Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  The CIA officer added a chilling speculation based on the British research:

  The British should have fairly positive information regarding Suzanne Spaak’s execution unless Claude Spaak, wanting Suzanne out of the way in order to marry Ruth Peters, and [Gestapo agent Horst] Kopkow, to protect himself, did not give the facts.20

  As intriguing as they were, the intelligence reports were far from authoritative. Heinz Pannwitz’s testimony reflected his self-interest, just as Leopold Trepper shaped his version to his. The various accounts created a patchwork fraught with errors.

  Pilette and Bazou grew up and pursued independent lives. Through her uncle the prime minister, Pilette met a handsome North African who was an adviser to the king of Morocco. After they married, he pursued political ambitions that played out on three continents but left him disappointed in the end. He spent much of her sizable inheritance chasing his dreams. However, the couple shared some happiness and produced a fine son along the way.

  Bazou went to the Sorbonne and decided to study a dead language. He became an eminent Sanskrit scholar who divided his time between Paris and India, marrying an Indian wife and fathering two accomplished sons.

  Pilette and Bazou nursed a lasting ache for their mother and a simmering anger toward their father. As Claude sold off the family’s art collection, the luminous Magrittes and Delvauxs took their places on the walls of Hollywood mansions and leading museums. Bazou still owns the Magritte painting of the two children, and Pilette his portrait of their mother.

  It is impossible to say exactly how many Jewish children were rescued over the course of the occupation, or to assign specific roles to the rescuers. Suzanne’s networks included the MNCR, Entr’aide Temporaire, the Oratoire, and the underground UGIF, as well as their partners, including the Jewish charities OSE and the Amelot Committee, the Catholic network, and the Protestant relief group Cimade. Their combined reach was considerable.

  Roughly eleven thousand Jewish children were deported from France between the Vel d’Hiv arrests in July 1942 and the liberation in August 1944. It is estimated that the rescue networks saved over one thousand. Suzanne Spaak established bonds of trust and promoted cooperation. She was not the only person who served this purpose, but her contribution was extraordinary.

  At the end of the occupation, the hidden children were scattered across the countryside. Suzanne’s colleagues gradually collected them and set about reuniting them with their family members wherever possible. Eventually the surviving parents and relations came out of hiding or returned from the camps and found their children.

  A group of them remained unclaimed. The MNCR assembled fifty children hidden by its network and prepared to care for them. Suzanne’s friends, including Peggy Camplan, located a large villa in the suburb of Montmorency that had been requisitioned for the German military during the occupation. Now the French state offered it as a home for the children. The cofounders included Jewish Communists and members of the Oratoire’s congregation, which continued to take up collections to support the children. Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot were named to the board of directors.

  The children called their new home Renouveau (“Renewal”). It was said that most of them had been “saved by Suzanne Spaak,” and a room was named after her.21 Several of the orphans had been rescued at La Clairière in February 1943, though they were young children at the time and their memories of the event were foggy.

  The director of Renouveau was Madame Claude François-Unger, whose first husband had died in Auschwitz in 1942.* François-Unger’s motto was “Don’t look back.”The children were urged to bury the past, study hard, and think of each other as family. In many respects the program was a success; the orphans grew up to become successful professors, engineers, and business leaders.

  But as they reached their later years, the past resurged, along with its pain. One of the rescued children, Jacques Alexandre, pieced together elements of the hidden history, aided by Peggy Camplan. She told him she and other members of Suzanne’s rescue network had also gathered intelligence for the Red Orchestra—small things, such as counting the German uniforms in a bar. Alexandre’s friend Sami Dassa wrote a moving memoir called Vivre, aimer avec Auschwitz au cœur (To Live and Love with Auschwitz in Your Heart). When the two learned of Suzanne Spaak’s role in their rescue, they made a ritual of placing flowers on her grave, but they had no idea she’d had children of her own.

