1. “Les Trentes Glorieuses,” the postwar boom in France.
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WHAT DID DORA BRUDER DO FIRST, I WONDER, AS soon as she had made her escape on 14 December 1941. Perhaps she had decided not to return to the boarding school the instant she had arrived at the gate, and had spent the evening wandering the streets till curfew.
Streets that still had countrified names: Les Meuniers, La Bèche-aux-Loups, Le Sentier des Merisiers. But at the top of the little tree-shaded street that ran alongside the perimeter wall of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie there was a freight depot, and further on, if you take the Avenue Daumesnil, the Gare de Lyon. The railway lines to this station pass within a few hundred meters of the school where Dora Bruder had been shut up. This peaceful quarter, seemingly remote from Paris, with its convents, its hidden cemeteries and quiet avenues, is also a point of departure.
I don’t know if the proximity of the Gare de Lyon encouraged Dora to run away. Whether from her dormitory in the silence of the blackout, she could hear the rumble of freight cars or the sound of trains leaving the Gare de Lyon for the Free Zone . . . She was doubtless familiar with those two duplicitous words: Free Zone.
In the novel I had written at a time when I knew almost nothing about Dora Bruder but wanted to keep her in the forefront of my mind, the girl of her age whom I called Ingrid hides in the Free Zone with her boyfriend. I was thinking of Bella D. who, at the age of fifteen, had smuggled herself out of Paris across the demarcation line, only to end up in a Toulouse prison; of Anne B., who was picked up without a travel permit on Chalon-sur-Saône station and sentenced to twelve weeks in prison . . . These are things that they had told me about in the sixties.
Did Dora Bruder prepare for her escape long in advance, with the complicity of a friend, boy or girl? Did she remain in Paris, or did she in fact try to reach the Free Zone?
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THE POLICE BLOTTER AT THE CLIGNANCOURT STATION has this entry for 27 December 1941 under columns headed Date and subject. Marital status. Summary:
27 December 1941. Bruder Dora, born Paris 12th, 25/2/26, domiciled at 41 Boulevard Ornano. Interview with Bruder Ernest, age 42, father.
The following figures are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12.
The superintendent at Clignancourt police station, 12 Rue Lambert, behind the Butte Montmartre, was called Siri. But Ernest Bruder probably went to the divisional station, 74 Rue du Mont-Cenis, next to the town hall, which was also part of the Clignancourt district: it was nearer his home. The superintendent there was called Cornec.
Dora had run away thirteen days earlier, and Ernest Bruder had waited all that time before notifying the police of his daughter’s disappearance. His anguish and indecision during those long thirteen days can be imagined. During the census of October 1940, he had omitted to register Dora at this very police station, and they were bound to notice. By trying to find her, he was drawing attention to her.
The transcript of Ernest Bruder’s interview is missing from the Prefecture of Police archives. No doubt local police stations destroy documents of that kind as they become obsolete. A few years after the war, other police records were destroyed, such as the special registers opened during the week in June 1942 when every Jewish person over the age of six was issued with three yellow stars. These registers, which had a column in the margin where you signed on receipt of your stars, recorded your civil status, identity card number, and domicile. Police stations in Paris and the suburbs compiled over fifty such registers.
We shall never know how Ernest Bruder answered the questions put to him about his daughter and himself. Perhaps he chanced on a desk clerk for whom it was a matter of routine, like before the war, and who saw no particular difference between Ernest Bruder and his daughter and any other French citizen. To be sure, the man was an “ex-Austrian,” and an unskilled laborer living in a hotel. But his daughter was born in Paris and had French nationality. A runaway adolescent. It happens more and more in these troubled times. Did this policeman advise Ernest Bruder to put the missing notice in Paris-Soir, given that almost two weeks had passed since Dora’s disappearance? Or did a Paris-Soir reporter, touring the police stations in search of “filler,” happen to see it among other incidents of the day and glean it for the paper’s “From Day to Day” columns?
