Dora Bruder

by Patrick Modiano

  But according to the “Memo to Mlle Salomon,” Dora Bruder had been returned to her mother. Whether or not she was wearing the star—her mother would have been wearing hers for at least a week—it means that, at Clignancourt police station, she was treated the same as any other runaway girl. Or it may be that the police themselves were responsible for the “Memo to Mlle Salomon.”

  I have been unable to trace Mlle Salomon. Is she still alive? Evidently, she was a member of UGIF, the organization administered by leading French Israelites who coordinated charity work among the Jewish community during the Occupation. Unfortunately, while the Union Générate des Israélites de France certainly came to the aid of a great many French Jews, its origins were ambiguous: it had been founded on the initiative of the Germans and the Vichy government on the assumption that control of such a body would facilitate their ends, as in the case of the Judenräte in the towns and cities of Poland.

  Both patrons and staff of the UGIF carried what was called a “legitimization card” to protect them from being rounded up or interned. But this irregular privilege was soon to prove illusory. From 1943 onward, leaders and employees of UGIF were arrested and deported in the hundreds. On the list of these I have found the name of an Alice Salomon, who had worked in the Free Zone. I doubt she could be the Mlle Salomon to whom the memo about Dora was addressed.

  Who wrote this memo? If it was somebody on the staff of the UGIF, it suggests that Dora Bruder and her parents had been known to the UGIF for some time. Very likely Cécile Bruder, Dora’s mother, in common with the majority of lews living in extreme poverty with no other means of support, had turned to this organization as a last resort. It was her only means of getting news of her husband, interned at Drancy since March, and of sending him food parcels. And she may have thought that, with the help of the UGIF, she would eventually find her daughter.

  “Social workers attached to the police (Quai de Gesvres) will take the necessary action if required.” In 1942, these consisted of twenty women attached to the Brigade for the Protection of Minors, a branch of the Criminal Investigation Department. They formed an autonomous section under a senior social worker.

  I have found a photograph dating from this period. Two women aged about twenty-five. They are in black—or navy blue—uniform, with a sort of kepi that sports a badge of two intertwined Ps: Prefecture of Police. The woman on the left, a brunette with hair almost down to her shoulders, carries a satchel. The one on the right appears to be wearing lipstick. Behind the brunette, two wall plaques read: POLICE SOCIAL SERVICES. Below this, an arrow, and underneath it: “Open 0930 h. to 1200 h.” The writing on the lower plaque is half obscured by the brunette’s head and kepi. Nevertheless, you can read:

  DEPARTMENT OF E . . .

  INSPECTORS

  Underneath, an arrow: “Passage on Right. Door number . . .”

  We shall never know the number of this door.

  1. In polite society, Israélite was used to avoid the connotations of the word “Jew.”

  .................

  WHAT HAPPENED TO DORA, I WONDER, IN THE INTERVAL between 15 June, when she found herself in Clignancourt police station, and 17 June, the date of the “Memo for Mlle Salomon.” Had she been allowed to leave the police station with her mother?

  If she had been allowed to return to the Boulevard Ornano hotel with her mother—it was no distance, just down the Rue Hermel—it means that the social workers would have come for her three days later, after Mile Salomon had made contact with the Quai de Gesvres.

  But I have a feeling that things were not quite as straightforward as that. I have often taken the Rue Hermel, in both directions, toward the Butte Montmartre and toward the Boulevard Ornano, and, try as I might, closing my eyes, I find it hard to picture Dora and her mother walking along this street on their way back to their hotel room on a sunny June afternoon as though it was just another day.

  I believe that on 15 June, at Clignancourt police station, Dora and her mother were caught up in a chain reaction over which they no longer had any control. Children are liable to expect more from life than their parents and, faced with adversity, their reaction is the more violent. They go farther, much farther than their parents. And, thereafter, their parents are unable to protect them.

  Confronted with the police, Mlle Salomon, social workers, German decrees and French laws, Cécile Bruder, with her yellow star, her husband interned in Drancy and her “state of penury,” would have felt herself utterly defenseless. And quite unable to cope with Dora, who was a rebel and had more than once shown her determination to tear a hole in this net that had been thrown over her and her parents.

  “In view of the fact that she has repeatedly run away, it would seem advisable to remand her to a juvenile home.”

