Non­fic­tion

Suzan­ne’s Children

  • From the Publisher
May 16, 2017

A sto­ry of courage in the face of evil. The tense dra­ma of Suzanne Spaak who risked and gave her life to save hun­dreds of Jew­ish chil­dren from depor­ta­tion from Nazi Paris to Auschwitz. This is one of the untold sto­ries of the Holocaust.
Suzanne Spaak was born into the Bel­gian Catholic elite and mar­ried into the coun­try’s lead­ing polit­i­cal fam­i­ly. Her broth­er-in-law was the For­eign Min­is­ter and her hus­band, Claude, was a play­wright and patron of the painter Renee Magritte. In Paris in the late 1930s 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.
In the final year of the Occu­pa­tion, Suzanne was caught in the Gestapo drag­net that was pur­su­ing a Sovi­et agent she had aid­ed. She was exe­cut­ed short­ly before the lib­er­a­tion of Paris. Suzanne Spaak is hon­ored in Israel as one of the Right­eous Among Nations.

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