| 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 away 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.I
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.II 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.III 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.IV 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.
The morning of February 15 dawned unseasonably mild. The curfew had ended at 6:00 a.m., but the streets were still dark and empty when Suzanne and Pilette left the apartment at seven. They walked past the Place des Victoires and the grand equestrian statue of Louis XIV and on through the shadowy streets to the Rue Greneta in the Marais.
A few miles away, in the northern eighteenth arrondissement, clusters of Protestant and Jewish women began to appear at the UGIF orphanages. One group made its way to the four-story building at 16 Rue Lamarck signposted ASILE DE NUIT, ASILE DE JOUR, ET CRÈCHE ISRAÉLITE (“Night Shelter, Day Shelter, and Jewish Nursery”). Others arrived at the smaller, equally bleak building at 9 Rue Guy Patin in the ninth arrondissement.
They told the staff they had come to take the children for their weekly walk and presented their identity cards for inspection. Then each departed with one or more children.
Once they were outside, the older children could make their own way to the Marais, but the smaller children had to be guided through the city. The women held their hands and spoke soothingly as they passed shops and produce stands stirring to life. When they reached Rue Greneta they entered La Clairière’s dingy entryway, which led to a large room with a vaulted ceiling where lunch was served to the poor. Marcelle Guillemot had put up a notice that there would be no lunch that day.
Pilette watched them arrive. They were different from the children she knew. Their heads had been shaved for lice and many wore a Star of David on their clothing, required for all Jews over the age of six. She thought they looked like refugees in their ragged clothes and battered shoes with no laces. One stubbly-haired girl of seven gripped a newspaper over her star with one hand and clutched her little brother’s hand with the other. Another arrived with a baby in her arms.
A pair of twin boys arrived wearing matching Dutch boy caps. Pilette was enchanted.
“Mother,” she whispered, “can we take them home?”
“No,” Suzanne answered firmly. “It would be too dangerous.”
By nine o’clock many of the children had arrived—more than expected. There were some happy accidents. Two sisters were reunited with their two brothers who had been separated from them after their parents were deported. Suzanne worked alongside an MNCR activist named Marguerite “Peggy” Camplan, who would become her closest ally. An attractive dark-haired woman in her forties, Camplan was a Protestant by birth and a Communist by conviction. It was whispered that her husband was Jewish and had changed his name from Kaplan.17 Of the five known accounts of the rescue, Peggy Camplan’s was the most detailed. “The crowd of children arrived carrying their meager bundles, and some without anything at all,” she wrote.
They were either trusting or frightened, depending on how much they knew. By that evening there were 60 of them in the Great Hall of Patronage where their destiny would be decided. Madame Spaak was there to receive them, reassure them, amuse them.18
The children were hungry. The soup Pilette ladled out had been furnished by Marshal Pétain’s relief fund, his propaganda showpiece. (“O ironie!” Peggy Camplan exclaimed.)
The children’s next stop was a desk occupied by Suzanne and an assistant. Camplan reported:
The afternoon of the first day of the Coup de l’UGIF was devoted to carefully noting the children’s names, birthdates, family addresses, and addresses of UGIF facilities. Their ages ranged from 3 to 18. We had to think of the possible return of parents who had escaped deportation and searched for their children, which had already happened.19
Once their data was recorded, the children were shuttled to temporary havens. “Everyone helped, the women from the [MNCR], the women from the Oratoire,” wrote Peggy Camplan.
Madame Spaak appeared pleased from the beginning with this success, but she didn’t lose sight of the rapid action required by this business, because it was impossible to keep all of these children in this spot for long without attracting attention.
Their deadline was the midnight curfew; the younger children needed to be safe in bed before then. At ten o’clock, Suzanne took stock. Her goal of placing all of the young children in homes was almost realized.
She had mobilized an extraordinary team effort. “Pastor Vergara telephoned in all directions to find temporary beds,” Camplan wrote.
Madame Spaak provided the example; she took many children herself and placed others with her friends . . . . The women of the [MNCR] also took them and placed them, even with Jews who were already in hiding, and who thus showed proof of their great support.
Pastor Vergara and several of his [grown] children took some in, as well as Pastor Vidal and a large number of parishioners from l’Oratoire. Even people in humble lodgings in the neighborhood, and concierges . . . . It was magnifique! Of course, this temporary distribution was carefully recorded.
A handful of Jewish teenagers remained, but they could spend the night at La Clairière on benches. However, there were still five small children who needed beds. Suzanne located a spot for them with a concièrge on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, but it was a mile away and the escorts were already heading out, anxious to reach home before the Métro shut down for the night. Whoever took the children would have to travel on foot and still make it home before curfew. Suzanne turned to Pilette. She set out into the night with the five children in tow.