  Suzanne Spaak was both honored and forgotten. On March 9, 1945, Adam Rayski’s newspaper, the Naïe Presse, published an article about her, praising her as a woman “who was not content with just words.”A 1947 Paris exhibition included a display highlighting “some noble figures from the French people who braved every danger to save Jewish children from deportation.” Four of the seven subjects were members of Suzanne Spaak’s network: the Countess de la Bourdonnaye, Paul Vergara, Marcelle Guillemot, and Suzanne herself.22

  More recognition followed, but as a by-product of politics. In the early 1960s, Israel began a program to recognize non-Jews who had risked or sacrificed their lives on behalf of Jews. Known as the “Righteous Among the Nations,” it was administered by the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

  In April 1963, the director of Yad Vasham learned that Paul-Henri Spaak was planning to visit Israel. Aware of the article about Suzanne, the director decided to conduct a ceremony to honor her in conjunction with her brother-in-law’s visit. He wrote to Claude and asked him to help assemble the documentation regarding his wife. Claude confirmed that Suzanne had organized rescues, but he specified that the reasons for her arrest and execution had been “classic” acts of resistance.23 Yad Vashem named Suzanne Spaak “Righteous Among the Nations” on April 21, 1985.

  But her story went cold. After the war, each movement involved in the rescues wrote its own history. Suzanne’s name appeared in many of them: Denise Milhaud’s account of Entr’aide Temporaire; Adam Rayski’s histories of Solidarité and the MNCR; the Oratoire’s story of La Clairière. But inasmuch as Suzanne didn’t belong to any party or a religion, she was always a footnote. As a woman without a business or profession, she left few papers for archives, and her husband burned what little she had. She was always an outlier: a Belgian amid the French, an atheist amid the believers, an independent among the militants.

  These were the vital components of her story: as a member of the ruling class, she had the means to help others. As a humanitarian, she chose to do so. As a political independent, she was overlooked in the institutional histories, and as a shunned wife, she was almost erased by her husband.

  The deportations marked a moment when anti-Semitism and xenophobia converged, among the French as well as the Germans.* Most of the population was not motivated by hatred or cruelty; people simply acted out of self-interest, and found it convenient to look the other way. This is human nature, and such behavior tends to be the norm when societies are confronted with injustice on an epic scale.

  It was laudable but not surprising when brave members of the immigrant Jewish community—including Sophie Schwartz, Léon Chertok, Charles Lederman, and Adam Rayski—defended their own. But Suzanne Spaak, along with her small army of outliers, belonged to a different category. Suzanne Spaak was capable of seeing and serving the “alien other” because, in her clear gaze, no fellow human was alien, or other. Il faut faire quelque chose. “Something must be done.”

  ____________

  * Stock’s aides were transferred to the front lines as punishment, in one case for accompanying two Jewish youths to their executions at their request. Franz Stock, his health broken by the war, died suddenly at the age of forty-four in 1948. As of 2017, initial steps have been taken toward his canonization.

  * In his memoirs, Leopold Trepper claims credit for discovering the remains of Suzanne Spaak and Fernand Pauriol “after a thorough search of the cemeteries in the suburbs” (Great Game, 321). It appears that he was greatly exaggerating his role, given that his version directly contradicts the acc
ounts of Chertok and the Spaak relations, including Claude.

  * Pilette considered this theory “ludicrous.”

  * Their son, Fred Kupferman, lived in the orphanage and grew up to become a prominent historian of the Vichy period.

  * Forty-one percent of France’s foreign Jews were deported, compared with 13 percent of the French Jews, and even this lopsided figure is misleading. Serge Klarsfeld shows that those described as “French citizens” among the deported included some eight thousand naturalized citizens and eight thousand children born in France of immigrant parents—culturally, if not legally, “foreign Jews.” Adjusted for these factors, 52 percent of France’s immigrant Jews were deported, compared with 7.5 percent of the French Jews of old stock.

  17

  the aftermath

  | 1945–2017 |

  Bazou and Pilette

  As of 2017, the Spaak siblings live near Paris, close to their grown children and grandchildren. Pilette is an accomplished knitting instructor who offers classes and instructional videos. Bazou spends part of the year with his wife in his ashram in India.

