setting up family placements.”3 Baur neglected to say that many children sent to the UGIF had been whisked away into hiding before they were even registered.

  The hiatus would not last. The Germans were set on resuming the deportations. On January 21, 1943, the SS officer Helmut Knochen wired Adolf Eichmann’s office from Paris. When would freight cars be available? Knochen had some logistics to sort out concerning the transport of 3,811 Jews detained in Drancy, 2,159 of whom were French citizens.

  A few days later Eichmann’s office replied that the freight cars were ready. After the three-month pause, a convoy left Drancy on February 9 bearing 1,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Of them, 920 were immigrants, and 126 were children.4 The reserves of immigrants in Drancy were depleted.

  The SS informed the French police that one thousand victims were required for the next convoy. There were enough French Jews on hand, but Vichy officials still opposed their deportation and declared that French police would not participate in the action. They pointed out that there was still time to arrest enough Jewish immigrants to fill the quota.

  The abrupt nature of the demand required the French police to alter their approach. They would drop the pretense of rounding up factory and farm workers and set their sights on easier marks. These were the sick, the elderly, and the children.

  Over the following days, the French authorities dispatched 1,400 police, who made 1,518 arrests.5 Of these arrestees, 1,191 were between the ages of sixty and ninety. The authorities had arrested and deported elderly subjects before, but never in such a concentration. Many spoke little French and had remained in their homes because they had previously been exempt from arrest.6

  Children in orphanages were even easier prey. On February 9, French police arrived at the UGIF orphanages at 9 Rue Guy Patin and 16 Rue Lamarck. Most of the children there had been arrested with their parents, rendering them enfants bloqués, or “blocked.”After an initial stay in Drancy, they had been released to UGIF orphanages until further notice. At each venue, the police asked the staff for a list of the foreign children who had been placed there by the UGIF. The police returned on February 10 and arrested ten children from Guy Patin and twenty-two from Lamarck. Over the next two days, the French police arrested a total of forty-two children from various UGIF institutions, and eight from outside the centers.

  Fifteen-year-old Simone Boruchowicz, consigned to the orphanage at Guy Patin with her eleven-year-old brother, Armand, recorded the experience:

  The terrible rafle of February 1943 [was] the one where we saw some of the smallest and some of the biggest children crossing the street to get into the bus, each bearing a little bundle. Not one of them cried. The police, after accepting a hearty complimentary breakfast, held the door coldly.

  Armand added:

  Once we were downstairs, a big rafle was announced, and the inspectors took the names of the children telling them they were going to the countryside. Two older boys hid in the basement, which couldn’t have been guessed. But an unfortunate little boy of 5 gave them away, naturally without intending to.7

  The sight of French policemen arresting small children was devastating. Hélène Berr described one officer in her diary:

  On the night of February 10 he turned up to arrest the children at the orphanage—the oldest was thirteen and the youngest five. These were children whose parents had been deported or who had disappeared, but they needed “some more” to make up the next day’s trainload of a thousand Jews. [The policeman said] “Sorry ’bout this, lady, I’m just doing my duty.”

  The arrests created a crisis among the UGIF staff. Thérèse Cahen was serving as the night supervisor at Guy Patin when the police arrived at dawn. Like Hélène Berr, she was a cultured French Jew from an affluent family. She wrote an agonized letter to her sister asking which was more ethical: to accompany the children in their fates, or to walk out in protest?

  I am paid and doubly protected by virtue of being French and having my [UGIF] card, so I can properly lock up at 6:00 p.m. and prevent the children from saving themselves. (The management thinks only about this.) This pleases me even less, given that nothing suggests that another rafle won’t occur, and plenty of them… Everything appears to happen in the following manner: an order to provide so many Jews; an order from the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs not to take the French; and then they take the [foreign Jews] between the ages of 2 and 100.

  Am I right to want to dissociate from it all by leaving the children who will miss me and whom I was helping? I don’t know… In the meantime, I don’t tell the older ones to save themselves instead of returning every afternoon from school. But that would be the only decent thing to do, since these girls of 15 are too young to understand that their existence is not over, and that they’re worth saving.8

  Cahen chose to cast her lot with her girls, and would eventually die at their side.9

  The chief rabbi of France, Isaïe Schwartz, deplored the arrests. That February, he met with a high-ranking French police official, who tried to placate him by explaining that “the increase in arrests affects only foreign Jews and has been necessary in order to protect French Jews.” Schwartz protested that the French Jews “had never been consulted on the matter of whether they hoped for that kind of protection.”10

  The events of February 1943 stripped aw
ay another layer of fiction from the deportations. This time the trains were packed with immigrant Jews, dispatched whether or not they were suitable for labor. It marked the first time French police had arrested toddlers in orphanages.

  Three convoys left Drancy for Auschwitz on February 9, 11, and 13, carrying a total of 460 children. The quotas were completed by children taken from UGIF centers. Some were individual children of parents who had already been deported; many were siblings, such as the three Sternschuss sisters: Mina, nine; Lola, seven; and Simone, six, from the orphanage on Rue Guy Patin.

  Most of the passengers, including the children, were gassed upon arrival.

  It had taken place over five days. The Jewish activists were stunned, as were the non-Jewish women, a passionate handful, who made it their business to know.

  “Il faut faire quelque chose.” (“Something must be done.”)

  The following week Suzanne Spaak mobilized the most audacious rescue of the occupation. She and her coconspirators planned the operation a short stroll away from the German headquarters on the Rue de Rivoli and carried it out at institutions under police surveillance and SS control. Their mission did not end with a single operation; it created an expanding safety net for Jewish children that would continue to care for them for years to come.

  The details can be found in the postwar testimony of five direct participants. (If Suzanne Spaak left an account, it did not survive.) The five recorded their versions in different eras, from different perspectives, based on different affiliations, and each includes some minor discrepancies. They agree on the fundamental facts, and all credit Suzanne Spaak with initiating and leading the operation.11

  Despite Vichy’s secrecy, Suzanne learned that the arrests in the orphanages had occurred and that more were imminent. Her most likely source was Sophie Schwartz.12 Suzanne received confirmation from a member of the Resistance who worked for the Prefecture of Police.*

  For Pilette, the story began when her mother told her that she had gone to see a relative of Julien Weill, the chief rabbi of Paris, on the elegant Avenue Victor Hugo.† She knocked on the door, introduced herself as Madame Spaak, sister-in-law of Paul-Henri Spaak, and said, “I want to help the children.”

  “He said ‘All right, there are about fifty.’That’s how she got in.”

  Pilette was unsure exactly who this man was. One possibility is André Baur, the UGIF official and Rabbi Weill’s nephew.‡ The former banker oversaw the UGIF aid to thousands of indigent Jewish families, but also assisted in the mechanics of the arrests.

  The outrage of the detainees at the Vel d’Hiv wasn’t entirely justified: Baur was far from a Nazi stooge. In May 1942 he sent a strong but futile letter to the French Red Cross demanding to know the fate of Jewish deportees. He wrote many protests to Vichy and SS officials over the course of 1942 and 1943, often provoking their ire.

  What Suzanne needed from this man, whether he was André Baur or someone else, were details. The authorities would have given him, as a UGIF official, the dates and locations of the next arrests in order to expedite them. After the war, one of Suzanne’s partners from the MNCR described her attitude.

  When she learned that the children were in danger, she—the “Aryan,” who wasn’t even allowed to cross the threshold of the UGIF—presented herself to the directors and demanded that the children be removed from the UGIF centers and put into safe hands.

  They hesitated, they stammered, they meant well, but they were afraid. “So shut down your shameful Bastille,” Suzette Spaak told them. The UGIF people handed over most of the remaining children to her. She took care of them with all of her energy.13

  The next round of arrests was planned for February 19. Armed with this information and the tacit support of the UGIF, Suzanne set to work.

  The usual procedure of filtering children into the countryside singly or in pairs would not do. Dozens of children at Lamarck and Guy Patin required immediate evacuation. This called for a mass operation on a larger scale than any single group could manage; none of them had the personnel, the network, or the money to do it alone.

  The maneuver would require trusted contacts within Jewish institutions, as well as non-Jewish families who would temporarily shelter the children in Paris. Then they would need multiple safe havens in the countryside.

  This meant leaping over vast social gulfs. There were relatively few Jews who moved between the non-Jewish French and Jewish immigrant communities, such as Robert Debré and Léon Chertok, and they were under surveillance or in hiding. Non-Jewish resistance circles were distrustful of outsiders. Too many, like the Musée de l’Homme group, had been infiltrated and betrayed.

  But over time Suzanne had forged diverse ties. Jewish Communist groups accepted her as a friend of Mira Sokol’s. The Protestants knew her as the mother of a student at a prestigious Protestant school. Soon she would join forces with the wealthy matrons of Entr’aide Temporaire, who regarded her as a member of their class. As the plaque tournant, or “turntable,” she could rally all of them for the emergency at hand.

  Working closely with Sophie Schwartz, she devised a plan. The UGIF orphanages allowed visitors to take the children out for a walk one day a week. The children were starved for fresh air and exercise, but it was dangerous for their relatives to come out of hiding and make themselves known. Suzanne and her partners decided to remove the children from the orphanages. Now they needed a destination.

  For this, Suzanne turned to the Oratoire du Louvre, a Protestant church on the Rue Saint-Honoré a few blocks away from her apartment. That fall she had met a friend of Pilette’s who asked her to meet his pastor there.

  French Protestants, a small minority in France, had experienced persecution in the past, and their theology expressed a strong affinity for Judaism. The Oratoire du Louvre had opposed the Nazis from the start. When the occupation authorities dissolved Jewish Scouting organizations, the Oratoire’s troops absorbed local members into their ranks. When the yellow star was imposed in May 1942, the church’s pastor denounced it from the pulpit. After the service a parishioner named Odette Béchard approached the pastor and asked how she could help. He referred her to Entr’aide Temporaire, where Hélène Berr and her relations volunteered. Béchard’s husband, Fernand, like various other congregants, worked for the Kuhlmann chemical conglomerate, where Hélène Berr’s father was the managing director. The Berr connection led directly to the UGIF underground. The network was perfect for Suzanne’s purpose.

  The Oratoire’s efforts were led by Pastor Paul Vergara. A slight man approaching sixty with an exuberant mustache, Vergara lived with his wife and children in a church apartment. The family shared the spirit of resistance. One parishioner recalled that within days of the Grande Rafle, “Vergara was sending Jewish children [into hiding] all over the place.” Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston, another Kuhlmann engineer, had joined the Gaullist resistance and took on increasingly dangerous assignments. Vergara’s teenage son Sylvain made a practice of boarding the Métro, snipping buttons off German officers’ uniforms, and making a dash for the door, though his father disparaged such pointless risk.

  Suzanne arranged to meet Vergara at the church, along with Marcelle Guillemot, the social worker who ran La Clairière, the church’s soup kitchen.* Guillemot was a tall, brisk woman with neatly coifed blond hair and an elegant profile. The children at the Oratoire considered her “energetic, strong and a little forbidding.”14 (Pilette called her “a dry, humorless drill sergeant, but she got the job done.”)

  Marcelle Guillemot recalled the first meeting:

  Madame Spaak had had a young catechist of Pastor Vergara’s to lunch. He spoke to her about the magnificent sermon Vergara had just given with such a spirit of resistance. Madame Spaak quickly judged that the pastor could be a great help to her in connection with her activity helping the Jews. She went to see him and disclose her goal, to save at least the Jewish children from the deportation that was awaiting them.

  Vergara and
Guillemot immediately agreed to help, and offered the facilities of La Clairière as a meeting point.

  Suzanne visited La Clairière on Thursday, February 11. On Saturday, February 13, a group of Jewish women, Sophie Schwartz’s lieutenants from the MNCR underground, began collecting addresses of individuals and institutions that would accept the fugitives. Suzanne returned to see Marcelle Guillemot and advance the plans.15 The social worker typed up a brief appeal to the Oratoire’s congregants and made multiple copies.

  On Sunday, February 14, Pastor Vergara preached a sermon based on the text “God created man in his own image.” The best way to serve God, he argued, was to help one’s fellow man, starting with persecuted Jews.16

  After the service Marcelle Guillemot positioned herself at the side door, surveying the women as they prepared to depart. She slipped copies of her appeal into the hands of those women she judged trustworthy.

  The appeal asked the women to appear the next day at the UGIF office at 23 Rue de la Bienfaisance. There they were asked to visit a UGIF institution the next day, either the orphanage on Rue Lamarck or the one on Rue Guy Patin, and introduce themselves as “relatives” who had come to take the children “out for a walk.” Once they had one or two children in hand, they would deliver them to La Clairière, where Suzanne Spaak and Marcelle Guillemot would take over. Sophie Schwartz organized a second group from her Jewish women’s circle to carry out the same task. The participants would total about forty women, twenty-five Protestant and fifteen Jewish.

  Le kidnapping was scheduled for Monday, February 15. If the plan went well, scores of children would arrive at La Clairière over the course of a day, and they would need to be fed and occupied. More critically, they would need to be registered and dispersed as quickly as possible.

  Suzanne enlisted every pair of hands she could find, including her fifteen-year-old daughter. Pilette would have to miss school on Tuesday; instead, she would accompany her mother to La Clairière to help out wherever she was needed.