Suzanne’s Children
ONE DAY, deep into my research for a book about World War II, I encountered a photo that stopped me cold. Suzanne Spaak was a lovely woman in her 30s with a soulful gaze. Who are you? I wondered, searching the photo for clues. The caption linked her to an espionage ring in Paris, but that didn’t give me much to go on. What was the story behind this mysterious woman?
In 2009 I finally tracked down her daughter Pilette, an 80-year-old knitting instructor in suburban Maryland. I gave her a call. “Everyone thinks Mama was a spy,” Pilette told me, “and I wouldn’t care if she was, but she was actually something very different.”
It turned out that her mother’s principal activity was organizing a network