  Claude Spaak

  Claude continued to write and produce plays, but none of them achieved the success of The School for Scandal in 1940. Suzanne haunted his work. In 1959 he wrote Soleil de Minuit (Midnight Sun), set in occupied Norway in February 1944. In it, a German officer has arrested five men accused of resistance activities. The officer interrogates the prisoners’ families, falling deeper and deeper into a moral quandary. One couple, the same age as the Spaaks during the occupation, reverse their roles. The husband is in German custody facing execution, and his wife, at liberty, must decide how to respond. The German officer finally releases all five suspects, concludes that he is the only true criminal, and presents himself for court-martial.1 In Les Survivants (The Survivors, 1963) a couple wanders the ruins of postwar Germany. “They both fiercely opposed the regime that destroyed the country, and their spouses paid with their lives. They have everything they need to rebuild their lives, but they cannot.”2

  Claude and Ruth were by all accounts a devoted couple, and lived well on a combination of the Spaaks’ art collection and Ruth’s eventual inheritance. Claude died in 1990 at the age of eighty-five, and Ruth died shortly after.

  Charles Spaak

  After the war, critics excoriated Claude’s brother Charles for writing screenplays for the German-owned Continental Films. Some artists in his situation were barred from working due to their collaborationist histories, but Charles’s support for Suzanne’s activities exonerated him. His daughters Catherine and Agnès became well-known movie actresses in the 1960s.

  René Magritte

  Claude Spaak and Magritte never resumed their friendship and creative partnership. Magritte struggled to recapture his earlier spark. For a while he survived by painting forgeries of the works of Paul Klee, Titian, and Max Ernst (Ernst liked the forgery so much that he signed it), then drifted into painting soft-focus nudes.3 By 1960 his reputation rebounded. He bought Georgette an elegant new home and died a prosperous man. A major museum in Brussels is dedicated entirely to him. His portrait of Suzanne is considered an important work, but the subject has generally been described as “Claude Spaak’s wife.”

  Leopold Trepper and Heinz Pannwitz

  Leopold Trepper’s life continued to veer between the terrifying and the picaresque. With the liberation of Paris, he emerged from hiding and reported to Moscow, but he met a chilly reception. The directors of Soviet intelligence were deeply suspicious of Trepper and his “Great Game.”Trepper claimed that he had tricked the Gestapo into believing that he was serving as its double agent, when he was actually working as Moscow’s triple agent. His minders in Moscow were unconvinced. In September 1944 Trepper showed up on the Spaaks’ doorstop. He asked Claude to verify his story, and Claude wrote out a report. He placed it in a yellow envelope and dispatched Pilette to drop it off at the Soviet embassy near Invalides.

  But to no avail. In 1945 the Soviets bundled Trepper and a dozen other agents onto a plane to Moscow. Shortly after he arrived, he was ordered to write out a detailed description of his wartime activities. Then he was hauled off to the notorious Lubianka Prison.

  A few months later, his interrogator came into his cell and announced that a Gestapo officer, Heinz Pannwitz, had just landed at the Moscow airport, proposing to cast his lot with the Soviets. He offered his expertise to break the codes of the British and the Americans, but the Soviets had other ideas and placed him under arrest.

  Trepper was startled. “That same night, Pannwitz and his accomplices slept in Lubianka,” he wrote. “History had played an enormous joke: the head of the Red Orchestra and the head of the Gestapo task force, a few meters apart, in the same prison.”4 The two men passed the time comparing notes on their wartime contest. Heinz Pannwitz would be imprisoned by the Soviets until 1955; Leopold Trepper walked out of Lubianka only a year earlier. Trepper rejoined his long-suffering wife, Luba, and their two sons, and they returned to their native Poland. But it was an unhappy choice. In the early 1970s the Polish Communist government carried out a massive anti-Semitic campaign, and Trepper was barred from leaving the country. An international campaign was launched to win his freedom with the support of Red Orchestra survivors, enlisting Claude Spaak, Charles Lederman, and Harry Sokol’s brother Jacques.5 Trepper was allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1974 and died there eight years later. He was given a hero’s burial that was attended by a host of high-ranking Israeli officials, including Ariel Sharon.

