Suzanne Spaak

Suzanne Spaak (c.1905-1944), World War II heroine.

Suzanne Spaak was born into a prosperous Belgian banking family sometime around 1905. She married Brussels born dramatist Claude Spaak (1904-1990), the brother of screenwriter Charles Spaak and Paul-Henri Spaak, one of Belgium's most important statesmen.

Living in Paris, France with her husband and two children, Suzanne Spaak enjoyed a life of luxury and prestige as one of the city's leading socialites. Her husband had acquired paintings by their fellow Belgian, René Magritte, and in 1936 Magritte painted Suzanne Spaak's portrait. However, her privileged lifestyle was about to change with the onslaught of World War II and the subsequent occupation of France by the German army.

Angry with the suppression, brutality and racial intolerance of the Nazis, she volunteered to work with the underground National Movement Against Racism (MNCR). Because of who she was, Suzanne Spaak's offer of assistance was greeted with a certain amount of skepticism by members of the French Resistance who wondered if this pampered and sophisticated woman would last under difficult and dangerous conditions. Her initial involvement was almost mundane, assigned to doing typing, distributing leaflets, and shopping for everyday supplies. Nonetheless, having chosen an underground movement to which a great many Jews desperately sought help, Spaak walked all over the city of Paris in an effort to find a hospital willing to take the risk of treating Jews who were in hiding and in dire need of medical attention. Using her influence with the upper class of Parisian society, she knocked on the doors of lawyers, judges, clerics, film stars and authors to get support for her work.

With time and growing atrocities by the Nazis, the educated and very capable Suzanne Spaak devoted herself to ridding France and her native Belgium of its suppressors. She joined the Red Orchestra intelligence network, a Soviet sponsored organization founded by a Polish Jew, Leopold Trepper. This group conducted very effective intelligence gathering in Germany, France, the Netherlands and in neutral Switzerland with members known as the "Lucy Ring." The network would become so successful, even infiltrating the German military intelligence service Abwehr, that the Nazis set up the "Red Orchestra Special Detachment" (Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle) to try to destroy it.

A mother of two children, Suzanne Spaak worked doggedly to save the lives of Jewish children who were facing deportation to the German death camps. In early 1943, she was part of a group that saved more than sixty Jewish children who were about to be deported from the Union Generale des Israelites de France (UGIF) centers. At enormous risk to herself and her family, she hid some of the children in her own home, helping to provide the children with clothing and ration cards and arranging for them be moved to the safety of homes of people in various parts of France willing to risk hiding them.

In Belgium, in the spring of 1942, the Germans traced and monitored Red Orchestra operative's radio transmitters and made their first arrests of Red Orchestra agents. Captured members were brutally tortured and several broke, divulging network secrets that, over the ensuing eighteen months, allowed for more than six hundred people to be arrested including Suzanne Spaak in Paris. Sent by the Gestapo to Fresnes prison in October of 1943, she was kept in horrific conditions and subjected to torture. As soon as the Allied forces broke through at Normandy and began to fight their way to free Paris, the Gestapo made preparations to flee but before they did, they began executing certain prisoners. On August 12, 1944, just thirteen days before the liberation of Paris, Suzanne Spaak was murdered by the Germans.

In 1985, Suzanne Spaak's valor and humanity was recognized by the government of Israel, designating her as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" in honors at the national Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem.