Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  Anyone caught exchanging messages or gifts was subject to solitary confinement. One day Legrand heard someone calling out for “Suzanne” and began a conversation through a brave intermediary, a prisoner named Chantal. But then a German guard arrived with a gun, an attack dog, and a new batch of prisoners. Legrand tried to warn Suzanne, but she was identified. “Suzanne punished is Suzanne in solitary,” Legrand wrote. (She didn’t specify whether her “Suzanne” was Suzanne Spaak).13

  The prisoners’ only exercise was taking walks around a courtyard that contained a cabbage patch and the graves of inmates who had succumbed to injury, illness, or suicide.14 Sometimes women were hauled off to trial and sentenced to deportation to Auschwitz; on those days the “Marseillaise” sounded in treble voices. One day Legrand was ordered to pack her things; the Gestapo was waiting. “You’re going to be deported for two years,” they told her. But then, to her surprise, she was released.

  The Gestapo may have believed that holding Claude’s wife and daughter hostage would bring him out of hiding; if so, they were wrong. Claude and Ruth remained ensconced in Saint-Cloud in silence.

  Pilette was released on December 23, 1943, and returned to her mother’s family. Other prisoners, including most of her relations and the Oratoire’s hapless deacon, were freed around the same time, though Charles Spaak remained in his cell at Fresnes, chain-smoking and polishing his screenplay.

  Pannwitz and his men had spent months staking out the Spaaks’ apartment at the Palais Royal, gradually moving in and inhabiting it. Now they plundered it, removing furniture and silverware to their headquarters on the Rue de Courcelles, a mansion seized from a prominent Jewish family. The Gestapo left behind a houseful of Magrittes and Delvaux, which held no interest for them. They raided the house in Choisel as well, expropriating its square bathtub.

  Suzanne Spaak’s fellow prisoners described her as unfailingly kind and reassuring. She spent her solitary hours touring her memory palace, revisiting beloved quotations and recording them on her walls. Every evening, the other prisoners heard her singing the same melody from the serene final movement of the Pastoral symphony, the one that Beethoven called “Happy and Grateful Feelings After the Storm.” But her hands needed to be busy. She unraveled thread from her blanket and went to work with two toothpicks knitting a tie for Bazou, and began to fashion a doll for Pilette from strands of her hair.

  May crept into Paris, while across the Channel, the Allies secretly assembled ships, tanks, and troops for the invasion and dispatched squadrons of bombers to soften their targets.

  That month, the guards came for Suzanne and a group of other prisoners arrested in the wake of Leopold Trepper. They were taken to a Paris building belonging to the Coty perfume company that the Germans had requisitioned for an “accelerated” court-martial for the Luftwaffe.15 The prosecutor was a relentless officer named Manfred Roeder, known as “Hitler’s bloodhound” and famous for seeking the death penalty wherever possible.* The Gestapo’s Heinz Pannwitz was also present.

  As the French historian Guillaume Bourgeois wrote, “Trepper left a field of ruins in his wake. Among those who helped him, around twenty were arrested and deported to places where some would die.”16 Louise Parrend, who had sheltered Trepper and Jewish children in Bourg-la-Reine, was found guilty of “hiding resisters and Jews in her boarding house.” She was deported to a prison in Germany. Madame May, Trepper’s messenger, was condemned to death, but Hitler, who personally reviewed the death sentences for women, commuted her sentence.17

  Suzanne Spaak was given a death sentence, but in her case, due to her tie to Paul-Henri Spaak, no pardon was mentioned. She was stunned to learn that another death sentence had been handed down to Jacques Grou-Radenez, arrested as a result of Bazou’s testimony. Soon after the trial he was sent to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, where he performed crippling slave labor alongside SOE agents, Soviet POWs, and members of the German resistance (among them the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged there in April 1945).18 The camp was the site of daily mass executions. Suzanne Spaak never learned the printer’s ultimate fate, but she felt horribly responsible.

  ____________

  * The Gestapo’s Brussels headquarters were located at 347 Avenue Louise, directly across the street from Suzanne’s mother’s mansion at 368A.

