Codename Suzette E-Book

Anne Nelson

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The thrilling and previously untold true story of Suzanne Spaak, who abandoned her life of opulence to save the Jewish children of Occupied Paris during the Second World War. Suzanne Spaak was born into an affluent Belgian Catholic family and married into the country's leading political dynasty. Her brother-in-law was the prime minister while her husband Claude was a playwright and patron of the painter René Magritte. In occupied Paris she was part of the cultural elite and a neighbour of Colette and Jean Cocteau. But Suzanne was living a double life. Her friendship with a Polish Jewish refugee led her to her life's purpose. When France fell and the Nazis occupied Paris, she joined the Resistance. She used her fortune and social status to enlist allies among wealthy Parisians and church groups. Under the eyes of the Gestapo, Suzanne and women from the Jewish and Christian resistance groups 'kidnapped' hundreds of Jewish children to save them from the gas chambers. Codename Suzette is a masterpiece of research and narrative, bringing to life a truly remarkable woman and painting a vivid and unforgettable picture of wartime Paris.

Leseprobe

To Suzanne’s Children:

Pilette and Bazou,Larissa, Sami, and Jacques.

The children she cared for then,The children she would care for now.

I end up wondering if I won’t simply decide to split the world in two: the world of those who cannot understand (even if they know, even if I tell them . . .) and the world of those who can.

—Hélène Berr, Journal, October 19, 1943

contents

list of illustrations

map of paris

dramatis personae

|CHAPTER 1| strangers

|CHAPTER 2| the real war

|CHAPTER 3| paris by night

|CHAPTER 4|la plaque tournante

|CHAPTER 5| monsieur henri

|CHAPTER 6| spring wind, winter stadium

|CHAPTER 7| the ragged network

|CHAPTER 8| suzanne and sophie

|CHAPTER 9| the unimaginable

|CHAPTER 10| la clairière

|CHAPTER 11|le grand livre

|CHAPTER 12| the unraveling

|CHAPTER 13| flight

|CHAPTER 14| all saints’ day

|CHAPTER 15| the last train

|CHAPTER 16| liberation

|CHAPTER 17| the aftermath

acknowledgments

appendix

notes

bibliography

illustration credits

index

picture section

list of illustrations

Suzanne Lorge was the oldest daughter of a wealthy Belgian financier from a Catholic family. The romantic fourteen-year-old fell in love with fifteen-year-old Claude Spaak, and the two secretly became engaged.

Claude Spaak, shown here with Suzanne and Pilette in 1928, was a member of Belgium’s leading political family. A talented writer and connoisseur of the arts, Claude proved to be a moody, difficult husband.

The third party in the Spaak marriage was Suzanne’s school friend Ruth Peters. The tall, ungainly Canadian became Claude’s mistress while remaining Suzanne’s close friend and becoming an “aunt” to the children.

Bazou, born in 1931, was a sunny, affectionate child who adored his parents and sister.

When surrealist René Magritte went broke, Claude and Suzanne provided him with a monthly stipend from her inheritance, and Claude shared a steady stream of ideas for his paintings.

Magritte worked from this photograph for his portrait of Suzanne. She looks puzzled and sad.

In 1937–38, Suzanne led relief efforts for victims of the Spanish Civil War, taking the children to French villages to collect contributions. She stands to the left; Pilette sits at her feet, and Bazou stands to the right, both wearing their dance costumes.

Claude’s brother Paul-Henri Spaak became Belgium’s prime minister in May 1938 at the age of thirty-nine. The following month he accompanied King Leopold III to a screening at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (shown here). Two years later, Spaak begged the king not to submit to the Nazi invaders.

Pilette was a shy but spirited girl. She helped her mother with her humanitarian efforts at the same time she learned cooking and needlework.

In 1938, Mira and Hersch Sokol, penniless Jewish refugees, arrived on Suzanne’s doorstep in France. Mira, a gentle intellectual, became her best friend.

The Sokols were recruited by Soviet intelligence. In early 1942 they began operating a radio transmitter for Leopold Trepper, but they were arrested by the Gestapo four months later. These photos were taken in Gestapo custody.

The Sokols’ torture sessions in Fort Breendonk were overseen by SS officer Philipp Schmitt, assisted by his dog, Lump.

One of Suzanne’s counterparts at the MNCR was Adam Rayski, a fiery young journalist. He helped to organize the Jewish Communist armed resistance during the occupation, but he reproached the party for its passive response to the Jewish crisis.

Léon Chertok, a handsome Jewish physician from Vilnius, acquired false identity papers through his female admirers. He worked closely with Suzanne in the children’s rescue efforts. He is shown here with a rescued child in the village of Noirvault.

Sophie Schwartz supported Jewish families through her efforts in the MNCR. Childless herself, she devoted her life to promoting the welfare of Jewish immigrant children.

Charles Lederman was a Warsaw-born Jewish lawyer and a founder of the MNCR. His blond hair and flawless French accent helped him avoid detection by the authorities.

Suzanne’s work with the Jewish underground bolstered her confidence and prompted a makeover that included a stylish hat, burgundy suit, and ochre blouse.

In July 1942, René Bousquet, the head of the French police, organized the Vel d’Hiv roundup in concert with the German SS. He personally extended the arrests to include children. This January 1943 photo shows him (in fur collar) in Marseilles with German officers preparing another roundup of Jews.

The arrest and deportation of immigrant Jews mounted over 1942, leaving their families stranded. These children were consigned to the Lamarck orphanage in Montmartre, shown here in early 1943.

Brussels-born siblings Sara and Simon Kejzman tried to escape to Switzerland but were turned back by the Swiss. The UGIF placed Simon in the Lamarck center and Sara in Guy Patin. They were among the children arrested at the centers on February 10 and deported (under the names of Marguerite and Simon Bogaert) on Convoy 47 on February 11. The February arrests inspired the rescue at La Clairière a few days later.

Suzanne turned to Paul Vergara, the Protestant pastor of the Oratoire du Louvre. A longtime opponent of the Nazis, he quickly agreed to help with the children’s rescue operation.

Vergara’s right-hand woman was the formidable Marcelle Guillemot, who ran the church soup kitchen at La Clairière. The pastor and the social worker offered it as a staging ground for le kidnapping. Guillemot would later make her own daring escape from the Gestapo.

La Clairière had served the immigrant community in the Marais for decades. Marcelle Guillemot turned the church facility into a clandestine base for Jean Moulin’s Gaullist resistance.

