Codename Suzette

by Anne Nelson

  On average I receive two parcels from the Red Cross per month, a large one (one pound of sugar, jam, fruit paste, some shortbread, apples, a quarter pound of butter, two packages of Gruyère, and five bars of milk chocolate), and a small one (one pound of prune jam, gingerbread, cookies, cremosine, and five bars of chocolate). You see that is enough. The proof is that I never eat my entire bread ration, and I assure you that I am rather less thin than before. “But Maman, what do you do all day?”Well, my dear, it’s incredible what you can do when you’re not allowed to do ANYTHING! First of all, we think of those we love and I have already told you, it is a great comfort. Then I shine my floor, it’s good exercise and when it’s very bright I am very proud! Then I “walk” (once a week a “real” walk outside). Finally, one becomes very ingenious and I knit with small bits of straw and I embroider during the day with a tooth of my comb.

  I made myself a game of dominoes by cutting letters from the newspaper that we are given as toilet paper (which also serves me to practice in German) and finally, I wrote several little poems for you (don’t make fun of me!) that I do not find bad at all. I send you, my dear, something that is very precious to me and whose story is here: one day, my guard brought me a very small bouquet, and imagine, it was March 27th! The day of our wedding anniversary! I kept these flowers (you see that I am also a framer) and they have been on my table ever since. I am glad to think that they will now go to be near you. Hang them near your bed and every night and every morning, it’s a little bit of your maman who will bid you goodnight and good morning.

  I assure you that I am very well and I have not even had a cold all winter.

  Believe that all I have told you is strictly correct and that I do not embellish anything. I believe that I have been given a character that easily adapts to everything. I especially believe that when your CONSCIENCE IS AT PEACE you can always find joy in life.

  Of course, the first two weeks were painful, but by the end of November I had already found the rhythm I described to you. And even with their monotony, after some time the days seem to pass quickly despite everything.

  For the past three weeks I’ve had the right to have books (what a delight!). And a guard has provided me what I need to knit and crochet. But for a long time I have had permission to have a New Testament, which is a very fortifying reading, I would like you to read a few verses from time to time, my darling, and reflect on them well. Even if you don’t believe in God, you can try to exercise Christian morality, which seems to me admirable from every point of view. (My darling, be patient with your brother and tell him that you must replace me at his side.)

  Now my big girl, my darling little Pilette, I will see you SOON and I will say goodbye very quickly so I have the strength to do it. I won’t speak of all the kisses, all the tenderness, there’s too much!

  My beloved little Bazou. Yesterday was your birthday and by a fortunate coincidence I had permission to write to you today! Naturally, everything I say to Pilette is for you as well (as for all those who love me) and I only want to speak of your thirteen years, darling, which you have celebrated without your mother being able to embrace you. But a little more patience, my little man, and we will soon be all together. I also have a small gift for you! And I believe that you have never received one that is so ugly and poorly made, but I am sure you never received one made with more love. This poor little necktie (I am also sending you my “needles” to knit) took me almost two months to make, and each stitch contains a tender thought, and more kisses than I have ever given you. I hope you are working well and that you do not forget that after the war you should go back to Henri IV with the boys your age. I also hope that you will have plenty of poems and plays to show me. My darling, it is difficult to choose from all I want to tell you, there is so little room! Are you careful not to eat too fast and to chew well? Do you avoid quarrelling with your sister? Do you still like“hist”? Am I still your“Tigrimounette”? I would like to go on for a long time, but all the good things have an end, and since I left Pilette very quickly I will do the same for you, but my dear, HAVE FAITH and À BIENTÔT.

  notes

  | CHAPTER 1 | strangers

  1. Interview, Anthony Palliser, Paris, March 8, 2015.

  2. La découverte de feu, 1935, and Le modèle rouge, 1935, currently in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Claude’s acquisitions were not to everyone’s taste. His brother-in-law, Milo Happé, consigned his Magrittes to the attic, but they would eventually contribute to his family fortune. Interview, Tommy Happé, December 3, 2014.

  3. The Comité Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme (Women’s Committee against War and Fascism), which had ties to the Communist Party.

  4. Pirotte gained renown for documenting the French Resistance in Marseille. She used Bunny’s Leica until her death in 2000. See “Julia Pirotte,” International Center for Photography, https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/julia-pirotte?all/all/all/all/0.

  5. Gilles Perrault, The Red Orchestra (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 101.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., 103.

  8. Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 134.

  9. See the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), n.d., Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, US Department of State, http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.

  10. The French tended to use the terms litwak (Lithuanian) or, less frequently, polonais (Polish) as general designations for persons from regions that included parts of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic region.

  | CHAPTER 2 | the real war

  1. Major D. Barlone, A French Officer’s Diary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4.

  2. Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010), 451.

