When her parents were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, a six-year-old from Newcastle was hidden away in Paris. Now she is retracing her path to freedom
The fragments of the story were there all along, bundled into a shoebox which lay, unopened, in a spare room at Suzanne Rappoport's apartment in Leeds. There were the postcards her father had sent, asking after her but providing no word of her mother; the studio photograph of the three of them taken a few weeks before they were separated; and the immaculate, handwritten note she had penned, aged no more than nine, telling how she longed to see them both again. "Je serai bien contente de revoir ma chere petite maman et mon cher petit papa," reads the letter. She never did.
Ms Rappoport was born of an immigrant British mother and has spent her entire adult life in England. But its defining event occurred on a warm August afternoon in German-occupied Paris, in 1942. The French police were collaborating with the Nazis in the round up of non-French Jews - those who had come to France but were not born there - for deportation. Among them were her parents, taken from their small flat at Belleville, in the attractive 20th arrondissement.
Ms Rappoport would have been taken, too, were it not for the courage and sheer audacity of the woman across the third floor landing, Mme Yvonne Collomb, who removed the child from the flat - even as French police waited for her parents to pack a case each - and then helped conceal her from the Nazis and their collaborators for over three years. Though other British Jews are known to have been among France's 30,000 Hidden Children, who escaped the Nazis in circumstances captured by Sebastian Faulks's novel Charlotte Gray, Ms Rappoport will become the first to tell her story this week, in a BBC Timewatch documentary which takes her back to the apartment block where, 65 years ago, she was concealed in a makeshift bed under her neighbour's kitchen table.
There would have been no story to tell had not Ms Rappoport's mother, Millie Spadik, whose own parents first arrived in Liverpool by passenger ship in the early 1900s to escape the Russian pogroms, decided to leave her home in Newcastle upon Tyne for France after an unhappy marriage. She settled in Paris where she had met Josek Rappoport, a Polish tailor, though she and her daughter returned to north-east England several times before the war. With Millie's income as a garment finisher supplementing Josek's salary, they enjoyed theatre and cinema and were able to indulge their daughter in her favourite treat - grenadine and lemonade with a straw at a café on Rue de Belleville. The last family photograph, taken at the Studio Jean Guy, marked their daughter's sixth birthday - 23 July 1942.
What occurred next remained firmly in the past until Ms Rappoport, now 70, concluded it was time to revisit it. Her decision to go back stemmed from a chance conversation about her parents with one of her neighbours in Leeds, Barbara Govan, whose Screenhouse Productions company has produced the Timewatch documentary, which airs on BBC2 on Friday. "I felt that I needed, while I still could, to find out what had happened to my parents - and to my grandparents, who were also taken that summer," Ms Rappoport said. "There were so many fragments of memory. That's how it must be with an experience like that."
She was at her father's shoulder, as he sat watching the pigeons in the sunshine through the window of their third-floor apartment, when they both heard the sound of the French policemen on the wooden staircase at 58 Rue de Belleville. The child was not immediately anxious: there had been a curfew for her that summer and the yellow star she and other Jewish children wore made her uncomfortable, but her parents had been assiduous about keeping the family's true predicament from her. It was as her parents locked the front door and quickly ushered her into the small family bedroom with them, bundling her under the bed, that it became clear something was seriously wrong. "Mother was sobbing, pacing backwards and forwards and tearing her hair out," Ms Rappoport recalled. "From under the bed, I saw clumps of it falling to the floor. She knew what was coming." After the front door was broken in, the Rappoports were ordered into their sparse little kitchen and were packing bags in front of the small Salamander stove, under the eye of the policemen, when Mme Collomb rushed in. "She said: 'What's my child doing in this apartment? I've been looking everywhere for her. She dragged me out by the arm before I could react," Ms Rappoport said. "She got away with it. The police left the building with my parents but never came looking for me."
Ms Rappoport now believes that her parents and their neighbour had rehearsed this script in readiness for the moment. "Mme Colomb had sent her daughter out to play at the Butte de Chaumont park that day," she said. "I also found my parents' sideboard in her apartment, and items like their Japanese tea set, which puzzled me. I now think it might have been their advance payment to her for the task she was prepared to undertake."