Larissa Gruszow was left at the Lamarck orphanage after her mother was deported to Auschwitz. Sophie Schwartz was desperate to help her friend’s forlorn daughter.

With Suzanne’s and Vergara’s help, Larissa was placed with the Cardons, a prosperous Catholic family in Normandy. In this photo, she dances in a meadow on their estate with Vergara’s son, Sylvain. Vergara’s daughter, Éliane, dances with another child.

Vergara’s son-in-law, Jacques Bruston, was an active member of the Gaullist resistance. Bruston and the pastor’s family paid a high price for their ideals.

Suzanne’s famous neighbor Colette went down in history as an accommodationist, if not a collaborator. She was actually protecting her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, shown here with her at their apartment in the Palais Royal. She also gave valuable support to Suzanne Spaak’s rescue network.

Suzanne’s rescue network expanded to include Hélène Berr, a member of a prominent French Jewish family. She is shown here with Jewish children from the UGIF institutions.

Dr. Robert Debré, an eminent Jewish pediatrician, shown here in 1935, used his privileged status to aid Suzanne’s rescue network. Along with the Countess de la Bourdonnaye, he supported the publication of the classic resistance novella Le Silence de la Mer and directed some of its profits to the children’s benefit.

Debré’s partner was the dashing Countess de la Bourdonnaye, Elisabeth de la Panouse, known as “Dexia.” She left the count, a Vichy supporter, for her children’s pediatrician. Imprisoned as a member of the Musée de l’Homme group, she resumed her resistance work upon her release. She and Debré participated in a wide range of resistance activities throughout the occupation.

In September 1943, Soviet agent Leopold Trepper escaped from German custody. The Vichy police put out a wanted poster describing him as “a foreigner who directs a group of foreign terrorists.” The Gestapo followed his trail to the Spaak residence.

The head of the Rote Kapelle task force was Gestapo officer Heinz Pannwitz. He conducted the interrogations of Pilette, Bazou, and their relations.

After Suzanne’s arrest, her funds were no longer available to support the hidden children. British SOE agent Dennis Barrett, a gentlemen’s tailor in peacetime, learned of the crisis and came to the rescue.

Jacques Grou-Radenez, master printer of the resistance. He and his wife hid Jewish children for Suzanne, and his fate was her only regret.

Abbé Franz Stock, the German chaplain, secretly aided members of the French Resistance imprisoned at Fresnes. He had helped the Countess de la Bourdonnaye in 1942, and consoled Suzanne two years later. He was posthumously honored by both the French government and Pope John XXIII.

Suzanne spent eight months in a spartan cell in the women’s wing of the Fresnes prison, a “factory of despair” outside Paris.

After the Liberation, the French government gave the MNCR a villa—previously a German military facility—to serve as a home for the hidden children who were left unclaimed. The children called it Renouveau (“Renewal”) and named a room after Suzanne Spaak.

Pilette and Bazou Spaak in Paris in 2015.

dramatis personae

The Spaaks

Paul Spaak, writer; married to

Marie Janson Spaak, daughter of Belgian prime minister Paul Janson, sister to Prime Minister Paul-Émile Janson, and world’s first female senator

Their Children

Paul-Henri Spaak, prime minister of Belgium; married Marguerite

Charles Spaak, screenwriter of Grand Illusion and numerous other films

Claude Spaak, playwright and art connoisseur; married Suzanne Lorge

Madeleine (Pichenette) Spaak Masson

The Lorges

Louis Lorge, financier; married to

Jeanne Bourson

Their Children

Suzanne (Suzette) Lorge; married Claude Spaak

Alice (Bunny) Lorge; married Milo Happé

Angèle (Teddy) Lorge; married Maurice Fontaine

Claude and Suzanne Spaak’s Children

Lucie (Pilette)

Paul-Louis (Bazou)

Ruth Peters, Suzanne Spaak’s childhood friend and Claude Spaak’s mistress

Soviet Agents

Leopold Trepper, Polish Jewish Communist

Georgie de Winter, Trepper’s young mistress

Hersch (Harry) and Miriam (Mira) Sokol, Jewish refugees turned radio operators

Madame May, Trepper’s elderly courier

Fernand Pauriol, French Communist who supported Trepper’s radio operations

The Jewish Underground

Leon Chertok, Jewish refugee doctor and a leader of the children’s rescue efforts

Sophie Schwartz Micnik, Polish trade unionist and women’s leader

Charles Lederman, Polish-born French Jewish lawyer

Adam Rayski, Polish-born journalist and militant

Édouard (Arek) Kowalski, Jewish Communist military leader

Jewish Children Rescued by the Network

Larissa Gruszow

Sami Dassa

Jacques Alexandre

Simone and Armand Boruchowicz

The Doctors and the Ladies

Robert Debré, leading French Jewish pediatrician

Elisabeth de la Panouse, Countess de la Bourdonnaye, Debré’s partner, known as “Dexia”

Fred Milhaud, French Jewish pediatrician working for the UGIF Jewish Council; married to

Denise Milhaud, president of the Entr’aide Temporaire relief organization

The Berrs (Raymond and Antoinette, their daughters Hélène and Denise; cousin Nicole Schneiderman; and Denise’s sister-in-law, Nicole Job), activists with Entr’aide Temporaire

Marguerite “Peggy” Camplan, MNCR partner

The Protestants

Pastor Paul Vergara, pastor at the Oratoire; married to Marcelle Vergara

Sylvain Vergara, the Vergaras’ teenage son

Eliane Vergara, the Vergaras’ oldest daughter, married to

Jacques Bruston, a member of the Gaullist Resistance

Marcelle Guillemot, social worker at La Clairière church soup kitchen

Odette Béchard, a member of the Oratoire who joined Entr’aide Temporaire

Maurice-William Girardot, church deacon and courier for funds

The Gaullists

Jean Moulin, leader of the Gaullist resistance

Jacques Grou-Radenez, master printer who helped the student movement Défense de la France

Hugues Limonti, family friend of Marcelle Guillemot and Gaullist agent in Paris

The Neighbors

Colette, considered France’s greatest writer of her time, Palais Royal resident with her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket

Jean Cocteau, prodigious French artist and writer, Palais Royal resident with his lover, actor Jean Marais

The Germans

Theodor Dannecker, SS officer who organized deportations in Paris from September 1940 to July 1942

Helmut Knochen, SS officer placed in charge of the Gestapo in France in November 1940

Klaus Barbie, SS officer placed in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon in November 1942

Alois Brunner, SS officer placed in charge of the camp at Drancy in June 1943

Heinz Pannwitz, Gestapo officer in command of the Red Orchestra task force (Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle), charged with tracking down Leopold Trepper and his associates

Rudolf Rathke, Gestapo officer on the task force

The British

Benjamin Cowburn, agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)

Johnny Barrett, radio operator for the SOE

1

strangers

|1937 – 1940|

Suzanne and Claude Spaak moved to Paris in 1937, bringing their two children, a surrealist art collection, and a large wicker trunk. They were a golden couple, attractive, affluent, cultured; the move was designed to mend the fault lines. Claude was frustrated in his writing career, and their marriage had faltered. Maybe Paris would help.

