Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  But then, to his alarm, Rayski learned that Colette’s husband was Jewish and under threat of rearrest, even though he slept in the attic and never left the building. “We gave the leaders of the MNCR—for reasons of security—the order not to meet there any more,” he wrote.16

  Few people outside Rayski’s circle were aware of Colette’s involvement, even though she was one of the best-known writers of her time. Her masterly biographer, Judith Thurman, wrote:

  Colette’s reluctance to take any sort of stand, even privately, or to voice any sentiment of outrage at the persecutions, even in her letters, is a symptom of that moral lethargy she admits so candidly in “Bella-Vista,” where the narrator bears witness to crimes she does nothing to stop. “I was born under the sign of passivity,” she writes then. And she writes, now [to a friend in 1942], “Save your aggression for your work. For the rest of your day-to-day life, passivity suffices.”17

  Years later, Jean-Louis Debré (the grandson of Robert), echoed this judgment:

  The attitude of Colette during the Second World War is disappointing and disconcerting… Of course, Colette needed money, but her attitude is ambiguous, as though, outside reality, she was turning her back on events.18

  If it weren’t for Pilette’s recollections and Rayski’s memoirs, Colette’s role may never have come to light. She never publicized her support for Suzanne’s rescue efforts or the Jewish militants. Her attitude was, “Let them think what they will.”

  By 1943 the French were exhausted by the hardships of the occupation and shocked by its mounting abuses. Germany no longer appeared invincible; the epic Battle of Stalingrad ended on February 2, 1943, with a massive German defeat. Collaborationists were dismayed and resistance sympathizers were energized. In London, de Gaulle tackled the challenge of uniting France’s fractious resistance movements under a single command.

  The Oratoire du Louvre found itself in the middle of the action. The church’s connection to the Gaullist resistance had begun at the outset of the war with a glamorous young congregant named Jacques-Henri Schloesing, the son of a neighboring pastor and the cousin of Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston.

  After France’s surrender, Schloesing joined de Gaulle’s forces in London and was assigned to a French fighter squadron to hunt German planes and escort American bombers over France.* On February 13, 1943—the day before the rescue at La Clairière—Schloesing’s plane was shot down by four Focke-Wulf 190s. Badly burned, he managed to parachute out over the Somme. The following week, Bruston spirited him into hiding. Schloesing made it back to England and insisted on going back into service despite his injuries.19

  Other Frenchmen were harder to convince. Early resistance initiatives were easily crushed before they could achieve traction. De Gaulle’s base in London was another issue. The French public nursed a lingering resentment of Great Britain, stoked by the British bombardment. Nonetheless, Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SOE, became one of the engines of the French Resistance. The Oratoire du Louvre played a role in advancing these interests, and they would intersect with the children’s rescue efforts and Suzanne Spaak.

  De Gaulle chose a charismatic, coolheaded official named Jean Moulin to unite the resistance forces within France.20 In March 1943, Moulin, who was based in the Southern Zone, sent his secretary Daniel Cordier to Paris to launch a new operation. Remarkably, it would be based at the Oratoire with La Clairière as its hub. The connection came about through Moulin’s trusted courier, Hugues Limonti. The twenty-one-year-old mechanic was appointed chief liaison in Paris, a terrifying position involving the oversight of a dozen agents and some thirty contacts a day, as well as communications with the Southern Zone. Limonti was also expected to recover parachute drops, distribute their contents, and make arrangements for clandestine visitors to and from Britain. Finally, he was charged with guiding downed Allied flyers to escape networks.21

  Hugues Limonti needed help.

  He turned to a close friend of his sister’s, Marcelle Guillemot. The Oratoire’s social worker had already begun her life of virtuous crime, supporting rescue operations for Jewish children from La Clairière. The rescue work provided Marcelle Guillemot with many of the resources Limonti sought: a quiet street with a busy storefront, a trusted staff, and office supplies. Guillemot could do nothing without Paul Vergara’s consent. Daniel Cordier went to visit the pastor on Moulin’s behalf, and Vergara agreed to place La Clairière at Moulin’s disposal. The operations would function under the supervision of Limonti, code-named “Germain.”

  The modest soup kitchen became a frequent stop for the various groups united under Moulin’s resistance council.* Couriers appeared at the door with the passwords: “I come on behalf of Germain, to carry out a commission for Claude” or vice versa, and Limonti arrived every day to collect the messages. Sometimes Guillemot had to vacate her office to allow him to use it as a dressing room.

  La Clairière continued to feed the hungry and care for children as its underground operations grew rapidly. Soon it was being used as a warehouse for weapons, radio transmitters, and underground publications. Limonti gave Marcelle Guillemot the daily task of buying all the Vichy newspapers. Their contents were dissected and communicated to London, where the BBC’s Radio Londres crafted broadcasts to counter their arguments.

  Moulin’s affiliates met at La Clairière twice that spring. One meeting lasted until lunchtime and the soup kitchen clientele had begun to gather downstairs. Mademoiselle Guillemot introduced the visitors as church elders who had come to make an inspection. In return for her support, Moulin’s delegation furnished Guillemot with identity and ration cards that she shared with Suzanne Spaak and the MNCR to use for the Jewish children.

  As the activity mounted, so did the risk. La Clairière was getting too busy for comfort, but it was too practical to give up. Marcelle Guillemot was always on hand, ever available and ever vulnerable.

  The unified Resistance was buoyed by Moulin’s stubborn diplomacy and the promise of an Allied invasion in the foreseeable future. Their progress culminated in the first historic meeting of the National Council of the Resistance in Paris on May 27, attended by Moulin and representatives of eight resistance movements, two trade unions, and six prewar political parties.

  The Jewish Communists looked for ways to participate. On May 21, 1943, Sophie Schwartz, Adam Rayski, Charles Lederman, and several others met to discuss how to expand their initiatives, including Solidarité and the MNCR. They were stirred by the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the ghetto uprising in Warsaw, where Polish Jews awaiting deportation armed themselves and attacked German forces over April and May. They were crushed, but word spread of the first urban uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe. Inspired, the Jewish underground in Paris founded a new umbrella organization, the Jewish Union for Resistance and Support (UJRE).22

  Throughout the country, the balky gears of the Resistance were finally starting to mesh. A new leadership structure emerged and the ranks filled with eager volunteers, many of them young men drafted into Germany’s new forced-labor force, the Service du travail obligatoire (STO). Begun in January 1943, the wildly unpopular program drafted hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen over the age of twenty to work in the Reich, beyond the hundreds of thousands already there. Thousands of youths known as réfractaires decamped to the countryside, where they joined resistance bands called maquis.*

  They included young men from the Oratoire. Forging their documents became one more task for Marcelle Guillemot’s workshop at La Clairière.

  ____________

  * It may also have referred to Marguerite Camplan, who lived at 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

  * Schloesing was shot down and killed in August 1944 over Normandy.

  * These groups included the Organisation civile et militaire (OCM), a Paris-based group of conservatives and Socialists; the Communists’ Front national (FN); the conservative Ceux de la Libération; and Ceux de la Résistance, a centrist group that included Robert Debr�
�’s son Michel.

  * Named after the scrub brush of their mountain enclaves.

  12

  the unraveling

  | JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1943 |

  The dark days descended in the early summer of 1943. The Gestapo and the French police had been hard at work trailing suspects, planting informers, and interrogating detainees. The French Special Brigades had mastered methods refined by the Gestapo, monitoring suspects for as long as nine months as they compiled names and addresses, then striking on multiple fronts.

  On June 20, the police moved in on Défense de la France. Suzanne’s friend Jacques Grou-Radenez, who had hidden Jewish children, was squarely in their sights. His office and printing shop were searched, but his resourceful wife, Madeleine, had been tipped off in advance and hid the incriminating materials. However, an informer’s tip led the French Gestapo to arrest scores of members of the group. They included General de Gaulle’s niece Geneviève and the blind student leader Jacques Lusseyran. Both were taken to Fresnes, then deported to concentration camps.*

  On June 21, Jean Moulin was arrested in a suburb of Lyon with eight members of his organization. Moulin was savagely tortured under the personal supervision of SS officer Klaus Barbie. He died without revealing names or intelligence.