I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960—an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke: the clean break, deliberately made, from enforced rules, boarding school, teachers, classmates; you have nothing to do with these people from now on; the break from your parents, who have never understood you, and from whom, you tell yourself, it’s useless to expect any help; feelings of rebellion and solitude carried to flash point, taking your breath away and leaving you in a state of weightlessness. It was probably one of the few times in my life when I was truly myself and following my own bent.
This ecstasy cannot last. It has no future. You are swiftly brought down to earth.
Running away—it seems—is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide. At least you experience a moment of eternity. You have broken your ties not only with the world but also with time. And one fine morning you find that the sky is a pale blue and that nothing now weighs you down. In the Tuileries garden, the hands on the clock have stopped for good. An ant is transfixed in its journey across a patch of sunlight.
I think of Dora Bruder. I remind myself that, for her, running away was not as easy as it was for me, twenty years later, in a world that had once more been made safe. To her, everything in that city of December 1941, its curfews, its soldiers, its police, was hostile, intent on her destruction. At sixteen years old, without knowing why, she had the entire world against her.
Other rebels, in the Paris of those years, equally solitary, were throwing hand grenades at the Germans, into their conveys and meetings. They were her age. Some of their faces appeared on the Affiche Rouge,1 and, despite myself, I keep associating them in my mind with Dora.
In the summer of 1941, one of the films made under the Occupation, first shown in Normandy, came to the local Paris cinemas. It was a harmless comedy: Premier rendez-vous. The last time I saw it, I had a strange feeling, out of keeping with the thin plot and the sprightly tones of the actors. I told myself that perhaps, one Sunday, Dora Bruder had been to see this film, the subject of which was a girl of her age who runs away. She escapes from a boarding school much like the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. During her flight, as in fairy tales and romances, she meets her Prince Charming.
This film paints a rosy, anodyne picture of what had happened to Dora in real life. Did it give her the idea of running away? I concentrated on details: the dormitory, the school corridors, the boarders’ uniforms, the café where the heroine waits after dark . . . I could find nothing that might correspond to the reality, and in any case most of the scenes were shot in the studio. And yet, I had a sense of unease. It stemmed from the film’s peculiar luminosity, from the grain of the actual stock. Every image seemed veiled in an arctic whiteness that accentuated the contrasts and sometimes obliterated them. The lighting was at once too bright and too dim, either stifling the voices or making their timbre louder, more disturbing.
Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation—people from all walks of life, most of whom would not have survived the war. They had been taken out of themselves after having seen this film one Saturday night, their night out. While it lasted, you forgot the war and the menacing world outside. Huddled together in the dark of a cinema, you were caught up in the flow of images on the screen, and nothing more could happen to you. And, by some kind of chemical process, this combined gaze had materially altered the actual film, the lighting, the voices of the actors. That is what I had sensed, thinking of Dora Bruder and faced with the ostensibly trivial images of Premier rendez-vous.
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ERNEST BRUDER WAS ARRESTED ON 19 MARCH 1942, or rather, that was the day he was interned at Drancy. I’ve been unable to find any trace of the circumstances of his arrest, nor of the reasons for it. In what was called a “family file,” where data on each individual Jew were assembled for use at the Prefecture of Police, his entry reads:
Bruder Ernest
21.5.99—Vienna
Jewish dossier no.: 49091
Trade or profession: None
French legionnaire, 2d class. 100% disabled. Gassed; pulmonary tuberculosis
Central police register E56404
Lower down, the file has been stamped WANTED, next to which somebody has penciled the words: “Traced to Drancy camp.”
As a Jew and an “ex-Austrian,” Ernest Bruder could have been arrested in the roundup of August 1941, during which the French police, backed by the German army, had cordoned off the 11th arrondissement on 20 August and then, in the days that followed, stopped and questioned foreign Jews in the streets of other arrondissements, including the 18th. How had he escaped this roundup? Thanks to his rank as an ex-French legionnaire, 2d class? I doubt it.