Claude had outgrown Brussels, though the city had offered him every advantage. He owed many of them to his wife. “Suzette” was the oldest child of Louis Lorge, one of Belgium’s leading financiers. A self-made man, he spent his life pursuing wealth and social status. He had married into a prominent family and employed German and English governesses for his daughters. He provided his family with a mansion in Brussels, a house in the country, and holidays on the French Riviera.

Louis doted on his firstborn, a petite blonde with long ringlets and a Cupid’s bow mouth. He decided that she should marry into the aristocracy and sent her to finishing school to study embroidery, piano, and household management. But she chafed at her father’s mercenary values and leaned toward literature and social reform.

The summer she was fourteen, Suzanne fell in love with Claude Spaak, her fifteen-year-old neighbor at their country estate. A dreamy-eyed poet and a member of Belgium’s leading political dynasty, he courted her on romantic boat rides, reciting French verse. The two became secretly engaged. Suzanne was also enamored of Claude’s mother, Marie Spaak, a tiny dynamo who fought for women’s suffrage, labor reforms, and immigrant rights. When Marie’s father died in 1921, she was invited to take his place in the Belgian senate. According to family lore, “She refused the position and told her family. Her sons burst out laughing, and she was so insulted she changed her mind and accepted”—becoming the first female senator in the world.1

Louis Lorge strongly opposed Suzanne’s choice of husband, but she stood firm. A last-minute complication arose. The couple’s mothers discovered that there was a third party to the romance, a Canadian classmate of Suzanne’s named Ruth Peters. The two girls shared everything, including an infatuation with Claude. The mothers sent Ruth home to Toronto, and Louis took measures to protect his daughter’s fortune. Rather than disbursing her dowry in a lump sum, he would pay it in monthly installments to guarantee her a good living.

Claude Spaak was the youngest of three brothers, all of them tall and combative. Paul-Henri, the oldest, ran away as a teenager to enlist in the Belgian army in the First World War and ended up in a German prison camp. He returned to join the family’s political enterprise, and it was said that he addressed the Belgian parliament as “Monsieur le Président, Sénateurs, et Maman.” The second son, Charles, was on the way to becoming a celebrated screenwriter in Paris. Claude struggled to emerge from his brothers’ shadows. Little was heard of their sister, Madeleine, known as “Pichenette.”

When the brothers joined the family at weekly lunches, they never made it to dessert; one was certain to have stormed out. They taunted Claude’s young fiancée. When there was a lull, she stared at her plate until one demanded, “Suzette, do you hear the clock ticking?” and she would run to her room. As her father’s favorite, Suzanne expected to be treated with respect, but Claude chose to see her take his place at the bottom of the stack.

The couple married in 1925. Within a year Suzanne was pregnant and miscarried, but the next year she gave birth to a healthy girl, Lucie. Claude sent the news to Ruth in Canada in an envelope bearing three horses, indicating her place in their relationship. The family nicknamed the child “Pilette” after a famous Belgian race car driver, whose garage sign caught her attention on her daily stroll.

Claude was appointed the first artistic director of Brussels’ new Palais des Beaux-Arts, where his job was to organize exhibits and answer complaints. He dealt with the boredom by taking up the avant-garde. He was attracted to a struggling Belgian painter, René Magritte, a rough-hewn man from the coal-mining region west of Brussels, six years his senior. Magritte was eking out a living designing wallpaper and sheet music. He aspired to make a name as a surrealist painter, but he struggled with the complex wordplay of the Parisian intellectuals. Claude helped him along by suggesting ideas for paintings, then acquiring them for himself and the extended family (some of whom hid them in the attic). Curious canvases began to fill the Spaaks’ walls. Other families displayed pictures of dead ancestors or bowls of fruit, but the Spaaks’ Magrittes showed a tuba bursting into flame and leather boots sprouting toes.2

At home, all was far from well. Claude’s temper drove Suzanne to tears, and there were other complications. Claude was smitten with an older woman, whom he followed to the South of France. She humored him for two weeks, then sent him packing back to Brussels, whereupon he began an affair with a coworker.

Divorce was legal but rare in Belgium, and Suzanne would be required to show cause, embarrassing the family. She wrote Ruth in Canada and asked her to come back. If Claude was going to have a mistress, it might as well be someone she liked. Ruth could calm Claude’s tantrums and intuit his wishes—and she could type. So she became his secretary, and Claude alternated between two beds.

In 1931 Suzanne gave birth to Paul-Louis, or “Bazou.” On the way home from the hospital the taxi driver looked at him and exclaimed, “Quel petit gros bazouf!” (“What a big little fatso!”), and the nickname stuck. Claude and Ruth stood over his cradle and promised never to do anything that would hurt the children.

Pilette contracted polio at the age of two. After a long search, Suzanne found a Swedish doctor who helped her with a new procedure. The painful operation kept her in a cast for months, but it saved her leg. Suzanne then turned to social issues. The Depression had driven factory workers into the streets. In 1935 Paul-Henri was appointed to serve as Belgium’s youngest cabinet minister. Though he advocated for the workers, Claude and Suzanne thought he was too cautious. Suzanne turned to the World Committee of Women against War and Fascism, a leftist coalition of feminists and pacifists.3

She took an interest in the plight of the Jewish immigrants she met there, a growing population invisible to most Belgians. Jews counted for less than 1 percent of Belgium’s population of eight million, and only a small fraction were citizens. Most had fled hardship and pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the Nazis were adding thousands to their ranks. When Suzanne read some articles by a young Polish Jewish activist, Julia Pirotte, she encouraged her to take up photojournalism. She commandeered her sister Bunny’s Leica Elmar III. “You never use it,” she told her, and Bunny’s Leica launched Pirotte’s career as a world-class photographer.4

In 1936 Claude commissioned Magritte to paint family portraits. He began with a snapshot of Suzanne, placing her image on a page of a book opening to a patch of blue sky with white clouds. Then he did portraits of Claude and Ruth seated in front of surrealist backgrounds. Claude disliked them and cropped the paintings, leaving only the heads. The next year Magritte painted the children in front of a window open to a road strewn with surrealist icons. His final painting of Claude’s family was L’Ésprit de géométrie, which depicted a mother with Bazou’s childish head, holding an infant with Suzanne’s adult head. It is both the most disturbing and successful of his Spaak portraits.I

By 1937 Claude decided that his career was stalled. Brussels was small, provincial, and dominated by his powerful family; his uncle was the current prime minister, and his brother Paul-Henri, the boy wonder of Belgian politics, was about to assume that position. In France, brother Charles had become one of the country’s leading screenwriters, and his coattails would be useful. Claude submitted some plays to Paris producers. Several expressed interest, and he packed up the family.