The days which followed brought the same bewildering existence which the two young Jewish brothers experience when hidden in an upstairs room in Charlotte Gray. Mme Collomb made her new child a bed under the kitchen table, protected from view by a long, thick chenille table cloth, and she occupied her with a pair of slippers made from old dusters. It was Suzanne's job to polish the floor with them. "I loved skating around the slippery kitchen on them," Ms Rappoport recalled. "She knew how to distract me."
But it soon became unsafe for a child, whose existence was well known, to be confined so close to home. Mme Collomb tapped into a network which was hiding children in rural France and sent her to the village of Mondoubleau in the Loire Valley, whose role in hiding children has been documented. It was here that the reality of her parents' absence and her own grim existence - with hours hidden from view in a cellar - began to dawn on her. Though she did not know it, those into whose care she had been entrusted did not share Mme Collomb's empathy. A letter, written from a family in Mondoubleau to Mme Collomb and recently recovered from the Leeds shoebox, reads: "Je regrette de vous mettre en embarras pour [Suzanne] mais je ne peux pas la garder. Je ne peux pas m'attacher a la maison pour un enfant." ("I'm sorry to put you in a difficult position over Suzanne but I can't look after her. I can't be stuck at home for a child.")
Suzanne was moved to a farmhouse in the Auvergne, where her yearning to see Ms Collomb, as well as her parents, was evident in an emotional a letter to Ms Collomb which concluded: "Je vais vous quittaient en vous embrasant de tout mon petit coeur."
Correspondence from southern Poland told Mme Collomb that the prospects for the child's parents were grim. Several postcards from Suzanne's father confirmed he was in the Auschwitz camp at Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million Jews and 75,000 Poles perished. His prisoner number - Birkenau 3776 - is at the top of the cards (translated into German at the camp) in which he reports: "I'm digging coal. I'm in good health. How is my child? Of my wife, I've heard nothing."
Young Suzanne, like dozens of France's hidden children, received no word of her parents' fate. She wept when a child, Fernandres, who had shared her predicament in the Auvergne, was suddenly taken home to Marseilles by her parents. Her years in hiding brought several close escapes - she was caught in the crossfire of a resistance attack on a German munitions train on one occasion - but eventually, after the war had ended, she returned to Mme Collomb, only to find herself within days on a ship to her maternal grandparents in Newcastle. "After everything, it wasn't what I wanted," she said. "I was returning to a strange country where I didn't speak the language. As soon as I was old enough, I left my family for London."
"Forget what happened," her grandparents told her, leaving her to reach her own conclusions about her parents' fate. And to this day, the precise details about them are unclear. Though Ms Rappoport has located them both at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, where 76,000 Jews deported from France are remembered, the dates and places of their deaths are still unknown. Discussions are currently under way in Europe on how to speed up the unlocking of a vast archive of Nazi documents, including an index of 17.5 million names, controlled by a commission on which 11 countries, including Britain, are represented. This may also reveal more about her paternal grandmother, who died at Auschwitz, and her grandfather, who died at a holding camp.
Mme Collomb's collection of evidence - passed to Ms Rappoport in 1969 when she went to France in search of documentation to assist her application for a British passport - has helped her to discover more than she hoped to learn and prompted her to ensure the Frenchwoman, who died in 1992, is remembered for her heroism. Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, has already agreed to name Mme Collomb as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and her name is also to be placed on France's Mur des Justes, which acknowledges those who defied the Nazis. It is now known that Mme Collomb saved others including a M. Hubermann, another neighbour, who hid in her broom cupboard.
The French government has awarded Ms Rappoport a small annual compensation - for which she must attend a Leeds police station each year to prove she is still alive. A class action suit co-ordinated in New York against the French railway, SNCF, for transporting her parents and many others continues - though a regional court verdict in their favour has recently been overturned.
"The police never came looking for me at Mme Collomb's house that day and whether I was on the arrest list is a mystery I shall never know the answer to," Ms Rappoport said. The horror that she was spared is perhaps best understood by the letters written by other Parisian children before they were herded away on trains, that summer. "My heart is heavy and I can't tell you all I am feeling," said 15-year-old Jacques Befelor before departing Paris on what was known as Convoy 15 to Auschwitz. "We are rushing to prepare for a long, sad journey and it drives us mad that we are to be separated. This is the end."
Independent
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