Review: Selflessness Under Pressure An unsung hero of the French Resistance, Suzanne Spaak risked everything to save Jewish children from deportation to Auschwitz. Diane Cole reviews ‘Suzanne’s Children’ by Anne Nelson.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-selflessness-under-pressure-1508194732
‘My children are safe while others are threatened.” That anguished thought gave Belgian heiress Suzanne Spaak the determination to risk everything to protect Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Paris from deportation to, and probable death in, concentration camps. Although absolute numbers are hard to come by, author and playwright Anne Nelson estimates in her immersive chronicle, “Suzanne’s Children,” that Spaak and her Resistance colleagues may have helped save hundreds of young Jewish lives.
At first glance, Spaak’s pampered early life contains little that would suggest her later capacity for selfless courage. The beautiful daughter of a prominent Belgian financier, she had harbored idealistic tendencies as a child, but chose status when she married into a distinguished Belgian political family. Suzanne’s husband, Claude, a suavely handsome writer and art connoisseur, became the patron of acclaimed Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. His provocative works dominated the couple’s grand Parisian apartment, an address so prestigious that their downstairs neighbor was the celebrated author Colette, who gave the world “Gigi.” Suzanne and Claude hobnobbed with the French writer Jean Cocteau, who also lived in the neighborhood, and a then little-known designer named Christian Dior made the costumes for a theatrical production that Claude had organized. To complete the idyllic picture, the couple doted on their young daughter and son, whom they fondly nicknamed Pilette and Bazou. Suzanne’s pedigree and social standing seemed impeccable.
By 1939, however, the real picture had darkened considerably. Angered by her husband’s self-centeredness and caddish infidelities, yet fearing the scandal a divorce would cause, a distraught Suzanne consented to share him in an awkward ménage à trois with his mistress—a woman who had once been her best friend and who would, after Suzanne’s death, become Claude’s second wife. Suzanne was further unnerved by the increasing likelihood of a coming war with Nazi Germany. Even her budding involvement with left-wing political groups seemed futile as the Nazi machine closed in on Jewish immigrant friends trying to escape Europe. With little solace to be found from either her personal life or the world around her, she suffered a breakdown.Ms. Nelson does not tell us what suddenly spurred Spaak to action—or more likely cannot, since Claude burned her correspondence and papers after the war—but with the fall of France and the start of the Nazi occupation, Suzanne gained new purpose. “What can I do?” became her constant refrain as she became ever more active in an ever-larger number of Resistance groups, working with Jews, Catholics and Protestants as well as communists, Soviet agents and followers of Free France’s leader, Charles de Gaulle. CONTINUE AT SITE
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