It was, of course, Suzanne’s inheritance that made the move possible. Claude rented a comfortable apartment in the suburb of Saint-Cloud, and the couple installed the children, unpacked their trunks, and hung their Magrittes. Claude mingled with theater and film folk, but Suzanne felt out of place. Parisians were defying the Great Depression with madcap pursuits. Le Hot Club de France had just launched its first jazz label. Hemlines were long, waists were narrow, and the collaboration between surrealists and couturiers sizzled. Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí designed a hat that looked like a shoe and a “skeleton dress” with a protruding rib cage.

In July 1937 Suzanne’s father died, leaving her a sizable inheritance, and the couple bought a farmhouse in the bucolic village of Choisel, thirty miles south of Paris. They renovated it top to bottom and set aside a room for Ruth. Suzanne thought the country would be good for the children. Bazou was thrilled to be reunited with his German shepherd, Wotan, who had been left behind in Brussels, but Suzanne now found herself stranded in a hamlet of flinty French farmers and weekenders.

Magritte, still struggling, wrote to patrons pleading for a stipend. When they turned him down, Suzanne offered him one thousand francs a month (roughly the salary of a secretary) in exchange for a series of paintings. The Spaaks amassed an extraordinary collection of forty-four works that would one day grace the world’s leading museums.

The Spaaks had moved to France for art’s sake, but there was no escaping politics. Over the mid-1930s Paris was rocked by street violence, and the country was polarized. The Left formed a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and trade unions, which won the 1936 elections. Léon Blum became France’s first Socialist and first Jewish prime minister. The Right responded with rage, echoing the Nazi diatribes against immigrant “Jewish agitators” and the “international Jewish banking conspiracy.”

France was still officially at peace, but war was in the air. Edith Piaf sang “Mon Legionnaire,” and there was a new vogue for war movies. One of them was La Grande Illusion, written by Charles Spaak. The 1937 masterpiece, directed by Jean Renoir, was based in part on Paul-Henri’s experiences as a German prisoner of war. It became an international sensation, but Paul-Henri, Belgium’s foreign minister, banned it in that country for fear it would enflame anti-German sentiment.II

In Spain, Fascist forces battled the democratically elected Republican government, and French newspapers warned there was worse to come. In April 1937 German and Italian planes bombed the town of Guernica, killing hundreds of civilians. Tens of thousands of refugees poured across the border into France. Suzanne helped those she could, including a girl named Carmen, who taught the children to dance the jota. Suzanne sewed Spanish costumes, and she and Claude took them to neighboring towns with the family gramophone. Locals gathered in the town square to watch them perform. Suzanne unfurled a banner—“Open the borders to Spain!”—as Bazou passed the hat. A photo shows Suzanne and her entourage raising their fists in a “No Pasarán!” salute.

The French public tended to regard the conflict as a Spanish problem. They were convinced that a broader war was unlikely and that their army and defenses shielded them. But the November 5, 1938, edition of Le Figaro challenged their complacency:

Monsieur von Rath [sic], third secretary of the German embassy [in Paris], was grievously wounded in his office. The aggressor is a young refugee of Polish origin who is not authorized to reside in France.

Le Figaro concluded that the attack was a tragic consequence of France’s lax immigration policies.

France’s ongoing excessive tolerance creates a battleground for those who are not interested in serving our country’s interests, only in undermining them.

The teenaged Jewish gunman, Herschel Grynszpan, was a magnet for French anti-immigrant sentiment. He had acted in response to an immigration dispute between Poland and Germany that had left his elderly parents stranded in a refugee camp on the border. He walked into the German embassy and randomly chose his victim, who died three days later. On November 9 the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht in Germany, burning synagogues, murdering dozens, and sending more than thirty thousand Jewish men to concentration camps. Some families ransomed their relatives and sent them abroad, driving another wave of Jewish refugees into France.

On November 11, Le Figaro expressed shock at the German violence:

A kind of madness seized the German population, and the hatred of the Israelite race today reached its paroxysm.

The paper included a response from the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger calling on the French government to expel the foreign troublemakers who “make their nest in Paris” and urging it “to begin with those who bear arms for Jewish Bolshevism.” France’s “excessive tolerance” toward Jewish refugees was now under internal attack.

Suzanne had sympathized with the Jewish exiles in Brussels, among them Miriam Sokol. One day in 1938 she and her husband, Hersch, appeared on the Spaaks’ doorstep in France. The tiny, raven-haired Mira had met Suzanne through her women’s committee. Born in Vilnius, she had earned a PhD in social science in Brussels, where she met “Harry” Sokol, a young physician from a prosperous Jewish family in Bialystock.

The Sokols, like many of France’s immigrant Jews, came from the tumultuous zone that spanned the Russian-German divide, where it was possible to live in three different countries over thirty years without moving house. They had been born in Czarist Russia, grew up under German occupation, and came of age in the newly reconstituted Poland. Each disruption brought more travails for the Jews. It was not uncommon for Jewish families to send their children as far away as possible, praying they would never come back.

Harry Sokol was a short, slight man with alert brown eyes and a puckish smile. He had studied and worked in England, South Africa, and Switzerland, and spoke English, French, and German. When he met Mira in Brussels he was completing his medical studies, but his immigration status made it impossible for him to practice. They attempted to emigrate to Russia, but the Soviets turned them down with the excuse of a housing shortage in Moscow. They applied again in 1935 with the same result.5

Mira found a job working for a Socialist member of the Belgian parliament, and Harry became a traveling medical supplies salesman who gave Marxist lectures on the side. This violated Belgium’s rules barring aliens from political activity, and they were expelled in 1938.6 They made their way to France with little more than Suzanne Spaak’s address.

Suzanne was glad to see Mira. The two women shared interests and social concerns, as well as their outsider status. The salons of Paris had little to offer a shy Belgian housewife with a bookish turn of mind. Things were far worse for Mira, a penniless Jewish émigrée. Her husband’s medical degree and her doctorate meant nothing in France.

Suzanne helped the Sokols find a place to live, and Mira visited her frequently. Years later Claude recalled, “My wife and I belonged to a group of left-wing intellectuals, which is why our assistance was sought. . . . My wife was very fond of [the Sokols]. For my part, I found their sectarianism a little excessive and rather oppressive, but I admired their idealism, the absolute purity of their convictions.”7 Claude found Harry strident and doctrinaire. The Spaaks’ young son, Bazou, called him “Monsieur je-sais-tout,” or “Mr. Know-it-all.” Pilette agreed. Harry was a “cold fish,” but Mira was “soft, loving, a true friend.”

When the Sokols arrived in France, Stalin’s purges were imprisoning and murdering tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Still, in Harry’s eyes Stalin could do no wrong. The Spaaks’ circle of friends included Communist Party members, but they considered Stalin and Hitler both to be monsters who had to be stopped. Suzanne was willing to help Communist refugees, but she had no interest in joining the party.

Mira was Jewish? A litwak? A Communist? For Suzanne, these labels were of no interest. She could talk to Mira about family and literature. They discussed politics, but they were more concerned with humanitarian issues than ideology. For Suzanne, Mira’s Jewish identity was a subject of interest, not prejudice.

Jews had lived in France since Roman times. The Revolution granted the country’s Jews full rights of citizenship, as it did France’s other persecuted minority, the Protestants. Most traditional French Jews had roots in the Alsace-Lorraine, the territory that straddled the French-German frontier. They began moving to Paris in the early nineteenth century, and soon gained entrée into elite schools, professions, and neighborhoods.

In the late nineteenth century, assimilation was tested by Jewish migration from Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1925, 3.5 million Jews left the region, 2.5 million of them for the United States.8 But in 1924 the US Congress passed severely restrictive immigration laws whose stated goal was “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”9 Within a year, France overtook the United States as a destination, largely because it needed immigrant labor to compensate for its disastrous losses in the First World War and from the Spanish flu that followed. In 1927 the French parliament passed a law allowing fifty thousand Jewish and other immigrants to obtain French citizenship, inspiring more Eastern European Jews to “Lebn vi Got in Frankraykh” (Live like God in France).10

Then came the crash of 1929. The appetite for immigrant labor vanished, but Jewish immigrants continued to arrive, spurred by the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany. Between 1914 and 1939, the Jewish population of Paris doubled, and over 90,000 of the city’s 150,000 Jews were foreign-born. The newcomers were highly visible, expanding the Jewish quarter of the Marais and spilling over into Belleville and Montmartre.

France was also straining to cope with refugees from Spain. The Spanish Republican government collapsed in March 1939, and Fascist forces took control of the entire country. Refugees crossed the Pyrenees into France until their numbers approached half a million. The French government’s response was wretchedly inadequate. Some ten thousand Spanish refugees perished of cold, hunger, and disease.

The Spaaks completed their handsome renovation of the house in Choisel, and it stood blanketed in blossoms and tranquility. But history was intruding, as Europe headed for war. In the summer of 1939 Suzanne suffered what her daughter later described as a breakdown. As the children played with the dog in the garden, Suzanne watched immobile from the chaise. Why did their mother look so sad? the children wondered. Something had gone terribly wrong. Suzanne, who didn’t drive, was trapped in Choisel. At thirty-five, she had no control over her life. Claude was pulling further and further away. Her marriage was a failure, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave him while the children were young. She was cut off from her friends and family in Brussels, as well as the activist circles that gave her purpose. She feared an impending war that threatened to destroy everything she loved.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union announced a mutual nonaggression pact. In political terms, this was impossible to grasp: the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were blood enemies. It made sense only in that both countries wanted something, and they needed to cooperate in order to get it. What they wanted was Poland, a country glued back together from the fragments of Russian- and German-speaking empires twenty years earlier. Stalin and Hitler denied Poland’s right to exist. Germany claimed the port city of Gdansk, formerly Danzig, and the western territories that had previously been East Prussia and expanses of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Soviets coveted western Ukraine and the Baltic regions.

Since 1918, Poland’s government had been run by a series of generals and dictators. Anti-Semitism was rife, and the political system was corrupt. Nonetheless, France and England had signed mutual defense treaties with Poland. For three years they had stood by as Hitler grabbed the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in violation of international law, but Poland was where they drew the line.

The French Communist Party, subservient to Moscow, was trapped in contradiction. Many of its members were Jews and Communists who had fled the Nazis. Now they were expected to support their persecutors as allies against the “Western Imperialists” in Britain and France.

As the war approached, Ruth Peters returned to Europe and joined the Spaaks in Choisel. France was in disarray. Léon Blum, the Socialist Party leader, begged the French Communist Party to renounce its allegiance to Moscow. When it refused, the French government dissolved the party, and it went underground. Mira and Harry Sokol’s situation was more precarious than ever. They risked arrest or deportation as undocumented immigrants, and the Soviet Union was the only imaginable avenue for escape.

The Sokols might have paused had they known more. Stalin’s purges had decimated his army officer corps and the intelligence service, and he had extended his accusations to the international Communist movement. Within a few years he slaughtered hundreds of members within his reach, including most of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party (many of them Jewish). Following the pact with Hitler, he ordered his agents to round up six hundred German Communists who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union (many of them Jewish) and deliver them to the Gestapo.

The Sokols’ failure to emigrate may have prolonged their lives, but their prospects were dim. They were stranded in France, jobless, homeless, stateless, and friendless—except for Suzanne and Claude Spaak.

I The painting was acquired by the Tate Collection in London.

II Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels also banned it in Germany, while in the US, Eleanor Roosevelt screened it at the White House.

2

the real war

|1939 – 40|

On September 2, 1939, the morning papers reported that Germany had invaded Poland, though Le Figaro still found room for a list of sportives at the Grand Prix in Deauville. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. The French army quickly mobilized five million men, but there was little panic. The French had built costly fortifications on the border, known as the Maginot Line, and the government assured the public that the country was safe.

On September 17 the Soviets attacked Poland from the east. Poland’s last defenders were crushed. They surrendered on October 6, leaving the victors to divide the spoils.