Evidently, from his file, he was “wanted.” But since when? And why, exactly? If he was already “wanted” on 27 December 1941, the day he had notified the Clignancourt police of Dora’s disappearance, he wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the police station. Did he draw attention to himself on that day?
A father tries to find his daughter, reports her disappearance at a police station, and a wanted notice is inserted in an evening newspaper. But the father himself is “wanted.” Parents lose all trace of their daughter and, one 19 March, one of them disappears in his turn, as if the winter that year was cutting people off from one another, muddying and wiping out their tracks to the point where their existence is in doubt. And there is no redress. The very people whose job it is to search for you are themselves compiling dossiers, the better to ensure that, once found, you will disappear again—this time for good.
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I DON’T KNOW WHETHER OR NOT DORA BRUDER LEARNED of her father’s arrest at once. I imagine not. By March, she had still not returned to 41 Boulevard Ornano after her escape in December. Or so it would seem from such traces of her as survive in the archives of the Prefecture of Police.
Now that almost sixty years have passed, these archives will gradually reveal their secrets. All that remains of the building occupied by the Prefecture of Police during the Occupation is a huge spectral barracks beside the Seine. Whenever we evoke the past, it reminds us a little of the House of Usher. And we can hardly believe that this building we pass every day can be unchanged since the forties. We persuade ourselves that these cannot be the same stones, the same corridors.
The superintendents and inspectors who hunted down the Jews are long dead, and their names echo with a sombre ring and give off a smell of rotting leather and stale tobacco: Permilleux, François, Schweblin, Koerperich, Cougoule . . . Also dead, or far gone in senility, are the street police, known to us as the “press-gang,” who signed the transcript of every interview with those whom they arrested during the roundups. Every one of those tens of thousands of transcripts was destroyed, and we shall never know the identity of the members of the “press-gang.” But there remain, in the archives, hundreds and hundreds of letters addressed to the Prefect of Police of the day, and to which he never replied. They have been there for over half a century, like sacks of airmail lying forgotten in the recesses of a remote hangar. Now we can read them. Those to whom they were addressed having ignored them, it is we, who were not even born at the time, who are their recipients and their guardians.
TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE
SIR,
I humbly draw your attention to my request. It concerns my nephew Albert Graudens, of French nationality, aged sixteen, who had been interned at . . .
TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE FOR JEWISH AFFAIRS
SIR,
I implore you to have the great kindness to release my daughter, Nelly Trautmann, from Drancy camp . . .
TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE
SIR,
I venture to ask you a favor in respect of my husband, Zelik Pergricht, so that I may know where he is and have a little news . . .
TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE
SIR,
I humbly beg you in your great kindness and generosity for news of my daughter, Mme Jacques Lévy, née Violette Joël, arrested about 10 September last as she was trying to cross the demarcation line without wearing the regulation star. She was accompanied by her son, Jean Lévy, aged eight and a half . . .
Forwarded to the Prefect of Police:
I beg you to have the kindness to release my grandson, Michel Robin, aged three, French-born of a French mother, who is interned with him at Drancy . . .
TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE
SIR,
I would be infinitely grateful if you would be good enough to take the following cases into consideration: my parents, both elderly and in poor health, have just been arrested as Jews, and my little sister, Marie Grosman, aged fifteen and a half, a French Jew, holding French identity card no. 1594936, grade B, and myself, Jeanette Grosman, also a French Jew, aged nineteen, holding French identity card no. 924247, grade B, have been left on our own . . .
TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE FOR JEWISH AFFAIRS
SIR,
Excuse me if I presume to write to you in person about this, but my husband was taken away at 4 A.M. on 16 July 1942, and as my little girl was crying, they took her at the same time.
Her name is Pauline Gothelf, aged fourteen and a half, born 19 November 1927 in Paris, 12th arrondissement, and she is French . . .
