Author Talk with Anne Nelson: Suzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue In Nazi Paris

Classrooms Without Borders in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation and the Maltz Museum of Jewish History is thrilled to welcome back author and scholar Anne Nelson! Suzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris

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 Renée 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.

Published in USA by Simon & Schuster. Published as ‘Codename Suzette’ in the UK and Australia by Allan & Unwin, and in France by Robert Laffont, and the Netherlands by Polis Books.

Anne Nelson
Photo by Lillie Paquette
Anne Nelson is an author and lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist she covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1995 she became the director the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting.

Since 2003 Nelson has been teaching at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where her classes and research explore how digital media can support the underserved populations of the world through public health, education and culture.

Nelson is a widely published author. Her 2009 book “Red Orchestra” describes the way media was used for both propaganda and resistance in Nazi Germany, and was published to wide acclaim in the U.S. and Germany. In October 2017, Simon & Schuster published her book “Suzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris,” telling the story of a rescue network in Paris that saved hundreds of Jewish children from deportation. The Wall Street Journal praised the way the book “vividly dramatizes the stakes of acting morally in a time of brutality.” It was named a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards. The work was published as “Codename: Suzette” in the UK, and as “La Vie Heroique de Suzanne Spaak” by Robert Laffont in France. It is available as an audiobook, read by Nelson, and was released in paperback in October 2018.

Nelson’s next book is scheduled for publication in the winter of 2019.

Nelson’s play “The Guys,” based on her experiences following the September 11th attacks, has been produced in all fifty states, fifteen countries, and as a feature film. It has been widely used to fund local fire departments and related causes such as trauma counseling and burn treatment centers.

Nelson also has long experience in philanthropy. She has consulted for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation, among others, in areas of human rights, freedom of expression, social and economic development, and media policy.

Nelson is a graduate of Yale University, a 2005 Guggenheim fellow, and a 2013 Bellagio Fellow. She is a fellow at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, and a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Council on Foreign Relations.