Suzanne's Children Read online

  The invasion of the USSR altered the dynamics of French resistance. For the Sokols, it erased any possibility of emigrating. Harry had been lucky to get out of the camp when he did. The invasion freed Jewish Communists from the French Communist Party’s adherence to the nonaggression pact, and paved the way to action. In late June the Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité called for attacks on factories, German installations, and German troops. French Communists opened a new dialogue with the Gaullist resistance. In a heartbeat, the Soviets were transformed from the scourge of the Western democracies to their ally. Three weeks after the invasion, the British signed a mutual defense treaty with the Soviets.

  The French Communist Party’s leadership was torn. Party elders considered sabotage and bombings the tools of anarchists, and the initial response fell to the hotheaded youth of the party. The bataillons de la jeunesse, or “youth battalions,” launched minor attacks and protests, most of them impulsive and inconsequential. But the Germans seized the opportunity to link the events to their war against the Jews and launched a series of roundups and executions, culminating with the August arrest of over four thousand Jewish men. A German report noted that the measure took place “following a demonstration that was led by Jews, and to intimidate the whole Jewish community. . . . The collaboration of the French police [around 2,500 officers] was good.”21 On August 21, forty Jewish lawyers from the Paris bar were arrested, including French-born members of the profession, dashing any hope for redress through the legal system. The bataillons de la jeunesse escalated their attacks on German servicemen, often chosen at random, and the Germans retaliated by executing French hostages, a disproportionate number of them Jewish.

  The Jewish communities were thrown into confusion. Who was safe and who should go underground? Which of the rumors could be trusted? Sometimes uncertainty led to paralysis. Adam Rayski noted that Jewish men who went into hiding experienced “major psychological problems. It was not without difficulty that they left their family circle and went to live in complete secrecy. . . . At that moment, the awareness of danger wasn’t very clear. Not even the most sophisticated believed in the threat of extermination.”22

  In September 1941 the Spaaks decided to move to Paris. It wasn’t difficult to find housing. Stripped bare by the occupation, Paris offered prospective renters an abundance of desirable options. Claude had some friends who told him about an apartment in the Palais Royal. The immediate explanation for the move was Pilette’s education; there was no high school in Choisel.

  But Suzanne also needed to be closer to the action. Her early involvement in Solidarité was limited to low-level activities as she introduced herself to the members and earned their trust, but she was eager to do more. Her first order of business was to help with the tracts; if she wanted evidence of the power of propaganda, she didn’t need to look far. That fall the Germans opened an exhibit called “Le Juif et la France,” which offered a “scientific guide to recognizing a Jew.” Giant posters depicted Jewish writers and artists who had “taken over” French literature and cinema. The catalog’s cover showed a spider crouching on a Star of David imposed on a map of France. The exhibit ran for six months in Paris, where attendance exceeded 150,000. It opened on the Rue Sainte-Anne, a ten-minute walk from the Palais Royal.

  • • •

  The Spaaks’ new apartment overlooked an expanse of gardens rimmed by shops nestled under graceful arcades. It came furnished, but the family brought some household items from Choisel, including a large selection of paintings by Magritte and another Spaak protégé, Paul Delvaux. The apartment included a maid’s room and came with the services of an elderly widow named Madame Lacour, a retired cabaret singer. Madame was too frail to work, but Suzanne welcomed her to the family table, where she amused the children with tales of her colorful past.

  Suzanne didn’t discuss her role with Solidarité with the family, but they could see she was up to something. She employed a succession of unlikely “maids” with strange accents who did little housework, muttered anti-Nazi sentiments, then disappeared—once they received their forged papers from Suzanne’s network.

  The Palais Royal had been constructed in the early seventeenth century as a residence for Cardinal Richelieu, the consigliere to King Louis XIII. It faced the once royal residence in the Louvre, not far from the royal chapel, the Oratoire du Louvre. After Richelieu’s death, the palace passed into the possession of the king and was renamed the Palais Royal. For the next 150 years French monarchs used it to house discarded queens, dissolute princes, and scheming courtiers, and its gardens served as a playground for the future Louis XIV.