The streetlights were extinguished as a precaution against air raids. It was slow going in the dark, and the children were hard to shepherd. They had been starved and shut in for weeks, and now they limped along the blacked-out streets. Pilette prodded them, anxious about the time. Finally she arrived at the address and rang the bell.
The concièrge opened the door and peered out. “Bring them upstairs,” she said. Pilette and the children trudged up seven floors to a small chamber. The woman’s own five children were piled on the bed, sleeping soundly, and she shook them awake. “Allez!” They tumbled out of the bed and the new arrivals took their place. The concièrge’s children stumbled down the stairs to sleep with their mother.
Pilette left for the Palais Royal, skirting police patrols and peering into the shadows. The darkness made it difficult. Some women installed small bulbs in the toes of their shoes to light their way, powered by batteries in the soles, but Pilette had no such device.
When she finally arrived at the apartment, all was silent. She tiptoed into Bazou’s room. Her brother was sound asleep in his bed, Claude was off with Ruth, and Suzanne was, yet again, absent. Pilette had just completed the most terrifying mission of her life—but there was no one to tell.
Suzanne and her colleagues spent the night at La Clairière working on the formidable record-keeping challenge. They had assembled a list of people in the countryside who had agreed to accept a child, recording their preferences for a boy or a girl. This was compared with a roster prepared the previous day, listing the children and their attributes.20
“The next day, Tuesday, February 16, ten new children arrived,” Camplan wrote.
Like those who came earlier, they were fed and sheltered at La Clairière until we could find them a temporary spot. But the big job of the second day was to work out, in writing, the permanent distribution of this continually growing flock.
Suzette—Madame Spaak’s codename—had gathered an entire staff around her at La Clairière. The children were distributed among the placements on offer, taking into account as much as possible the requests regarding age and sex.
The next group to join the effort was the Oratoire’s Girl Scout troop. Its twenty-three-year-old leader, Simone Chefneux, sent the girls to La Clairière to receive their assignments as convoyeuses, or children’s escorts. Madame Camplan reported:
On the third day, Wednesday, February 17 (which saw fifteen new children arrive), we executed the plans of the previous day. Each convoyeuse was given her assignment to take the children to either a temporary hiding place or to the countryside, where they would be introduced to the neighbors as a little refugee. The child was saved!
The departures followed rapidly, but children from the Jewish quarter continued to arrive. By the end of the week, Marcelle Guillemot found the number of young guests had risen to ninety.21
She had reason to be anxious. The sudden influx of children had naturally aroused curiosity on the street. Nosy shopkeepers were told that the children had been bombed out of their homes in the suburbs by British air raids. Still, there were informers everywhere, and the unusual events at the soup kitchen could turn curiosity into suspicion. Once the children were safe, the women set to work erasing all traces of their operation. Camplan wrote:
On the fourth day, Thursday the 18th, we burned all of the papers and labels bearing the compromising names. We took the boxes of the remaining clothes to a neighboring seamstress and gave a brave grocer the lists from the children’s files. She hid them for months in a bottle rack in the back of the store, and we opened a private door when we wanted to consult them.22
The seamstress removed the yellow stars from the children’s clothes and burned them, then dismantled the garments and stored them with her rags.
On Thursday police appeared on the Rue Greneta asking questions. Shortly afterward, officers from the Vichy Commission for Jewish Affairs descended on the Oratoire, but by then all evidence of the operation had vanished. Peggy Camplan wrote:
From that point on, we adopted more discreet tactics. The children didn’t come from the UGIF any more, because the Coup had been so successful that it couldn’t be repeated without danger.
The operation’s success caused more complications. News of the rescue at La Clairière had flown through the Jewish community. Relatives, friends, and neighbors appeared on its doorstep, pleading on behalf of their children. The women at La Clairière gave them temporary addresses from their list of reliable hosts, and Suzanne or a colleague from the MNCR came by every day to drop off the name of the contact who would oversee the permanent placement. Remarkably, La Clairière continued to function as a soup kitchen and community center with only a brief pause.
After the war Claude Spaak reported that a dozen Jewish children were taken to the Spaaks’ country house in Choisel—a fact that Suzanne successfully hid from her own children.23 The other host families ran the gamut of French society. Many of Pastor Vergara’s parishioners were families of professional men who collected the children from La Clairière the same day they were called.24 The Meunier family had been hiding Jewish children since the Vel d’Hiv. Now the pastor turned to them again, asking them to take a group of children between the ages of four and seven. Michèle, sixteen, worried about her family’s “mean concièrge.”