  * The Majestic, located on Avenue Kléber in the sixteenth arrondissement, is now the Hotel Peninsula.

  † Les Caves du Majestic finally premiered in France in October 1945, six months after Germany’s surrender. Charles had written the first screenplay Continental produced under the occupation as well as Majestic, the last.

  * Geneviève de Gaulle survived to become a leading reformer in French politics.

  * Suzanne and her counterparts were tried by a Luftwaffe court-martial because of events in Berlin. One of the German anti-Nazis in contact with Trepper’s radio network was air force officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. Everyone connected to him was tried by court-martial; over fifty of them were executed. Some sources record Suzanne’s trial as taking place in January, but the records have never been found.

  15

  the last train

  | MAY–AUGUST 1944 |

  In her cramped cell, Suzanne Spaak agonized about those she had left behind, even though she had made every possible arrangement on their behalf before her flight. Her lieutenant Peggy Camplan struggled in her absence. The group had barely been able to make payments on the children’s stipends for October. Once Suzanne and some members of her financial network disappeared in November, Camplan judged it prudent to cut off all contact with those who remained.

  Camplan appealed to leaders of different resistance groups: Jacques Maillet from the trade unions and Émile Laffon from de Gaulle’s Free French, besides the usual Jewish supporters. Between them, they came up with 50,000 francs a month. Next she turned to Entr’aide Temporaire. Denise Milhaud and her associates increased their contributions; so did Charles Spaak (presumably before his arrest).

  Another source of funds was Éditions de Minuit, an underground publishing house launched with support from Robert Debré and Dexia.1 Its maiden effort, Jean Bruller’s novel Silence de la Mer, had sold briskly. Bruller and his partners devoted the profits from the novel and subsequent works to resistance causes, including the rescue of Jewish children. After Suzanne Spaak’s arrest, Robert Debré arranged for it to step up its contributions to the children’s network.

  But the greatest windfall literally dropped from the sky, borne by an SOE agent named Dennis John Barrett. Johnny Barrett was a dapper Englishman who had grown up in France and followed in his father’s footsteps as a gentleman’s tailor. Barrett was slender, high-strung, and newly wed. The SOE’s training reports on the twenty-seven-year-old were harsh: “Both mentally and physically frightened of being hurt, and would like a nice cushy job somewhere he felt perfectly safe,” and “a very disappointing type.”

  Nonetheless, the SOE was desperate for Barrett’s language skills. He parachuted into France on April 10, 1943, alongside his superior, Benjamin Cowburn, who had served as best man at his wedding. There, serving under the code name “Innkeeper,” Barrett quickly proved his worth. His next evaluation found him “keen, intelligent and thoroughly reliable.” Cowburn was delighted to learn that Barrett’s keyboard skills extended to the piano.

  Barrett’s reports offered hair-raising accounts of his brushes with the Gestapo, along with the occasional haberdashery review:

  Source did not find that his clothes were in any way conspicuous, indeed, he looked more French than the French themselves, many of whom affected an English style of dress, tweed jacket and flannel trousers, which they managed to obtain on the Black Market.2

  After Suzanne’s arrest, Peggy Camplan told members of the SOE network about the urgent state of the children under her care. Somehow the news reached Barrett. He was flown back to London in November 1943, and returned four months later bearing the princely sum of 100,000 francs for the chi
ldren. Later, Benjamin Cowburn delivered another large installment.

  “Both of them were extremely interested in the question of the persecuted children,” Camplan wrote, “and in the course of a leave in England, Barrett was able to obtain this money that he gave me ‘for your little friends.’ As one can imagine, it was very welcome here.”3 It is not clear where the money came from. The donations were recorded in the annals of the MNCR but not in Barrett’s SOE files.

  Barrett and Cowburn were in constant peril, especially after the D-Day landings on June 6. As the Allies fought their way across France, they relied on the support of SOE agents and their French colleagues.

