Suzanne Spaak

(1905–1944)

On 12th August 1944, just thirteen days before the liberation of Paris, 39-year-old Suzanne Spaak was executed in her cell in Fresnes prison (Seine, Val-de-Marne) by a Gestapo officer. This was the price she paid for saving Jewish children and her involvement in the espionage network known as the Red Orchestra.

Suzanne Spaak came from a wealthy banking family. She was born in 1905 in Brussels as Augustine Suzanne Lorge, daughter of exchange agent Louis Lorge. In 1925, she married Claude Spaak, a playwright and filmmaker, brother of the socialist minister Paul-Henri Spaak. As fascism and Nazism rose in the 1930s, Suzanne joined the Comité Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme. In May 1940, the Spaak family retreated to the South of France in Sainte-Maxime.

From 1941, Suzanne became a leader of the Mouvement Nationale Contre le Racisme (MNCR). She worked secretly against the persecution of Jews and found support within Protestant circles to shelter Jewish children. As a mother of two, she did not hesitate to take great risks to smuggle Jewish children to safety.

But Suzanne did more. Through her previous involvement with the World Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, she had met the communist Myra Sokol in Brussels. The Sokol couple introduced her to the Parisian network of the Red Orchestra, led by Leopold Trepper (Leiba Domb), a Polish Jew and officer of the Soviet military intelligence. Since the late 1930s, Trepper had built a network across multiple European countries, using legitimate companies as cover, including raincoat shops ‘Au Roi du Caoutchouc’ and ‘The Foreign Excellent Trench-Coat’, as well as the import-export firms Simex and Simexco. Through these companies, spies made contact with the German occupiers. Information was sent via coded radio messages by so-called 'pianists'. ‘Cobblers’ provided false documents.

On the night of 12th to 13th December 1941, the Nazis located a Red Orchestra transmitter in Brussels. During the raid, they found enough evidence to dismantle the Brussels network, and they came across Suzanne Spaak’s name. At that time, she was in Brussels, helping Jewish children go into hiding. In November 1943, she was arrested and shortly thereafter transferred to Paris, where the specially formed Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle led the hunt for the network. Like other members of the Red Orchestra, Suzanne was heavily tortured.

In January 1944, she was sentenced to death. Executions were usually carried out in Germany, but as the liberation of Paris neared, Heinz Pannwitz, leader of the Sonderkommando, personally shot her in her cell on 12th August. Her body was buried anonymously in Bagneux cemetery, with a small plaque reading: "Une belge" (a Belgian).

In 1985, Suzanne Spaak was posthumously awarded the title of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem, granted to non-Jews who helped Jews survive the Holocaust.

Sources:

● Gilles Perrault, Het Rode Orkest, Toren Boeken, 1983.

● Anne Nelson, La vie héroïque de Suzanne Spaak, Robert Laffont, Parijs, 2018.