“We were afraid she would turn us in, so the children came and went quickly so as not to attract attention,” she recalled. “The children weren’t traumatized. They didn’t realize what had happened to their parents, and we didn’t either. But one little boy, 5 or 6 years old, would pray, ‘Mon Dieu, please bring my parents back.’ ”25 Over the coming months, Vergara continued to send children to the Meuniers until they could find places in the countryside. Michèle estimated that her family sheltered some fifteen children over the year.
Many more havens were needed, and Suzanne sought out every node of her network, including the Countess de la Bourdonnaye. Dexia had been assisting Robert Debré and was known as his nurse (though some called her his “secretary”). She supported the operation at La Clairière and offered her luxurious apartment on 55 Rue de Varenne as a hiding place. She took in over a dozen children, including Armand Boruchowicz, the boy from Guy Patin whose friends had been caught hiding in the basement.26
For Dexia and Debré, resistance was a family affair. Their older children by their first marriages were fighting with de Gaulle’s forces, but Dexia’s youngest daughter, Oriane, was still living at home. She had sung the “Marseillaise” in the famous student demonstration against the Nazis on the Champs-Élysées in 1940; now she had to be more discreet. Nevertheless, she maintained her feisty spirit: “We used to cut Métro tickets in a V and the Cross of Lorraine and leave them on the floor of the subway.”V
Oriane’s new task was to hide the children. The countess’s apartment had six bedrooms, a garden, and a grand salon, but there were logistical challenges. Her elegant street served as a thoroughfare for the occupation hierarchy. The Wehrmacht’s military tribunal was located a few doors down, and Pierre Laval had lived next door at the Hôtel Matignon until the previous November. Only a year earlier, the countess had gone to prison and risked deportation for hiding her fellow Musée de l’Homme resisters in her apartment.
Dexia and Oriane sneaked the Jewish children, aged seven to ten, past the neighbors and the concierge and installed them in Oriane’s room. “We played little games. They were adorable, hiding in the banquettes.” Oriane also witnessed their pathos. “One of them said, ‘Madame, can you tell me, did they arrest Maman because I didn’t know my catechism?’ ”27
Before they could be moved to the countryside, the children needed a new identity and ration cards. The rescuers started out by obtaining blanks or “scrubbing” old cards. Suzanne took on the task of scrubbing them using Dr. Debré’s hospital laboratory. “Madame Spaak was in charge of the first ones,” Camplan noted, “but her methods took a long time because she had to go through a group that worked outside Paris. She often traveled with the fake cards in her bodice or sent them through the mail, one by one, under the cover of a new hardback book marked ‘printed matter.’ ”28
More shelters were needed, and Suzanne continued to reach out. One contact was Jacques Grou-Radenez. The master printer, known as a “friend of the poets,” dined with the Spaak family on occasion. His most recent project was training members of the Gaullist student movement Défense de la France, offering them a printing press and lightning apprenticeships for their underground newspaper of the same name.
Grou-Radenez and his wife had five children of their own, but at Suzanne’s request they took in five Jewish children and welcomed more over the coming months.29 It was a courageous decision; Grou-Radenez was already placing his family at risk through his work printing Défense de la France. But he and his wife, deeply principled Catholics, would not turn the children away.
Next, Suzanne contacted the ladies of Entr’aide Temporaire, perhaps through the Oratoire’s Odette Béchard. Suzanne began by meeting with the group’s president, Denise Milhaud of the UGIF underground, and Hélène Berr’s cousin Nicole Schneiderman.
“We didn’t know about the action of La Clairière when Madame Spaak proposed to me that we take in children,” recalled Milhaud. “I hesitated, because I wasn’t even sure it was Madame Spaak.”30 But Milhaud decided to trust her, and Entr’aide joined Suzanne’s rapidly expanding network.VI
The children were safe from immediate danger, but now the next stage began. More ration and identification cards were needed. Sophie Schwartz and Solidarité contributed counterfeits from the Jewish Communists and the FTP-MOI underground. Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot set up forgery workshops and collection points for Red Cross supplies in church facilities.
The Oratoire’s Girl Scouts rode the rails accompanying the children to the countryside, and a young congregant named Maurice Nosley took children to four host families in Saône-et-Loire, working with Entr’aide Temporaire and Hélène and Denise Berr.31
Finally, the children were all registered, documented, and placed. After a cooling-off period, the rosters were placed in hermetically sealed jars and buried in a garden in the suburb of Goussainville, where Sophie Schwartz had her lodgings.