  The French Revolution transformed the Palais Royal into a hotbed of political ferment. Rabid mobs seized its royal residents and hauled them to the guillotine, while revolutionaries made incendiary speeches from the balconies. The apartments were converted into gambling dens, and its arcades became showcases for courtesans. Patrons could consult a twenty-four-page Liste complète des plus belles femmes publiques et des plus saines du palais de Paris offering the names and addresses of the Palais Royal’s “prettiest and healthiest” prostitutes. The Marquis de Sade opened a bookstore to sell his pornography, and another shop sold Charlotte Corday the kitchen knife she used to stab Marat. A few decades later the Bourbon monarchy was restored, and the dignity of the Palais Royal along with it. A young librarian named Alexandre Dumas gazed into the garden and found the inspiration to write a series of romances set in the palace.

  By the time the Spaaks arrived, the Palais Royal was more eccentric than grand, but it was still a coveted address for writers and artists. There were a dozen theaters within walking distance, including the Théâtre du Palais Royal (a tawdry vaudeville house) and the Comédie Française. Under the occupation, the revered classical theater was obliged to present the Berlin Schiller Theater’s production of Kabale und Liebe for the benefit of the German troops.23

  Claude and his colleagues puzzled over the proper response of the artist under occupation. Claude continued to write, but he chose to boycott opportunities to produce his work so long as the Germans ruled Paris. He made one exception: as the hardships of occupation grew, his actors begged him for permission to remount The School for Scandal as a benefit for indigent performers. He relented, on the condition that his name would not appear on the program or the posters. Claude settled for attending the theater frequently, often with wife and children in tow, and spending time with his movie and theater friends.

  These included Jean Cocteau, who lived just around the corner. Cocteau had moved into the Palais Royal in the fall of 1939. When war was declared, his first question was reportedly “But how will I get my opium?”24 He flirted with Fascism and saw no reason why the occupation should deprive the public of his genius, or his genius of its revenues. He frequented fashionable salons that welcomed German officials, and praised Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. His lover, Jean Marais, paid a price. When he tried to join the French Resistance he was turned away because his partner was considered untrustworthy. But Cocteau may have had a motive beyond ideology. The persecution of homosexuals was less draconian in occupied France than in Nazi Germany, but as public figures, Cocteau and his lover were vulnerable. Ingratiating himself with the authorities may have been a tactic for survival.

  Cocteau loved the “spell that the Palais Royal works on certain spirits . . . of the ghosts of the révolutionnaires who haunt it,” a sentiment shared by the Spaaks.25 One evening the family joined him at a restaurant across the street and he accidently spilled some red wine on the table. The children watched with delight as he idly sketched the dark liquid into fantastic designs. Pilette was aware of Cocteau’s fame, but it was the handsome Jean Marais who caught her eye, and she wasn’t alone. Jean Cocteau had written a series of scripts to showcase Marais, and the teenage girls of Paris went crazy, hiding in the stairwells of the Palais Royal to catch sight of their idol.

  After her isolation in the countryside, Suzanne found tha
t the Palais Royal’s “small town within a city” suited her very well. She performed her tasks for Solidarité invisibly while taking family matters briskly in hand. The country house in Choisel compensated for food rationing and shortages: she converted the garden into a potager, planting half the lawn with potatoes, and fitted Wotan’s kennel with rabbit cages and chicken pens. On Saturdays she or Pilette would take the train out and load up a bicycle with baskets of vegetables, meat, and eggs, then push the bicycle three miles back to the train station.

  Suzanne enrolled Pilette, fourteen, in the École Alsacienne, a progressive school founded by French Protestants near the Luxembourg Gardens, hoping she could make some new friends. Bazou, ten, studied at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV, whose graduates included Guy de Maupassant, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the former prime minister Léon Blum.