Neither France nor Britain had a strategy in place. The French made a few incursions into Germany and withdrew. The Royal Air Force dropped leaflets on the German naval base at Kiel, warning, “You cannot win this war.” Then the Germans paused. The drôle de guerre, or “Phony War,” had begun.

A French officer expressed his country’s misplaced optimism in his diary:

We know that our land is safe from invasion, thanks to the Maginot Line; no one has the least desire to fight for Czechoslovakia or for Poland, of which ninety-five Frenchmen out of every hundred are completely ignorant and unable to find on a map. We have no belief that Hitler will hurl himself on us after having swallowed up the little nations, one by one. We tell ourselves that having obtained what he wants, he will leave us in peace.1

The governments in London and Paris distributed gas masks and evacuation plans, but civilians grew weary of waiting on permanent alert and went back to their business. Members of the Spaaks’ circle, including Claude, Charles, and Harry Sokol, weighed their sense of duty against their family obligations. Millions of conscripted Frenchmen lined up to get their hair cropped and mustaches trimmed, but once they reached the “front” they spent their days drilling, drinking, and mugging for the cameras.

Immigrants were eager to enlist. For Spanish Republicans, military service was an instant ticket out of the camps, even if these soldiers’ informal style came as a shock to their French officers. (One startled young lieutenant reported that his jolly Spaniards greeted him every morning with “Buenos días, Papá!”2)

Some thirty thousand Jewish immigrants enlisted, making up almost a third of the foreign recruits.3 But here, too, anti-Semitism persisted. Jews had no chance of becoming pilots, and seasoned soldiers found themselves reporting to French officers their juniors in age and experience. They were relegated to “special units” in the French Foreign Legion, described as “poorly equipped, poorly trained, and poorly armed.”4

One day Bazou Spaak accompanied Suzanne to Paris to visit the Sokols, who had moved into a small flat near the École Militaire. Bazou asked Harry, “Who’s going to win the war?” Harry answered, “France, of course!” and signed up for the French Foreign Legion not long after. Harry’s national origin temporarily worked in his favor. Had he been German or Austrian, he would have been designated an enemy alien. The French arrested some eight thousand Germans and Austrians, three thousand of whom were Jews and other political exiles.I

The Spaaks were technically immigrants, but their circumstances were more favorable. France welcomed Claude as an artist, and his family’s independent income was another advantage. He had a minor heart condition that exempted him from military service, freeing him to concentrate on theater. His producers had rented the Théâtre des Mathurins, a playhouse just north of the Madeleine. They needed a comedy and hoped that Claude could fill the bill. The production team settled on a new adaptation of the Restoration comedy The School for Scandal.

It was a family affair. Claude trimmed superfluous characters and streamlined the action. He asked Suzanne and Ruth Peters to collaborate on a new translation, for which he took credit. The play, which had premiered in London in 1777, seemed an odd choice for Paris in 1939, but it turned out to be perfect. The producers reckoned that Parisians needed to laugh, and the social machinations of Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite offered a welcome break from their diet of dread. The cast was fresh and lively and the costumes scintillating. The producers gambled on a little-known thirty-five-year-old designer named Christian Dior, who had been mobilized for farmwork but allowed to return on leave. The unlikely soldier sat in the back of the theater, a slight man with soft features, already starting to bald. A friend described his costumes as “almost caricatures. His hats were exaggeratedly large with upturned brims, and his use of color was quite novel, bright as those acid drops the English are so famous for.” The bold black and pink stripes on one gown inspired the audience to break into spontaneous applause. The play made Dior the talk of the town.5

The playbill was illustrated by Claude’s friend Jean Cocteau, who was launching his own play next door. Cocteau had recently been convicted of drug trafficking, a consequence of his long-standing opium addiction, and he was worried about his handsome young lover, Jean Marais, who had just been called up for military service. When he wasn’t appearing in court, undergoing rehab, or shadowing his lover, Cocteau dashed off a torrent of poems, plays, and illustrations.

L’École de la médisance opened in February 1940. It was an instant hit, and the company settled in for a long run. At the theater, Suzanne stood quietly in the background with Bazou and Pilette as Claude accepted the accolades. But Claude was surprisingly ambivalent. He spurned evening attire, hated curtain calls, and often fled before the end of the performance. But he avidly consumed the reviews and called the theater every night from Choisel to check on the box office receipts. He finally decided to stop—at which point the operator, who had been eavesdropping, called and asked, “Monsieur, don’t you want to hear how the box office did tonight?” As the play approached its hundredth performance, it seemed as though Claude’s writing career had finally taken off.

In April the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark to wrest control of matériel and supply lines. Then they turned westward, and, as in past wars, the path to Paris ran through Belgium.

Occupying center stage was Claude’s brother Paul-Henri, who labored for peace where none was at hand. He was not yet forty and had recently rotated from the post of prime minister to foreign minister. As a youth he had returned from prison camp to a blasted homeland and a starving population. Why, he asked, should the Belgians offer up their country as a battlefield when they had nothing to gain?

Paul-Henri served as the cabinet’s intermediary to the Belgian king, a foppish young man who looked down on plebeian politicians. Paul-Henri, his occasional golfing buddy, was the only minister he liked. As a hereditary German prince, Leopold III hoped to ingratiate himself with the Nazis and preserve his dynasty. The Germans had pressured the Belgians again and again to prove their submissiveness, and they complied. Spaak’s uncle, Paul-Émile Janson, the minister of justice, drew up a list of “suspect Belgians and foreigners”—including Jewish refugees—who would be arrested when it “proved necessary.”6

On May 10 the Germans attacked Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The German ambassador arrived in Paul-Henri’s office to make the formal declaration. Paul-Henri interrupted him, acting “very, very emotional, [his] heart beating at an appalling rate, extremely indignant.” He pulled out a text and read aloud: “For the second time in twenty-five years . . . Germany is committing a criminal aggression against a neutral and honest Belgium.”7

Later that day, the “suspect Belgians and foreigners” were rounded up, loaded onto sealed train cars, and deported to France. One Jewish survivor reported that townspeople along the way accused them of being German parachute agents.8

Brussels fell on May 18. By the time the German troops reached the Royal Palace, most of the ministers had escaped to France. Paul-Henri dispatched their families to his brother in Choisel along with his own wife and three children. The parade of black Packards stood in a long row outside the house like a funeral cortege gone astray. Claude sent them to a nearby hotel.