  Over the summer, the authorities concentrated on British agents and French contacts, and the SOE may have played a part in a debacle. One question reigned in the minds of the German military and the French resisters: When and where would the Allies invade? The London strategists set about misleading the Germans, and instructed the SOE to operate as though it were preparing for a 1943 invasion, specifically in the northern Pas-de-Calais region. They multiplied the numbers of agents and arms parachuted into France. The French Resistance took heart, believing the invasion was at hand, and relaxed security. (There have been allegations that the SOE misled its own agents to make the fiction more credible if they broke down under interrogation.)1 In late June, five SOE agents were captured by the Germans and sent to Fresnes, and the toll continued to mount over the summer.2

  In July, it was the Oratoire’s turn. The disaster began with Pastor Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston. The thirty-four-year-old engineer had blood ties to the Gaullists through his cousin the fighter pilot, and Bruston was eager to support Moulin’s resistance council and its London backers. On July 22 he left Paris by car en route to Tours to pick up some cases dropped by parachute. The Germans, perhaps through individuals who cracked under interrogation, had identified the field and the ground personnel. As he drove back to Paris, Bruston was halted at the Porte d’Orléans, and the Gestapo found the cases hidden in the trunk. The Oratoire operation was compromised. Hugues Limonti and Bruston’s wife, Éliane, learned of his arrest and warned Marcelle Guillemot. Limonti went into hiding at La Clairière.

  One of the three occupants of Bruston’s car may have broken down under questioning. The following day Guillemot received a suspicious phone call. “Do you want to carry out an assignment from Lise to Madame Bruston?” the voice asked. Guillemot played dumb, and the voice answered irritably, “So you don’t understand! Fine, we’ll come.”

  It was 1:00 p.m. The soup kitchen had just finished serving the noon meal. Hugues Limonti collected his messages and fled. Moments later he passed Gestapo vehicles turning onto Rue Greneta.

  Marcelle Guillemot raced through La Clairière, destroying evidence. A postwar interviewer recorded her description of the next harrowing moments:

  She barricaded herself on the second floor, closing all the doors and securing all the locks. She threw into the toilet all the identity cards, photos, etc. of the young réfractaires of the Oratoire that she was just finishing. She lit the boiler and burned the boxes holding the radio messages, newspapers, lists of Jews, etc.

  Over this time that the Gestapo was ringing the bell, knocking, telephoning. The unsympathetic concièrge herself tried to open the door with some keys. Having finished everything, and even having eaten a bit, Mlle. G. prepared to escape, judging that all was now in order. She almost made it downstairs, but her clothing snagged on a key—one she walked past a hundred times a day without snagging.

  This made her stop and think. Perhaps she could use another exit without being seen. She made her way to the skylight. She saw that the cleaners in the next building, by sheer chance, had left a window open that she could reach through the skylight. She climbed out and tranquilly departed from 58 Rue Greneta, under the gaze of the concièrge who knew her. Mlle. G. warned her with a look, and she kept her silence magnificently. The Gestapo waited patiently at the exit of number 60!3

  Then the Gestapo came for the Vergaras. The pastor was warned in time and escaped, but his family did not. His wife, Marcelle, was held and interrogated for three months in Fresnes. The Gestapo also arrested seventeen-year-old Sylvain—little Larissa’s dancing partner and the snipper of German buttons in the Métro. Sylvain was deported to Buchenwald, a second blow after Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston, was sent to Mauthausen.