  Rudolf Rathke

  British intelligence files dated March 1945 recorded Rathke’s surrender. “A 42-year-old native of Stettin. He was a member of the Gestapo, but deserted to the American troops in the hope of saving his skin. He talked willingly, without, of course, compromising himself. However, he gave the impression of a man with a burdened conscience, his attitude having been one of constant fear. At times he seemed to regret his surrender and voiced intentions of escaping or committing suicide.”

  Theodor Dannecker

  Dannecker, the SS officer who ordered the Vel d’Hiv arrests, expanded his mandate to include Jewish children. His superiors recalled him from Paris in late 1942 under charges of corruption and misconduct. He organized deportations from several other countries until the end of the war, and was captured by American forces. He committed suicide in an American prison camp on December 10, 1945, at the age of thirty-two.

  Alois Brunner

  In July 1943, the thirty-one-year-old SS commander was placed in charge of the internment camp at Drancy and instructed to expedite the deportations from Paris. He escaped after the war and eventually made his way to Syria, where he instructed security services in the use of electrical torture devices. His whereabouts were a mystery until 2017, when reports emerged that he had spent his final years incarcerated in a Damascus basement, where he died in 2001 at the age of eighty-nine.

  Helmut Knochen

  Knochen was the thirty-year-old SS officer placed in charge of security in Paris in 1940, and his jurisdiction was later expanded across northern France. He oversaw the pursuit of thousands of Jews, as well as members of the French resistance and British SOE agents. After the war he was tried and sentenced to death (sequentially) in British and French courts, but the sentences were commuted. In 1962, he was released by President Charles de Gaulle. He died in Germany in 2003 at the age of ninety-three.

  Klaus Barbie

  In November 1942, the twenty-nine-year-old SS officer was placed in charge of the Gestapo office in Lyon. There he oversaw the torture and murder of members of the French resistance, including Jean Moulin, and the deportation of numerous Jews, including forty-four children from the orphanage at Izieu. In 1947, he was recruited by the US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). The French attempted to extradite him, but he escaped, allegedly with the help of US intelligence. In 1983, he was finally extradited from Bolivia to France, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He
died of cancer in a Lyon prison in 1991.

  Robert Debré and Elisabeth de la Panouse, Countess de la Bourdonnaye (“Dexia”)

  Robert Debré was widely recognized as the foremost French pediatrician of his time. The couple married in 1956, and the countess continued to support his medical work. She suffered terrible losses in the final months of the war in Europe. Her son Geoffroy, the gallant tank commander, was killed in January 1945 in a battle in Alsace. Later she learned that her younger son Guy, who had been captured on his way to join the Free French, had died in a German concentration camp the same month.

  Robert Debré was luckier. His children not only survived the war but his son Michel triumphed in peacetime. He became the principal author of the new French Constitution in 1958, and was named prime minister shortly afterward. Michel moved into the Hôtel Matignon on the Rue de Varennes—the official residence, next door to the apartment where the countess, his new stepmother, had hidden a dozen Jewish children from La Clairière.

  The countess died in 1972 at the age of seventy-four, and Robert Debré died five years later at the age of ninety-five. The Hôpital Universitaire Robert-Debré, the leading pediatric hospital in France, was named after him, and the Centre Elisabeth de la Panouse-Debré children’s clinic was named after her.

  Paul Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot

  Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot returned to their callings at the Oratoire and La Clairière after the war. The pastor’s family paid a heavy price for their commitment to the Resistance. Eighteen-year-old Sylvain returned from Buchenwald bearing the physical and psychological scars of his ordeal. Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston, who was arrested after picking up an airdrop from London, died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in March 1944 at the age of thirty-five.