  Perhaps Dora was taken from Clignancourt police station to the Dépôt at police headquarters, that being the usual practice. In which case she would have known that huge, windowless basement, its cells, its straw mattresses heaped with Jewish women, prostitutes, “criminals,” and “political” prisoners huddled together anyhow. She would have known the lice, the foul stink, and the wardresses, those terrifying blackclad nuns with little blue veils from whom it was useless to expect the least pity.

  Or else she was taken directly to the Quai de Gesvres, open 0930 h. to 1200 h. She went down the passage on the right, stopping outside the door the number of which I shall never know.

  Either way, on 19 June 1942, she must have climbed into a police van, where she would have found five girls of her age already installed. Unless these five were picked up as the van did the rounds of police stations. It took them all to the internment center of Tourelles, Boulevard Mortier, at the Porte des Lilas.

  .................

  THE TOURELLES REGISTER FOR 1942 SURVIVES. ON ITS cover is one word: WOMEN. It listed the names of internees in order of arrival. These women had been arrested for acts of resistance, for being Communists and, up to August 1942, in the case of Jews, for having failed to comply with German decrees: Jews were forbidden to go out after eight o’clock at night, compelled to wear the yellow star, forbidden to cross the demarcation line into the Free Zone, forbidden to use the telephone, to possess a bicycle, a radio . . .

  The register has the following entry for 19 June 1942:

  Arrivals 19 June 1942

  439. 19.6.42. Bruder Dora, 25.2.26. Paris 12th. French. 41 Bd Ornano. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

  For the same date, there follow the names of five other girls, all about the same age as Dora:

  40. 19.6.42. 5th Winerbett Claudine. 26.11.24. Paris 9th. French. 82 Rue des Moines. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

  1. 19.6.42. 5th Strohlitz Zélie. 4.2.26. Paris 11th. French. 48 Rue Molière. Montreuil. J. Drancy 13/8/42.

  2. 19.6.42. Israelowicz Raca. 19.7.1924. Lodz. Ind. J. 26 Rue [illegible]. Deported by German authorities convoy 19.7.42.

  3. Nachmanowicz Marthe. 23.3.25. Paris. French. 258 Rue Marcadet. J. xx Drancy. 13/8/42.

  4. 19.6.42. 5th. Pitoun Yvonne. 27.1.25. Algiers. French. 3 Rue Marcel-Sembat. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

  The police had allotted each girl a registration number. Dora’s was 439. I don’t know the meaning of 5th. The letter J stands for Jewish. Drancy 13/8/42 is added in each case: on 13 August 1942, the day when the three hundred Jewish women who were still interned at Tourelles were transferred to Drancy camp.

  .................

  ON THAT THURSDAY, 19 JUNE, THE DAY THAT DORA arrived at Tourelles, all the women were assembled on the barracks square after breakfast. Three German officers were present. Jewish women between the ages of eighteen and forty were ordered to line up, backs turned. One of the Germans had ready a complete list of these women and called out their names in the order written. The rest returned to their rooms. The sixty-six women thus segregated from their companions were locked up in a large, empty room without beds or chairs where they remained in isolation for three days, a policeman guarding the door.

  On S
unday 22 June, at five o’clock in the morning, buses arrived to take them to Drancy. They were deported the same day, put on a train with over nine hundred men. It was the first transport to leave France with women on board. For the Jewish women in Tourelles, the hovering menace they’d never quite been able to put a name to and, at moments, had succeeded in forgetting, had become fact. And in this oppressive atmosphere Dora spent the first three days of her internment. On the Sunday morning, while it was still dark, she and all her fellow internees watched through closed windows as the sixty-six women were driven away.

  On 18 June, or else on the following morning, a desk clerk would have made out Dora’s transfer warrant for Tourelles. Had this been done at Clignancourt police station, or at the Quai de Gesvres? It had had to be made out in duplicate and the copies handed, complete with check marks and signatures, to the guards on the police van. As he signed his name, did the clerk consider the implications of his act? After all, for him, it was merely a routine signature, and besides, the girl was being sent to a place still reassuringly designated by the Prefecture of Police as “Hostel. Supervised short-term accommodation.”

  I have managed to identify a few of those women who left Tourelles on Sunday 22 June at five o’clock in the morning, and who had come into contact with Dora after her arrival there on the Thursday.

  Claude Bloch was thirty-two years old. She had been picked up while on her way to Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue Foch to ask for news of her husband, who had been arrested in December 1941. She was the only person on that transport to survive.