  For the past six months, Marcelle Guillemot had been juggling her roles as church social worker, MNCR supporter, and secret agent for the Gaullist resistance. Now she fled to the countryside. The arrests took her out of action as far as Paris was concerned, but she remained in touch with Hugues Limonti and carried out various services on his behalf.4

  The children’s escorts from the MNCR suffered a loss that month. Régine Grumberg was on her way to pick up some children to take into hiding when she noticed some police inspectors following her. They grabbed her as she was entering the Métro. Fortunately, she had followed protocol and wasn’t carrying any compromising addresses.5 She was sent to Drancy, then to Auschwitz.*

  The Jewish resistance was also battered. The young Jewish militants, suffering from their families’ deportations, launched increasingly violent attacks, on the principle of “an eye for an eye.” The French police’s Special Brigades responded by escalating their surveillance and arrests. As the losses mounted, the Jewish underground’s leaders searched their ranks for possible informers, fixing their attention on a new recruit for Solidarité. Lucienne Goldfarb was a striking red-haired teenager who fit the profile of the ideal volunteer, as the daughter of Polish Jewish parents detained at Drancy. Then her associates learned of her intimate friendship with a French policeman, which had coincided with dozens of arrests. Lucienne—aka Katia la Rouquine, or “Katy the Redhead”—would profit from her relationship with the French police through the occupation and beyond.6

  Adam Rayski reported, “By late July nearly the entire Jewish leadership had fallen”—at least sixty individuals in all.7 Only a handful escaped; Léon Chertok and Rayski fled to the South.8 Sophie Schwartz owed her escape to an attack of appendicitis. She had been hospitalized in a clinic under a false name; otherwise she would surely have been arrested with the others.9

  Over the month of July, three groups of critical partners in Suzanne Spaak’s rescue network had been crippled. Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot were in hiding in the countryside. Sophie Schwartz, Léon Chertok, and Adam Rayski had gone underground. Jacques Grou-Radenez’s Défense de la France had been decimated, even if the printer himself was still at liberty.

  The legal Jewish charities were attacked. In June the Gestapo arrested David Rapoport, the head of children’s services for the Amelot Committee, and in July they came for the UGIF. The SS had gotten wind that children had been disappearing from the UGIF’s facilities, and on July 13 the UGIF headquarters informed its children’s homes in Paris that “the German authorities demand with all urgency the complete list of children currently in our centers, ‘blocked’ or not.”10 Ten days later the Gestapo arrested UGIF official André Baur, Suzanne’s possible source, along with his wife and their four children, aged three to ten. The Baur family was held in Drancy until December 17, then deported to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival. The week after Baur’s arrest, the Gestapo came for more than twenty women on the UGIF’s children�
�s staff, and they, too, were deported.

  The rules had changed. Throughout the summer of 1943, the SS took over the mechanics of the arrests and deportations from the French. French policemen had tried to spare French Jews, but the Germans made no such distinctions.

  In September the Gestapo came looking for Robert Debré and two of his associates. The German police had made several visits to his colleagues, but they fended off their questions. Debré was visiting his house in Touraine to review arrangements for hiding Jewish children and to explore the potential use of a nearby field to receive parachute drops from London.

  The phone rang; it was Dexia, calling from his Paris office. “They’re here.” Debré didn’t know what to do, but the countess advised him to return to Paris. He was examining a child in his clinic when the Gestapo returned. The countess and his servant held the police at bay while the doctor fled through the kitchen and out the back on an escape route to a prearranged hiding place nearby. An associate, the Baroness de la Chevrelière, coolly informed the police, “He’s out on an emergency call and will return any minute.” Stymied, the police left, stating that they would return. They did, thirteen times. As their fury mounted, they tore the curtains, ripped out the telephone wire, and smashed his possessions.11

  Debré and his colleagues went underground. A friend in the Gaullist resistance procured forged identity and ration cards, and Debré shaved off his beard and mustache. The couple found refuge outside Paris with friends.

  On a visit back to the city, Dexia was arrested and delivered to Gestapo headquarters. Trembling but summoning every ounce of her sangfroid, the countess demanded a chair. Then she proceeded to lecture the Germans. Yes, she was Debré’s secretary, but he had vanished, she informed them. He was probably under arrest somewhere in the South. She had already been tried with the Musée de l’Homme conspiracy and imprisoned in Fresnes; didn’t they know? The agents didn’t know, and they were astonished that she would volunteer the information. Did they think anyone in her right mind, she demanded, would care to repeat the experience?