On May 25, Paul-Henri fled to Dunkirk. Hundreds of thousands of French and British troops had been driven to the sea and were awaiting evacuation. Paul-Henri and two other ministers went to the head of the line, and their small torpedo boat arrived in London by nightfall. Belgium surrendered two days later. A quarter of the country’s eight million people fled to France, along with a quarter of its nine-hundred-thousand-man armed forces.9

One of the refugees was René Magritte, who had been living in Brussels on Suzanne’s monthly stipend. Five days after the German invasion he fled with some friends, leaving his wife, Georgette, behind. Magritte told a friend she stayed to recover from appendicitis, but she actually refused to abandon a lover.10 Magritte believed with some reason that the Nazis might target him for arrest. He was a sometime member of the Communist Party, and the Nazis condemned surrealists as “degenerate.” He had given a public lecture in 1938 in which he called Hitler a “pain in the ass” and his followers a “fistful of fanatics.”11 Magritte and his companions left Brussels under a hail of German bombs, traveling by train, streetcar, taxi, and on foot—any conveyance that still functioned. Magritte planned to hole up outside Carcassonne in the southwest with some other painters, but he needed money. He stopped off at the Spaaks’ home in Choisel asking to “borrow back” some paintings.

“There’s a rich American who’s sailing for New York, and she’s buying art to take along,” Magritte told Claude. “I think I can sell her something. Don’t worry, I’ll replace it later.” The painter scurried off, clutching a shiny green portfolio filled with a dozen paintings. A few days later he tracked down Peggy Guggenheim at a framer’s shop in Montparnasse.12 He conveniently happened to be carrying La voix des airs, an oil he had “borrowed” from the Spaaks. She bought it from him then and there.II

Claude, Suzanne, and Ruth spent the following days gathered around the radio, listening to the news and reviewing their options. Paul-Henri had quietly advised his family to move money out of Europe and make contingency plans. The previous year, Claude had deposited $10,000 of Suzanne’s fortune in a Manhattan bank under the names of “Monsieur and Madame Spaak.” He transferred more funds to a bank in England, and stored a third sum in gold coins at home in a sturdy leather bag.

Now they should leave, Claude decided, with New York as their ultimate destination. If the Germans continued to advance, there would be mass panic. They should get on the road before the crush. Claude loaded the bag of gold into the car. Suzanne was worried about those under her care. What would happen to Mira? Would the Germans bomb Paris to rubble, as they had Warsaw? What about the Spanish refugees trapped at the border? Bazou wanted to know if his dog, Wotan, would be safe. There was no time to answer.

Claude bundled Suzanne, Ruth, and the children into the black Citroën, squeezing them in amid luggage and provisions, and headed south through a landscape glowing with yellow fields of rapeseed. They sheltered in a farmhouse along the way.

France surrendered on June 17, but some areas of the country were still untouched. Claude decided to strike out for the coast in hopes of sailing to North America. But first they made a stop at the grand château where Claude’s mother, the Belgian senator, had found refuge. They found her resting in queenly fashion in a satin-canopied bed beneath an opulent ceiling covered with clouds and cherubs. They stayed for a week, until the château’s population swelled to nearly a hundred. Claude decided to head south and buy passage to New York, hoping to make it ahead of the German troops.

The Spaaks left on a sultry Sunday morning that would be torrid by nightfall. The road was empty as far as the eye could see, both ahead and behind them, a perfect allée that stretched between two sentinel rows of trees. No one talked. From her window Pilette could see a dejected Belgian soldier sitting by the side of the road in his red-tasseled cap, chewing on a blade of grass. Later she realized that if the soldier had walked a kilometer west, he could have made it back to Belgium. But he stayed put, suggesting he would spend the next four years as a prisoner of war.

At one point Claude’s hands gripped the steering wheel. “Don’t turn around; act normally,” he said tensely. Two German soldiers on motorcycles had appeared in his rearview mirror. They sped up and passed the car. A few hours later the family pulled up at a railroad crossing and saw townspeople crowded at their windows. Pilette was taken aback to see how excited they were, “as though they were waiting for a bullfight,” watching the two German motorcyclists, who had stopped at the barrier. The Spaaks learned that Bordeaux would be occupied the next day. They would not be going to America.

Instead, Claude veered east to Carcassonne. The overloaded Citroën kept blowing out tires. He found a room for the women and children and went to see Magritte, who was staying outside town. Claude invited Magritte to join them, but Magritte preferred to sulk. He wrote to a friend, “I wish I could drop dead very soon.”13

The next day Claude drove the family to Sainte-Maxime, a small town on the French Riviera, where he found a villa to rent. The children thought it was paradise, with a garden of mimosa and fig trees and a terrace overlooking Saint-Tropez across the bay. The rooms were cool, bright, and serene. Claude settled into an office on the second floor, where he wrote and tutored his daughter.

Bazou pined for his Wotan, and his mother decided to take the train north to fetch him. Suzanne spent the first night in Marseille in a bedbug-infested hotel, where she filled a large bucket with water and slept in a chair placed in the bucket. But she accomplished her mission and returned with the dog.

At this point the children thought they were “happy and complete,” but Suzanne knew otherwise. Claude went back to his writing and Ruth withdrew to her room, but Suzanne spent much of her time in tears, worrying about her Spanish refugees and her friend Mira. She besieged Claude with a constant refrain: “I want to do something.” Europe was in flames, her refugees were in crisis, and here she was, trapped at a beach resort. Finally, in September, he relented.

Claude obtained a laissez-passer that authorized the family to return to the Occupied Zone, and the Spaaks, Ruth, and Wotan piled back into the Citroën. As they approached the border of occupied France, Claude scanned the horizon, fearing he might be arrested and sent to Germany. At the checkpoint, he handed the pass to the soldier on duty, who put it in a pile to process. Claude turned to his family and said, “Let’s let Wotan pee one more time in the free world.”

He walked the dog and returned for the pass. The sergeant stared at him in dismay, then looked down the road. He had mistakenly given it to another driver, now long gone. The family could get another permit, but it would take weeks. Claude installed them in an inn and set to work getting a new pass. A recently demobilized French officer named André Mercier helped, and Claude offered him a ride back to Paris in return. The additional passenger made the squeeze even tighter; Wotan’s food, a huge bag of rice, hung precariously from the antenna. The Spaaks later learned that Mercier had hidden his revolver in his luggage. If the Germans had found it at a checkpoint, it would have endangered them all.