  Josette Delimal was twenty-one. Claude Bloch had met her in the Dépôt at police headquarters, and both were taken to Tourelles on the same day. According to Claude, “Josette had had a tough time before the war and hadn’t built up the strength you can draw from happy memories. She broke down completely. I did my best to comfort her [ . . . ]. When they took us to the dormitory to assign us to our beds, I refused to let them separate us. We were together until Auschwitz, where typhus soon carried her off.” That’s all I know about Josette Delimal. I wish I knew more.

  Tamara Isserlis. She was twenty-four. A medical student. She was arrested at Cluny métro station “for concealing the French flag beneath the star of David.” Her identity card has been found and gives her address as 10 Rue de Buzenval, Saint-Cloud. She had an oval-shaped face, light brown hair, and dark eyes.

  Ida Levine. Twenty-nine. A few of her letters to her family survive, written first from the Dépôt, then from Tourelles. She threw her last letter from the train at Bar-le-Duc station, where a railroad worker mailed it. She writes: “I’m writing this on a train to an unknown destination, but it’s traveling east, so perhaps we’re going quite far away . . . ”

  Hena: I shall call her by her first name. She was nineteen. She had got herself arrested because she and her boyfriend had burgled an apartment, stealing jewelry and cash worth one hundred and fifty thousand old francs. Perhaps, with this money, she dreamed of leaving France and escaping the threats hanging over her. She was taken before a magistrate and sentenced for theft. Being Jewish, she was sent not to an ordinary prison but to Tourelles. I feel a certain solidarity with her act of burglary. In 1942, my father and his accomplices had plundered the SKF warehouse on the Avenue de la Grande-Armée of its stock of ball bearings, loading their loot onto trucks and transporting it back to the den on the Avenue Hoche from which they operated their black market business. According to German decrees, Vichy laws, and articles in the press, they were no better than vermin and common criminals, so they felt justified in behaving like outlaws in order to survive. For them, it was a point of honor. And I applaud them for it.

  The rest of what I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed.

  Annette Zelman. She was twenty-one years old. She was a blonde. She lived at 58 Boulevard de Strasbourg with a young man, Jean Jausion, the son of a professor of medicine. His first poems had been published in Les Réverbères, a Surrealist magazine that he had started with some friends just before the war.

  Annette Zelman. Jean Jausion. In 1942, they were often to be seen together at the Café de Flore. For a while they had hidden in the Free Zone. Then disaster struck. A few words in a letter from an officer in the Gestapo tell the story:

  21 MAY 1942 REFERENCE MARRIAGE BETWEEN JEWS AND NON-JEWS

  It has come to my knowledge that the French national Jean Jausion (Aryan), a 24 year-old philosophy student, and the Jewess Anna Melka Zelman, born Nancy on 6 October 1921, plan to marry over the Pentecost holidays.

  Jausion’s parents wish to prevent this union at all costs but lack the means to do so.

  Consequently, I have taken the precaution of ordering the arrest of the Jewess Zelman and her internment in the camp at Tourelles barracks . . .

  And a French police file:

  Annette Zelman, Jewess, born Nancy 6 October 1921. French: arrested 23 May 1942. Held under lock and key at police headquarters Dépôt from 23 May to 10 June, transferred to Germany 22 June. Reason for arrest: projected marriage to an Aryan, Jean Jausion. Couple signed a written statement renouncing all plans to marry at the express wish of Dr. H. Jausion, who hoped that they would be dissuaded thereby, and that the Zelman girl would be returned to her family without any recriminations.

  But this doctor with the strange methods of dissuasion was too trusting: the police failed to return Annette Zelman to her family.

  In 1944, Jean Jausion went off to be a war correspondent. In a newspaper dated 11 November 1944, I came across the following announcement:

  Missing. The management of our sister paper Le Franc-Tireur1 would be grateful to anybody having information about the disappearance of one of its contributors, Jean Jausion, born Toulouse 20 August 1917, domiciled Paris, 21 Rue Théodore-de-Banville. Left 6 September on an assignment for Franc-Tireur, accompanied by a young couple named Lecomte, former maquisards, in a black Citroën 11, front-wheel drive, license number RN 6283, bearing a white Franc-Tireur sticker at the rear.

  I heard that Jean Jausion launched his car at a German infantry column. He fired a machine gun at them until they had a chance to shoot back and give him the death that he had sought.

  A book by Jean Jausion came out the following year, in 1945. It was entitled Un Homme marche dans la ville.

  1. An underground Resistance newspaper published openly after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

  .................