  On July 13, 1944, the Germans trapped some British Special Air Service (SAS) forces in the forest of Fontainebleau. Barrett and another SOE agent rushed to their aid. The two were captured and sent to Fresnes.4 Benjamin Cowburn parachuted back into France two weeks later hoping to rescue them, but Barrett and his partner were already trapped behind prison walls. Now Johnny Barrett and Suzanne Spaak, who had unknowingly supported the same Jewish children’s network, were imprisoned yards away from each other, with no knowledge of each other’s existence.

  With Germany’s defeat in sight, Heinz Pannwitz turned his attention to Suzanne. There were loose ends to tie up. Pannwitz thought his “very likable” prisoner was unlikely to know much about Soviet espionage and claimed he had no desire to see her dead. Instead, he designed a plan to use her to entice her husband into captivity. After the war he described his strategy:

  I proposed to Berlin that Mme. Spaak be asked to assist the search for her husband with the promise that the death sentence never be carried out if her husband was found and both of them remained in prison for the remainder of the war. Berlin agreed clearly and unequivocally to this proposal. Madame Spaak was in the military prison of Paris, Fresnes, in which the [Gestapo] security police kept all their prisoners, but which was administered by the military authorities.5

  Pannwitz understood that Suzanne couldn’t simply mail a letter to her husband, but he also presumed, correctly, that her family had a way to communicate with him. He proposed that Suzanne send her children the letter outlining his offer and ask the family to pass it along to Claude. He maintained that his pledge could be trusted.

  I asked the prison officials prior to writing the letter whether we were certain we could keep our word. The officials arranged for her to talk with me once more. I once more wrote Berlin asking for reassurance and emphasizing that in this case I had to keep my word. I received a firm, positive answer that the promise would be kept. After the second assurance, Mme. SPAAK wrote the letter as instructed and enclosed two small dolls which she had made out of her own hair for her children. Her children, who were with their grandmother in Brussels, received the letter.6

  This was the first time they learned of their mother’s arrest. Suzanne addressed the first page to Claude and the second page to Pilette, emphasizing that some things were not intended for her eyes. She also made it clear that her primary motivation for writing was her distress regarding Jacques Grou-Radenez.

  “My dear little Pilette,” Suzanne wrote:

  I would very much like to stop my letter here. I hope that you will be spared this, and that Bonnette and Bonne Maman Spaak [her mother and mother-in-law] can do what I must ask of you. If, despite everything, you read this, my dear little Pilette, don’t be frightened, you are a big girl and I know that you are a courageous little Belgian.

  On May 24, the military tribunal of the Luftwaffe condemned me to death for helping an enemy agent escape.

  On June 8, a German police officer ordered me to write the following: “If you have the possibility of sending this letter on to your Papa, do it. If he doubts the promises that they’ve made to me, he can respond with a letter that his mother can give to the police.”

  I was asked to stress this, that this approach is not directed against Claude or anyone from the Spaak family, but only against the man [Trepper] who is responsible for my sentence. Claude has NOTHING to fear from him.

  The officer, in the name of the GERMAN POLICE, made me two FORMAL PROMISES.

  Claude will not be tried, but simply interned until the end of the war, perhaps even under house arrest, obliged to sign in on a daily basis at the mayor’s office.

  My death sentence will be dropped.

  My dear, I would NEVER have agreed to write this letter if it was only a matter of myself. I place the life of Claude infinitely above mine, and I wouldn’t risk his life to save mine for anything in the world. I also think of your and your brother’s ages, and the presence of a good father is even more important. But a man [Grou-Radenez] was arrested because of me and condemned to death on the same day as me, and the second formal promise of the German police is exactly this: “The sentences against you both will be suspended, and we will just intern you until the end of the war.”

  I have asked for some days to think, and after carefully weighing the pros and cons I made up my mind today. I think it is my duty towards this man arrested because of me (there is no possible doubt, it’s my fault), towards his wife, and towards his children (of whom the oldest is about Bazou’s age). Everything that I have told you about my life is correct, but I can’t hide from you that when I learned on May 24 that he had been condemned to death, I was profoundly unhappy. We returned from the court together and he had nothing but admirable words. He said to me, among other things, “Above all, [there’s] no spirit of hate or revenge.”