The Spaaks made their way back to Choisel through a new landscape. Roads bore signposts in German; clocks were set an hour forward to Berlin time. German soldiers guarded each junction. The Spaaks’ house appeared unscathed, but when they entered the salon they found two uniformed German officers seated in the armchairs. They greeted the Spaaks politely. “We’re veterinary officers from the Wehrmacht,” one of them announced. “We’ll be staying for three days.” Assigned to care for army horses, they stated their presence as a fact.

The Spaaks had traversed the country, witnessing defeated soldiers, throngs of refugees, and country folk greeting German troops. They had imagined another existence in New York, where Claude might open an art gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Suzanne could knit stockings for the Red Cross, and the children would go to the zoo in Central Park—a place where the Nazis were a distant headline in the New York Times. That future was not to be.

The invasion had altered the demographic map of France. The casualties were never accurately recorded, but it is believed that between fifty thousand and ninety thousand French soldiers were killed, and nearly two million taken prisoner.14 Eight million people had fled, six million of them French, and the rest refugees from Belgium and neighboring countries.15

Claude’s associates returned to the theater, and Suzanne’s refugees went to ground. Hard times were coming, but the Spaaks were buffered by wealth and privilege. They could lie low until it was over. They had the ability to choose, and the sensible choice seemed obvious.16 Nonetheless, events were transpiring that would complicate that choice.

On June 14, the same day that Paris surrendered, twenty uniformed Gestapo officers checked into the Hôtel du Louvre. The next morning one appeared at the Prefecture of Police to demand the French dossiers on left-wing opponents: Communists and Free-masons, in addition to the interned German and Austrian exiles, many of whom were Jews.

The French police had the files ready and handed them over without objection. The exiles who had been rounded up by the French as suspected German agents were now subject to arrest as enemies of the Reich.17

The French government was paralyzed. Winston Churchill urged its leadership to set up a government in exile in London like the Belgians’ and fight on with their troops overseas. But the French were beaten and ready to cut their losses. On June 16 a new French government was formed by men who were prepared to negotiate a surrender.

On the seventeenth the Spaaks, like millions of others, heard Marshal Philippe Pétain deliver his first broadcast as chief of state. “It is with a breaking heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting,” he announced.18 His message was met with both sorrow and relief by an audience that was haunted by newsreels of Warsaw in ruins and that still grieved for the last war’s casualties. Pétain, the heroic field marshal of the First World War, promised them survival with a modicum of dignity.

The next day, the Spaaks gathered at the radio to hear Charles de Gaulle’s broadcast from London contesting Pétain’s message. “It is absurd to consider the fight to be lost,” he said. “The flame of French resistance is not extinguished, and must not be extinguished.” Few Frenchmen heard this broadcast; the BBC had to repeat a similar version of the address four days later.

What did it mean? The “flame of French resistance” was invisible, and the officer purporting to fan it was an unlikely leader. At six feet five inches, de Gaulle was almost a foot taller than the frail Pétain and the pudgy Churchill, with beady eyes, a double chin, and a beaked nose. His green uniform’s taut shoulders and billowing breeches exaggerated his awkward build. They called him “the great asparagus.” His voice was high and reedy, and he spoke with fussy precision. But he was prepared to lead. Although de Gaulle lacked the authority to establish a government in exile, he announced that he was organizing a Free French army in London. Suzanne and Claude heard the news with interest, although Suzanne had reservations about him as a conservative military man.

The dust began to settle. Most of the one hundred thousand French soldiers who were evacuated at Dunkirk returned to France voluntarily within a week, including many Jews. Only a few thousand remained in Britain with de Gaulle.

On June 1, 1940, as the fighting continued, Adolf Hitler made a surprise trip to Belgium to confer with his generals and revisit his old stomping grounds from the First World War. Family lore held that Hitler stayed at the home of Suzanne’s sister Bunny after the Germans requisitioned it. Three weeks later he arrived in Paris to inspect his next conquest. He had never traveled beyond German-speaking territories and knew Paris only through pictures. He roamed the empty streets at dawn in an open staff car crammed with four underlings, bypassing the city’s most exquisite sights in favor of its monuments to grandiosity.

Life changed for the Spaaks at Choisel. As a British citizen, Ruth faced internment, so she departed to the Free Zone, and Magritte returned to Brussels. The Spaaks prepared for a long haul. Suzanne went to the yarn shop and bought up the available stock, then purchased four pairs of shoes for each family member, the children’s in four different sizes. “Four pairs for four years, to last the war,” she said. Within weeks the shoe stores were empty, but her family was shod.

The Germans were commandeering French vehicles and gasoline, so Claude reluctantly parked the black Citroën in the garage and covered it with straw. Now getting to Paris meant a three-mile walk or bicycle ride to the train station for an hour-long trip. A Life correspondent wrote that the absence of traffic left Paris “weirdly silent,” like a “lost city discovered by archaeologists.”19 Claude had to fiddle with the radio dial for illegal BBC transmissions to find out what was going on in the world; the French newspapers and broadcasters had been taken over by Vichy propagandists and Nazi censors.

Two million Parisians had fled, and half had not returned by September. If the decision was difficult for most Parisians, it was harder for Jews. They were aware of the Nazis’ abuses elsewhere, but French Jews believed that their citizenship would protect them. Leaving France required money, visas, and a perilous journey, as well as the willingness to abandon family and property.20 Only five thousand Jews left the country between June 10 and 25, and another fifteen thousand by the end of the summer, barely 5 percent of the Jewish population.21

Many of the initial German occupiers were young, handsome, and correct. When they commandeered a dwelling they usually apologized, and there were reports of them offering their seats on the Métro to elderly Jewish ladies. German troops helped refugees return to their homes and distributed food to their families. “Poor French people,” one leaflet stated. “See how your government and its prefects have abandoned you, how they have lied to you and presented us as barbarians. . . . But since they are not doing anything for you, the German army will come to your aid.”22

The illusion of civility would not last, and the early warning signs came from the French. In July, roving bands of young thugs appeared wearing the pale blue shirts of the French Fascist party. They began by putting up anti-Semitic posters along the thoroughfares and moved on to smashing the windows of Jewish shops on the Champs-Élysées.23

The Germans took over the administration of the northern Occupied Zone, headquartered in Paris, while Pétain and his government installed themselves in the southern spa town of Vichy, chosen for its extensive hotel accommodations. The democratic French République was no more, replaced by the authoritarian État Français. Laws made in Vichy applied to both zones, but the Germans could overrule or amend them. Pétain urged his countrymen to turn away from the divisive democratic politics of the past—namely, the Popular Front of Léon Blum—and instead embrace the authoritarian values of “travail, famille, patrie