| 1945–2017 |
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 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.
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.
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’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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
After the war the MNCR emerged as a legal organization, and Pastor Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot joined its board. The group’s leaders took an active role in aiding France’s shell-shocked Jewish population.
The Communist lawyer became a prominent politician in the postwar era, benefiting from the prestige the Communist Party had won with its resistance efforts. He served for many years as a senator and judge on the High Court of Justice (Haute cour de justice).
Like many of his counterparts, Rayski returned to Poland after the war to help build a new Communist Poland. But he soon ran afoul of the Communist Party and returned to France, where he was implicated in a Polish espionage case. He later became a leading historian of the Jewish resistance. He called his 1985 memoir Our Lost Illusions. Rayski died in 2008 at the age of eighty-five. His son, Benoît, the hidden child, became a noted author and critic who published a controversial 2012 article describing himself as an “Islamophobe.”
The handsome psychiatrist moved to New York in 1947 and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he became an early advocate of the use of hypnosis in American psychiatry. Then he returned to France and developed a reputation as a renegade theorist. Chertok died in 1991 at the age of eighty. His son Grégoire became a managing partner at a Rothschild merchant bank.
Sophie Schwartz, Peggy Camplan, and the Milhauds devoted years of their lives to caring for the Jewish orphans. Sophie took many of them under her wing, and remained especially close to Larissa Gruszow. Sophie died in 1999 at the age of ninety-five.I
Hélène and her parents, Raymond and Antoinette, were arrested on March 7, 1944, held in Drancy for two weeks, then deported to Auschwitz. Antoinette was gassed on April 30, 1944, and Raymond was murdered in September. Hélène was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, a few weeks after Anne Frank died of the same cause in the same camp, and a few days before the camp’s liberation.
Larissa’s father returned from his POW camp after the war and took her to Poland with his second wife, but she was unhappy there. She received an engineering degree and returned to Belgium, where she lived with her husband and two children. She and Pilette and Bazou Spaak remain close friends.
After the war, Peggy Camplan told her charges at Renouveau that the master list of rescued children had been buried under a tree at Suzanne’s country house in Choisel. That list has not been found. The available evidence suggests that all of the children rescued by the network survived the occupation.
The Yad Vashem memorial in Israel is charged with identifying non-Jews who risked their safety or their freedom to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust, with no expectation of personal gain. The process requires rigorous documentation. Suzanne Spaak was designated Righteous Among the Nations in 1985. Since then, at least fourteen members of her network have been so honored. Others include: Fernand and Odette Béchard (Oratoire parishioners); Marguerite Camplan (MNCR); Louis and Hélène Cardon (sheltered Larissa Gruszow); Simone and Adrien Chaye (sheltered children from the La Clairière rescue); Lucie Chevalley-Sabatier (founder of Entr’aide Temporaire); Noémie Fradin (sheltered Benoît Rayski and others); Marcelle Guillemot (social worker at La Clairière); Marie Marteau (ran the Hotel Stella, used as a way station for the network); and Paul and Marcelle Vergara (pastor of the Oratoire and his wife).
I. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s online archives contain a video interview with her under the name of “Sophie Micnik.”