  Soon after the family moved into their new home, Claude received a visit from the maid in the apartment downstairs, bearing a note. “Those little feet make too much noise. Please get your children some felt slippers.” Quiet was a necessity for the Spaaks’ downstairs neighbor, who was widely recognized as France’s greatest living writer. Colette was famously particular about her writing conditions. The walls of her room were covered in red silk. She wrote on a lap desk from her daybed overlooking the garden, surrounded by her vast collection of millefiori paperweights. She composed on blue paper—always with a Parker pen—in light cast by blue-tinted bulbs, wearing her special dressing gown and in her bare feet.26 Every detail was carefully maintained by her formidable maid, Pauline Tissandier. Colette had tried to relocate to the countryside, but she always came back to the Palais Royal, saying, “Les pierres de Paris me tiennent” (“The stones of Paris hold me fast”).27 Her neighbors, described by her biographer Judith Thurman, would become the Spaaks’.

  Everyone recognized her: the bookseller in the arcade, the friendly hookers, the man who sold crêpes on the corner, the neighbors who shouted greetings from their open windows. . . . The concierge was a deaf erotomane prematurely wasted by her passionate exertions, which had recently driven her husband to his grave.28

  But Colette’s good friend and neighbor Jean Cocteau noted trouble in paradise. A juvenile gang roamed the garden, and ten-year-old Bazou joined with gusto. Cocteau described their encounters:

  Children are playing police and burglar games in the garden. A queen disturbs their tumultuous adventures. She is Madame Colette, a hat on her shrubby hair, a scarf around the neck, naked feet in her sandals and a cane in her hand. Like those of a lioness, her magnificent eyes severely observe those games of war, police and crime.29

  The Spaaks’ relations with their famous neighbor were cordial nonetheless. Suzanne and the children often found Colette seated in her favorite chair under the leafy allée of chestnut trees. As the two women chatted, Bazou tried not to stare at the writer’s gnarled toes, the red lacquered nails emerging from the sandals she wore even in winter. Another favorite perch was the large fountain outside her window, but, much to her annoyance, it had been drained, along with the rest of the city’s fountains. British bomber pilots used the reflection to guide their nighttime navigation, so the authorities reduced the flow to a trickle, just enough to keep the pipe from freezing.

  At sixty-eight, Colette was a living legend. Her appearance was as remarkable as her habits, with enormous eyes rimmed in kohl, a sharp nose, and a pointed chin. She often posed with her cats to highlight her feline traits. After a tumultuous love life, she had finally found contentment with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket. Sixteen years her junior, Goudeket was of Jewish extraction, a slender man whom Colette rapturously described as “a chic type with satin skin.” He had been a pearl broker until his business failed with the Depression, then turned his hand to other ventures, all of which ended with the 1940 anti-Semitic regulations.

  Colette became his full-time occupation. Goudeket flirted with her, fussed over her, and offered her every attention an aging siren could desire. She adored him in return. Her need for him grew as her condition worsened; her sandals and cane were the result of a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis. As she became less mobile, the gossip in the garden became an important source of research. She pressed Pilette for her opinions of the boys in school and how it felt to hover on the verge of womanhood. She was researching a new novel about a fifteen-year-old girl called Gigi.

  Colette and Goudeket had fled the invasion like everyone else, but returned to the Palais Royal after a few months. To the eyes of the world, Colette, if not exactly a collaborator, was surely an accommodationist. She published articles in Le Petit Parisien, a mouthpiece of the regime, as well as in the virulently Fascist Gringoire. Like Cocteau, she moved in circles that welcomed the German and Vichy elite.

  Colette’s early conversations with Suzanne Spaak skirted sensitive matters as they took each other’s measure. They soon learned they had much in common: They both cared deeply for individuals who suffered under the anti-Jewish statutes. They also shared expertise in the advanced art of coping, which Colette wrote about in detail. There was no gas for cars, no leather for shoes, no fabric for clothes. Growing children went to school dressed in made-over tablecloths, and French women, inspired by Scarlett O’Hara, cut up their curtains for dresses. Young ladies expressed their style through increasingly fanciful hats.30 At the great fashion houses, affronted saleswomen watched their clientele shift from the grandes dames of Paris to the wives and mistresses of the German occupiers. Other offensive new customers were the plebian “BOFs,” or “Butter-Egg-Cheese” women, who made fortunes selling food on the black market. As the available cotton, wool, and silk was shipped off to Germany, resourceful French designers introduced fabrics made of cellulose and platform shoes fashioned of wood with flexible ribbed soles. One startling newsreel showed the sweepings from barbershops being spun into gloves and sweaters made from human hair.