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FOR THE DATE OF 17 APRIL 1942, THE POLICE BLOTTER at Clignancourt station has this entry under its usual headings, Date and subject. Marital status. Summary:
17 April 1942. 20998 15/24. P. Minors. Case of Bruder Dora, age 16, disappeared following Interview 1917 has regained maternal domicile.
I don’t know what the figures 20998 and 15/24 stand for. “P. Minors” must mean Protection of Minors. Interview 1917 is certainly the transcript of Ernest Bruder’s deposition, and the questions concerning Dora and himself put to him on 27 December 1941. This is the sole reference in the archives to Interview 1917.
A bare three lines on the “case of Bruder Dora.” The entries that come after it in the blotter for 17 April concern other “cases”:
Gaul Georgette Paulette, born 30.7.23 Pantin, Seine, to Georges and Pelz Rose, spinster, lives in hotel 11 Rue Pigalle. Prostitution.
Germaine Mauraire, born 9.10.21 Entre-Deux-Eaux (Vosges). Lives in hotel. 1 P.M. report.1
J.-R. CRETET, 9TH ARRONDISSEMENT
So the list goes on, throughout the Occupation, in the police blotters: prostitutes, lost dogs, abandoned babies. And runaway adolescents—like Dora—guilty of vagrancy.
Apparently, “Jews” as such never came into it. And yet they passed through these same police stations before being taken to the Dépôt, and from there to Drancy. And the phrase “regained maternal domicile” suggests that the Clignancourt police were aware that Dora’s father had been arrested the month before.
Of Dora herself, there is no trace between 14 December 1941, the day she ran away, and 17 April 1942 when, in the words of the blotter, she regained the maternal domicile, that is, the hotel room at 41 Boulevard Ornano. For those four months, we have no idea where she went, what she did, whom she was with. Nor do we know the circumstances of her return to the “maternal domicile.” Was it of her own accord, after having heard of her father’s arrest? Or had she in fact been stopped in the street, the Brigade for the Protection of Minors having issued a warrant for her arrest? So far, I haven’t found a single clue, a single witness who might shed light on these four months of absence, for us, a blank in her life.
One way not to lose all touch with Dora Bruder over this period would be to report on the changes in the weather. The first snow fell on 4 November 1941. Winter got off to a cold start on 22 December. On 29 December, the temperature dropped still further, and windowpanes were covered with a thin coating of ice. From 13 January onwards, the cold became Siberian. Water froze. This lasted some four weeks. On 12 February, the sun came out briefly, like a tentative annunciation of spring. The snow on the sidewalks, trampled by pedestrians, turned to a blackish slush. It was on that evening of 12 February that my father was picked up by the Jewish Affairs police. On 22 February it snowed again. On 25 February, there was a fresh, much heavier snowfall. On 3 March, just after 9 P.M., the first bombs fell on the suburbs. Windows rattled in Paris. On 13 March, in broad daylight, the sirens sounded a general alert. Passengers were stuck in the métro for two hours. They were led out through the tunnel. A second alert that same day, at 10 P.M. 15 March was a beautiful sunny day. On 28 March, about 10 P.M., a distant air raid, lasting till midnight. On 2 April, around 4 A.M., an alert, followed by a heavy bombardment till six. More raids from 11 P.M. On 4 April, the buds on the chestnut trees burst open. On 5 April, toward evening, a passing spring storm brought hail and, with it, a rainbow. Don’t forget: rendezvous tomorrow afternoon, on the terrace of the Café des Gobelins.
A few months ago, I managed to get hold of a photograph of Dora Bruder, one that is in complete contrast to those already in my collection. It may be the last ever taken of her. Her face and demeanor have none of the childlike qualities that shine out from all the earlier photographs, in the gaze, the rounded cheeks, the white dress worn on a school assembly day . . . I don’t know when this photograph was taken. It could only have been in 1941, when Dora was a boarder at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, or else early in the spring of 1942, when she returned to the Boulevard Ornano after her escape in December.
Dora Bruder Page 5