  3. Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001), 19.

  4. These “special units” included the Twenty-First, Twenty-Second, and Twenty-Third Foreign Infantry Battalions and the Foreign Legion’s Half-Brigade No. 13. See Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 20.

  5. Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: The Man Who Made the World Look New (New York: Arcade, 1996), 63.

  6. Paul Belien, A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005), 199–200.

  7. Michel Dumoulin, Spaak (Brussels: Éditions Racine, 1999), 159.

  8. Belien, AThrone in Brussels, 201.

  9. Ibid.

  10. René Magritte, Catalogue raisonnée, vol. 2 (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 1997), 8.

  11. René Magritte, La ligne de la vie, manuscript, National Art Library, London, 1938, 8.

  12. Magritte, Catalogue raisonnée, vol. 2, 81–82; interview with Pilette Spaak, June 16, 2012.

  13. Magritte, Catalogue raisonnée, vol. 2, 81.

  14. Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 180.

  15. Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 30.

  16. The account of Suzanne and Claude Spaak’s flight from Paris is drawn from interviews with Pilette and Bazou Spaak, and from Dumoulin, Spaak.

  17. Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 20–21.

  18. “Maréchal Petain’s Speech of 17 June 1940,” Vichy Web, maintained by Simon Kitson, French Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/vichy/english.htm.

  19. Sherry Mangan, “Paris under the Swastika,” Life, September 16, 1940, 78.

  20. Léon Blum’s brother René, the impresario of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, was in New York at the time of the invasion. He returned to France to be with his family, and would perish in a gas chamber in Auschwitz
two years later. Léon Blum himself miraculously survived a show trial, Buchenwald, and Dachau.

  21. Susan Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 47.

  22. Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 145–46.

  23. Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 52.

  24. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 13.

  25. Thomas Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89.

  26. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 171.

  27. Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 53.

  28. Ibid., 54.

  29. Adam Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005), 27–29.

  30. Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 220.

  | CHAPTER 3 | paris by night

  1. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 45.

  2. Central Intelligence Agency, The Rote Kapelle: The CIA’s History of Soviet Intelligence and Espionage Networks in Western Europe, 1936–1945 (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1979), 39. See also Perrault, The Red Orchestra, 102. According to the CIA’s account, Mira Sokol may have received a payment from a suspected Soviet agent as early as 1939 (The Rote Kapelle, 357).

  3. Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 56–57.

  4. David Diamant, Le billet vert (Paris: Renouveau, 1977), 87.

  5. Ibid., 89, 96.

  6. Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 56–57.

  7. Léon Chertok, Memoires: Les résistances d’un psy (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 80–81.

  8. Ibid., 81.

  9. Jacques Bielinky, Journal, 1940–1942: Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), cited in Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 59.

  10. Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 60.

  11. Perrault, The Red Orchestra, 103–5.

  12. Ibid.

  13. “B. Aronson,” “Suzanne Spaak, sauveteur d’enfants Juifs,” Naïe Presse, March 9, 1945, Archives du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris, CCXVIII-88a.

  14. Chertok, Memoires, 86.

  15. Adam Rayski, Nos illusions perdues (Paris: Éditions Balland, 1985), 99.

  16. Chertok, Memoires, 117.

  17. Jeremy Josephs, Swastika over Paris: The Fate of the French Jews (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 37.

  18. Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 23.

  19. Ibid., 45.

  20. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 281.

  21. Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 77.

  22. Adam Rayski, “Testimony,” Archives du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, DLXI_84, 6. Rayski’s undated statement begins, “A. Raisky, who is no longer in agreement with certain ideas of the Communist Party, has preferred to reclaim his independence. Nonetheless he maintains a faithful memory of the past, which allows him to evoke with great honesty the actions of resistance of Communist Jews. He directed the UJRE [the successor organization to Solidarité] until 1949.”

  23. R. Cardinne-Petit, Les secrets de la Comédie Française: 1936–1945 (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1958), 220.

  24. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1970), 436.

  25. Jean Cocteau, L’Impromptu du Palais-Royal (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962), quoted in Claude Bourgelin and Marie-Claude Shapira, Lire Cocteau (Lyon: Presses Universitaires Lyon, 1992), 66.

  26. Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 468–69.

  27. Colette, directed by Yannick Bellon, 1951, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqEa9cVRGlk.

  28. Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh, 422–23.

  29. Michel Lincourt, In Search of Elegance: Towards an Architecture of Satisfaction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 162.