  Regarding myself, a long time ago he told me that he had forgiven me. I believe that it is my duty to do everything that I can to save this man who is so morally great. And now, I don’t think I can do anything more than write this letter.

  Since May 24, I have been profoundly unhappy, and this wasn’t because of my sentence, but because I understood what it is not to have a tranquil conscience. As I have written in my appeal for a pardon: “I hold that human life is sacred and, for me, to live with the knowledge that I am responsible for the death of a man is a punishment worse than death.” I believe this very intensely.

  If I am mistaken, if I am wrong in writing this letter, I ask my dear Claude not to be sentimental. I have tried to act as intelligently as possible in carrying out what I believe to be my duty. And I finish with a verse by Peguy that I repeat every day: “Hope sees what does not yet exist, and what will be.”

  I embrace you all.

  SUZANNE

  Her signature—in capital letters—was emphatic.

  Pannwitz was convinced that her message had reached Claude and that he met it with silence.7 Claude later maintained he didn’t receive it.8 Pilette believes her father’s statement—but also holds that he wouldn’t have responded if he had received it. “Why should he? It was a set agreement that you don’t fall into their traps.”

  There was no logic to Suzanne’s death sentence. So far as the Germans knew, all she had done was to help hide Trepper’s money and find him a few nights’ lodging. Trepper’s mistress Georgie de Winter, on the other hand, had played a supporting role in his escapades, but she was spared a death sentence, and so were the two career Soviet agents sent to assist him.

  As the Allies advanced on Paris, the Germans and their Vichy counterparts faced a difficult decision: How should they spend their final weeks in power? In futile combat, in rampant looting, or in the destruction of evidence of their crimes?

  The debate was suspended by an unexpected event. On July 20 a large group of German officers, officials, and intellectuals, sickened by Nazi excesses and fearful of their postwar futures, launched a coup attempt against Hitler. An erroneous report reached Paris stating that Hitler had been assassinated and a new regime was taking over. For the next few hours, German dissidents within the military took over the Gestapo headquarters in Paris and prepared to parley with the Allies. But soon they stood corrected: Hitler was not dead, and the Nazis maintained control. The Gestapo swarmed the military installations in Paris, arresting the mutineers.
Over the following weeks almost five thousand German military and civilian leaders were executed in Berlin for their involvement in the conspiracy, including Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France.

  It is not known whether Suzanne and her fellow inmates were aware of the German coup attempt that would have saved them, but they could hear the roar of Allied bombers and the rumble of artillery in the distance. The prisoners anticipated the advance with high excitement, and triumphant graffiti blossomed on the prison walls.

  The Germans began to move their prisoners in preparation for flight. At the end of July, Georgie de Winter was transferred from private quarters to Fresnes, receiving special privileges as an American citizen. One of the female German guards offered her books and a sweater, adding, “When your countrymen arrive, I’m counting on you to tell them that I’ve treated you well.” Georgie learned that Suzanne Spaak was also in Fresnes, and sent her a message via the prison grapevine. Suzanne sent her a gracious reply.

  Later, on one of their walks around the prison cabbage patch, Georgie and Suzanne fell into step. It was Georgie’s indiscretions that had led the Gestapo to Madame May and Suzanne’s address. Georgie looked at her regretfully and said, “I’m sorry, it’s because of us you were arrested.” Suzanne responded with a gentle smile. “Don’t worry about it, it’s of no importance.”9

  As the Allies fought their way to Paris, their commanders considered skirting the city, but de Gaulle loudly objected. The future of France, he argued, depended on a highly symbolic event: the liberation of Paris led by Free French troops loyal to him. The Communists, including their Jewish divisions, had carried out many of the earliest and most aggressive acts of resistance, but the general wanted to prevent them from getting the upper hand.* The Allies decided to let de Gaulle get his way.