  Suzanne Spaak joined the legions of other Parisian women on bicycles, implements that transformed female apparel. Women adopted culottes, and Elsa Schiaparelli reinvented underwear, substituting drip-dry synthetics for silk, and elastic for buttons.31 Suzanne’s practicality infuriated her daughter. Pilette noticed that Ruth Peters and Suzanne’s sisters spent serious money on clothes, somehow obtaining scarce silk stockings, but Suzanne wore thick cotton hose. One day, on the way to the theater, Pilette confronted her mother about her dowdy appearance. “Your maid wears nicer stockings than you do!” Suzanne, stung, crossed the street and marched off without her—but she didn’t change her ways.

  There was little Suzanne could do to help Mira and Harry, who were increasingly cut off from her visits, friendship, and assistance. She could only channel her concern through her work with Solidarité. Sustenance for the Jews of Paris had become a complex matter. They were now barred from many workplaces, and their families limited to starvation rations. Officially, the French State oversaw Jewish charities. In actuality, the official charities functioned as extortion rackets run on an industrial scale, and the authorities were always trying to improve their efficiency.

  In November 1941 the Germans reconfigured the Jewish Coordination Committee into the General Union of French Jews, or UGIF.IV Every legal Jewish charity was consolidated under this union, and any that remained outside were dissolved. The UGIF has gone down in history as one of the most controversial institutions of the occupation. The directors were given the impossible task of administering relief to Jewish families at the same time as they implemented Nazi policies. Self-interest played a major role in their participation. For much of the occupation, the UGIF council offered its members and their families immunity from arrest and deportation. Jews were required to pay dues to the UGIF, effectively compensating the regime for depriving them of their rights, their property, and their safety.

  Among the institutions placed under the UGIF’s direction were the Rothschild charities. Before the occupation these were showcases of modern philanthropy, but now they struggled with inadequate staff
and scant supplies. UGIF orphanages became warehouses for Jewish children who had been left behind by the arrests. By the end of 1941 the number of children had grown to fifty, and they became a critical concern for Solidarité and Suzanne Spaak.

  That winter was the coldest in memory, compounded by a dire fuel shortage. Parisians packed into the Métro stations to keep warm. Some spread their meager possessions out on blankets to sell, employing a code—“22-22”—to say “Pack up, the Germans are coming!”

  Violence mounted as young Communist militants stepped up their attacks. One of them was Maurice “Fifi” Feferman, a teenage fellow prisoner of Harry Sokol’s who had escaped Pithiviers. Feferman began his campaign by leading a raid for twenty-five kilograms of dynamite. In November he firebombed the display window of a collaborationist bookstore near the Sorbonne. Over an eight-week period he helped to assassinate a German officer, bombed the Imperator Hotel, exchanged fire at a French fascist rally, and bombed a theater that was showing the anti-Semitic film Jud Süss.32

  The Nazis responded to the attacks by executing hundreds of hostages over the following year, terrorizing the population and crippling the underground Communist Party. Red-bordered posters appeared on walls and lampposts across Paris announcing the latest victims. The average life span for a youth battalion recruit was seven months.33

  The ground shifted again in December, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the United States. Pilette was the first in the family to hear, and she rushed home from school to wake up her father. Claude was electrified; with the United States in the fight, the Allies’ chances improved immeasurably. A few days later—some said as a reprisal against the United States—the Gestapo arrested 1,098 prominent French Jews, known as the “Notables.” One of them was Colette’s husband, Maurice Goudeket.