  30. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel was wildly popular in occupied France. The Nazis banned it in response, and prices for illegal copies shot up. Mitchell was amused at the idea of Scarlett’s flinty Irish father, Gerald O’Hara, exclaiming, “Oo la la.” See Anita Price, The Margaret Mitchell Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 78.

  31. Patricia Volk, Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 123.

  32. In early 1942, Feferman and his partners joined the FTP-MOI, but their days were numbered. In May, Feferman and another youth were apprehended by police. He swallowed a tablet of cyanide and shouted “Vive la France et le Communisme” and, as a guarantee, fired his last bullet into his head. He was twenty-one years old. See David Diamant, Jeune combat: La jeunesse juive dans la Résistance (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1993), 39.

  33. See Cobb, The Resistance, 77–84.

  34. Jean-Jacques Bernard, Le Camp de la morte lente (Paris: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2006).

  35. Maurice Goudeket, Près de Colette (Paris: Flammarion, 1956), 203.

  36. Le Petit Parisien, December 31, 1941, 1.

  37. Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 49.

  | CHAPTER 4 | la plaque tournante

  1. Interview, Antoinette Spaak, Brussels, November 2014.

  2. Charles Lederman, unpublished memoirs, collection of Claudie Bassi-Lederman, 144.

  3. Radio Paris ment and Messages personnels, BBC, Jalons, http://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu00282/bbc-radio-paris-ment-et-messages-personnels.html.

  4. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 177.

  5. Vinen, The Unfree French, 118–22.

  6. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Polish Victims,” in Holocaust Enyclopedia, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005473.

  7. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), xv.

  8. Robert Belleret, “Premier convoi pour Auschwitz,” Le Monde, March 26, 2002, www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2002/03/26/premier-convoi-pour-auschwitz_268264_3232.html.

  9. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1972), 405.

  10. Rayski, “Testimony,” 10. See also Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner, eds., Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  11. Rayski, “Testimony,” 12.

  12. Ibid., 13.

  13. Jeanne List-Pakin, “Testimony,”Archives du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris, Document DLXXXVII-7, 2.

  14. Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, and Adam Rayski, L’Affiche Rouge: Immigranten und Juden in der französischen Résistance (Berlin: Schwarze Risse Verlag, 1994), 107.

  15. See Chertok, Memoires, and Rayski, Nos Illusions Perdues, for descriptions of their clandestine life.

  16. Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions: La Résistance et le “problème juif,” 1940–1944 (Paris: Libraire Arthème Fayard, 2008), 225–26. Poznanski records that J’Accuse was launched in April 1942 under Mouni Nadler but modified its subtitle several times that year. The MNCR archives begin with an edition identified as “No. 1,” dated October 10, 1942: http://archives.mrap.fr/images/c/c0/Jaccuse_1opt.pdf.

  17. Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, 190–91.

  18. Cédric Gruat and Cécile Leblanc, Amis des Juifs: Les résistants aux étoiles (Paris: Éditions Tirésias, 2005), 45, quoted in Ronald Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light un
der German Occuption, 1940–1944 (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), chapter 7.

  | CHAPTER 5 | monsieur henri

  1. Perrault, The Red Orchestra, 130.

  2. Guillaume Bourgeois, L’Orchestre rouge (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2015), 136.

  3. W. F. Flicke, Rote Kapelle: Spionage und Widerstand (Augsburg, Germany: Weltbild Verlag, 1990), 161–62.

  4. Harry’s brother Jacques, a Communist architect based in Brussels, was also arrested on suspicion of involvement in his brother’s activities. Jacques survived the war. See Central Intelligence Agency, The Rote Kapelle, 356.

  5. Betty Depelsenaire, Symphony Fraternelle (Brussels: Lumen, 1942).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., 22.

  8. V. E. Tarrant, The Red Orchestra: The Soviet Spy Network Inside Nazi Europe (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1995), 39–41. See also Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), and Flicke, Rote Kapelle.

  9. Leopold Trepper, with Patrick Rotman, Le Grand Jeu (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1975), 240.

  10. Trepper, The Great Game, 164.

  | CHAPTER 6 | spring wind, winter stadium

  1. Hélène Berr, Journal, trans. David Bello (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008), 51.

  2. Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, 250.

  3. Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, 159.

  4. Claudie Bassi-Lederman and Roland Wlos, “La rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv, ou le ‘sombre jeudi,’” L’Humanité, July 6, 2012. See also Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 86.

  5. Rayski, Nos illusions perdues, 128.

  6. Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2008), 265.

  7. Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 86.

  8. Michel Laffitte, “The Velodrome d’Hiver Round-up: July 16 and 17, 1942,” Sciences Po, http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/va-lodrome-da-hiver-round-july-16-and-17-1942.