Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris - Hardcover

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Anne Nelson is an award-winning author and playwright. She is the author of Suzanne's Children; Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler; Murder Under Two Flags: The US, Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up; and The Guys: A Play. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, BBC, CBC, NPR, and PBS. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She teaches at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs in New York City.

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Suzanne’s Children

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...