  TWO YEARS AGO, ON ONE OF THE BOOKSTALLS ALONG the Seine, I happened to find the last letter written by a man who was on the transport of 22 June with Claude Bloch, Josette Delimal, Tamara Isserlis, Hena, Jean Jausion’s girlfriend, Annette . . .

  The fact that the letter was for sale, like any other manuscript, suggests that the sender and his family had disappeared in their turn. A square of thin paper covered back and front in minuscule handwriting. It was written from Drancy camp by a certain Robert Tartakovsky. I’ve discovered that he was born in Odessa on 24 November 1902, and that, before the war, he wrote a column on art for Illustration. Today, fifty years later, on Wednesday, 29 January 1997, I reproduce his letter.

  19 JUNE 1942. FRIDAY.

  MADAME TARTAKOVSKY

  50 RUE GODEFROY-CAVAIGNAC. PARIS XIE

  Yesterday I was picked to go. I’ve been mentally prepared for a long time. The camp is panic-stricken, many men are crying, they are afraid. The only thing bothering me is that most of the clothes I keep asking for still haven’t arrived. I sent off a coupon for a clothes parcel: will what I need come in time? I don’t want my mother or any of you to worry. I’ll do my utmost to keep safe and well. If you don’t hear from me, be patient, if necessary, go to the Red Cross. Ask the Saint-Lambert police (town hall XVe), Vaugiraud métro, to return the documents seized on 3/5. Be sure and ask about my certificate of voluntary enlistment, Regimental no. 10107, it may be at the
camp and I don’t know if they’ll let me have it back. Please take a cast of Albertine to Mme BIANOVICI, 14 Rue Deguerry, Paris XIe, it’s for a friend in my hut. She’ll give you 1,200 francs for it. Write first to be sure of finding her in. I approached M. Gompel,1 an internee at Drancy, and the sculptor is to be invited to exhibit at Les Trois Quartiers. Should the gallery want the entire edition, keep back three casts, saying either that they’ve been sold or else reserved for the publisher. You can make two extra casts following said request if you think the mold will bear it. Don’t distress yourselves too much. I wish Marthe to go on vacation. Never think that no news means bad news. If you get this note in time, send the maximum number of food parcels, moreover the weight will be less carefully checked. Any thing glass will be sent back, and we are forbidden knives, forks, razor-blades, pens, etc. Even needles. But I’ll manage somehow. Army biscuits or unleavened bread welcome. In one of my regular notecards I mentioned a friend PERSIMAGI, see Swedish Embassy on his behalf (Irène), he’s even taller than me and his clothes are in tatters (see Gattégno, 13 Rue Grande-Chaumière). A bar or two of good soapy some shaving soapy a shaving brush, toothbrush, nailbrush, all welcome, I’m trying to think of everything at once, to mix the practical with all the other things I have to say to you. Nearly a thousand of us are to go. There are also Aryans in the camp. They are forced to wear the Jewish insignia. SS Captain Doncker arrived at the camp yesterday, scattering people in all directions. Advise our friends to get away somewhere if they can, for here one must abandon all hope. We may be sent to Compiègne before we leave for good, I’m not sure. I won’t be sending back any laundry, I’ll do it here. The cowardice of most people here appals me. What will be its effect once we’re there, I wonder. If you can, go and see Mme de Salzman, not to ask her for anything in particular, just for information. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to meet the person whom Jacqueline wanted to get released. Urge my mother to be very careful, people are being arrested daily, some here are very young, 17, 18, others as old as 72. Up to Monday morning, you can send parcels here as often as you like. It’s not true that they no longer accept parcels at the usual addresses, don’t take no for an answer, telephone the UGIF at the Rue de la Bienfaisance. I didn’t mean to alarm you in my previous letters, was only surprised not to have received the clothes I’ll need for the journey. I’ll be sending my watch back for Marthe, probably also my pen, I’ll entrust these to B. Put nothing perishable in food parcels in case things have to be forwarded to me. Photographs without letters in food parcels or underwear. I’ll probably send back the art books for which my warmest thanks. Doubtless I’ll be spending the winter there, don’t worry, I’m prepared. Reread my cards. You’ll see which things I’ve been asking for from the first and have slipped my mind. Darning wool. Scarf Sterogyl 15. My mother’s metal box, as sugar crumbles. What upsets me is that all deportees have their heads shaved, it makes you even more conspicuous than the insignia. In the event of dispersal, I’ll go on sending news via the Salvation Army, let Irène know.