Sophie Schwartz’s lieutenants served as a vital link between the rescuers and Jewish families in hiding: if relatives could be convinced to bring their children directly to the network, they would lessen their risk of arrest in the UGIF facilities. Sick children were sent to Léon Chertok and his MNCR medical committee, with the support of Robert Debré. Debré and his colleagues were often able to place them in non-Jewish clinics.
But the network required money, in large quantities. The MNCR paid an average of 1,000 francs a month per child to cover room and board in the metropolitan area. Areas outside Paris were less expensive but still cost around 750 francs a month. In one day, the operation at La Clairière added sixty-three children to the account, which meant an additional 60,000 francs a month. This was a daunting figure, even for a Belgian heiress.
Suzanne embarked on a massive fund-raising campaign. She had formerly shunned Parisian high society, but now her pedigree was useful. Pilette was delighted to see her dowdy mother decked out as a woman of fashion. The burgundy suit and hats were called into action, and she kept her hair trimmed and coiffed in the updated style that flattered her new nose. Claude had given her a gold bracelet the previous year. By the time she added her new fur coat, Pilette thought “she looked like a star!”
Suzanne continued to expand her network. Robert Debré connected her to the leading physicians of Paris, while Entr’aide Temporaire introduced her to banking and business circles. Scores of participants from half a dozen groups had taken part in the rescue; now they would cover the expenses of hundreds of Jewish children at a cost of some 300,000 francs a month.32 The Oratoire took up regular collections, and Pastor Vergara commissioned a church deacon named Maurice-William Girardot to deliver the funds to Suzanne at the Palais Royal.
Suzanne gave her donors a choice of payment plans. Some of them opted for a onetime contribution; others chose a subscription plan. Suzanne’s artist friend Valentine Hugo made a single contribution, while her screenwriter brother-in-law Charles Spaak signed up for a 5,000-franc monthly subscription, enough to support five children. (This would have surprised his critics, who took a dim view of the screenplays he wrote for the German-owned Continental Films.) Suzanne gave what she could from her own allowance and asked her relatives for more. Every possible source of funding was explored, from far-flung Rothschilds to destitute Jewish families in Belleville.
But Suzanne scored her biggest coup closer to home. She knew that Colette was sympathetic to the cause, but her neighbor had become more reclusive, tormented by her arthritis and her fears for the safety of her Jewish husband.
A few weeks after le kidnapping at La Clairière, Suzanne knocked at her door and explained the situation. The next day Colette’s housekeeper, Pauline, appeared at the Spaaks’ bearing a large donation, along with a long typewritten list of names and addresses: two single-spaced pages, front and back.
Suzanne showed the list to Pilette. Colette had scoured her address book for friends who were good for a contribution or a place to stay, and above all who were absolutely trustworthy. With one gesture, Colette added scores of aristocrats, artists, and perceived collaborators (like herself) to a mission that had been launched by Polish Communist Jews and Protestant reformers.
This convergence suited Suzanne—it was, at heart, the quality that defined her. One of her Communist Jewish partners, Jeanne List-Pakin, saw Suzanne’s political independence as both her strength and her liability.
Not being a member of a political party, she didn’t believe that she was obliged to submit to strict discipline regarding clandestinity. In her impulsive heart, she wanted to offer her help to all of the resistance networks at the same time.33
Once the situation at La Clairière was under control, Suzanne returned to the house on Avenue Victor Hugo that had been the source of the original warning. She volunteered to take more children. “But please,” she asked, “from now on, not so many at once.”
I. Jacques Adler, a historian of the Jewish Communist movement, wrote that the warning was sent by the French Communist Party to the MNCR.
II. Pilette did not recall the man’s name. She thought he was the son of the chief rabbi of Paris, but it appears that Julien Weill was childless, making his nephew a reasonable guess. French researcher Gisèle Pierronet believed Suzanne learned of the impending event at a private dinner with Armand Kohn of the Rothschild Hospital.
III. Another uncle was Dr. Benjamin Weill-Hallé, a leading physician who supported the UGIF underground, along with his colleague Robert Debré.
IV. The exact timetable and the number of children rescued vary among the different accounts. However, sixty-three is the most widely accepted number of children involved.
V. The French Resistance had adopted the “V for Victory” slogan, and the Cross of Lorraine was the symbol of de Gaulle’s Free French.
VI. Unfortunately, Hélène Berr’s journal falls silent over the period in 1943 when the operation took place. But other entries mention her collaboration with Denise Milhaud, Lucie Chevalley, and Odette Béchard, all members of Entr’aide who took part in the operation.