SATURDAY 20 JUNE 1942.—My dear ones, case arrived yesterday, thank you for everything. I’m not sure, but I fear a hurried departure. I am to have my head shaved today. From tonight, deportees will probably be confined to a special hut and closely guarded, even to the lavatory and back. A sinister atmosphere hovers over the camp. I doubt that we’ll be going via Compiègne. I know we are to be given three days’ rations for the journey. I’m afraid I’ll begone before more parcels arrive, but don’t worry, the last one was very generous and since being here I’ve put aside all chocolate and jams, and the large sausage. Keep calm, I’ll be thinking of you. I wanted to give Marthe the records of Petrouchka on 28/7, the complete set is 4 r. Saw B. last night to thank him for all he has done, he knows I’ve been defending Leroy’s sculptures to key people here. Am delighted with latest photos of the works but haven’t shown them to B., apologized for not giving him one but said he could always ask you. Sad to interrupt the edition, but there’s still time if I get back soon. I like Leroy’s work, would gladly have brought out a reduction within my means, can’t stop thinking about it, even though we are to leave in a few hours.
Please do all you can for my mother, by which I don’t mean that you should neglect your personal affairs. Tell Irène that as she is her neighbour I wish her to do likewise. Try to telephone Dr. André ABADI (if still in Paris). Tell him that I met the person whose address he knows on 1 May and was arrested on 3 May (was it simple coincidence?). The incoherence of this note probably surprises you; but the atmosphere is hard to bear, it’s 6:30 A.M. I’m about to send back everything I’m not taking with me, I’m afraid of taking too much. The searchers are liable to throw out a case at the last moment if there’s no room, it depends on their mood (they belong to the Jewish Affairs police, either fascists or anti-Semites). Still, that has its uses. I’ll get my belongings sorted out. Don’t panic the moment you stop hearing from me, keep calm, wait patiently and with trust, have faith in me, reassure my mother that, having seen departures for the Beyond (as I told you), I prefer to be on this journey. My main regret is to be parted from my pen, not to be allowed paper (an absurd thought crosses my mind: knives are forbidden, and I don’t even possess a simple key to a can of sardines). I’m not putting on a brave face, don’t have the heart in this atmosphere: a lot of the sick and infirm are also picked for deportation. I’m also thinking of Rd, hoping that he is safe at last. I had all sorts of things with Jacques Daumal. Probably no point in moving my books out of the house now, I leave it to you. Let’s hope we have good weather for the journey! Make sure my mother receives all her allowances, get the UGIF to help her. I hope you’ve made it up with Jacqueline by now, she is a strange girl, but good at heart (the sky is clearing, it’s going to be a fine day). I don’t know if you got my usual card, or if I’ll get an answer before we leave. I think of my mother, of you. Of all my loving friends who did so much to help me keep my freedom. Heartfelt thanks to those who helped me “get through” the winter. I’m leaving this letter unfinished. It’s time to pack my bag. Back soon. A note in case I can’t finish, pen and watch are for Marthe whatever my mother says. I kiss you good-bye dearest Maman, and you my dear ones, with all my love. Be brave. It’s 7 A.M., back soon.
1. Roger Gompel was the director of a chain of department stores, including Les Trois Quartiers. He was interned at Drancy but later released.
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TWICE IN APRIL 1966 I SPENT A SUNDAY IN THE EASTERN districts of Paris, looking for some trace of Dora Bruder in the areas around the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie and Tourelles. I felt this was best done on a Sunday, when the town is deserted, at the lowest ebb of the tide.
Nothing is left of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. A modern apartment block stands at the corner of the Rue de Picpus and the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. The section that has replaced the school’s tree-shaded wall now displays the last odd numbers in the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. Opposite, a little further along on the even-numbered side, the street is unchanged.
It’s hard to believe that one July morning in 1942, while Dora was interned at Tourelles, the police had come to arrest nine young children and adolescents at number 48bis, where the windows overlooked the garden of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. It’s a five-story building in light-colored brick. On each floor, two windows flank two smaller windows. Number 40 next door is a grayish building, recessed. In front of it, a low brick wall with an iron gate. Other small houses opposite, on the same side as the perimeter wall of the old boarding school, have remained as they were. Number 54, just before you reach the Rue de Picpus, used to be a café owned by a Mlle Lenzi.
All of a sudden, I felt certain that, on the night when she had made her escape, Dora had slipped away from the boarding school by the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. I visualized her, hugging the school wall. Perhaps streets named after a station evoke thoughts of escape.
I wandered around for a while, and then the sadness of those other Sundays when it was time to return to the boarding school began to weigh me down. I felt sure that she left the métro at Nation. She put off the moment when she must enter the gate and cross the courtyard. She prolonged her walk, choosing streets at random. It grew dark. The Avenue de Saint-Mandé is quiet, bordered by trees. I forget if there is open ground. You pass the entrance to the old Picpus métro station. Did she ever emerge from there? In comparison with the Avenue de Saint-Mandé, the Avenue de Picpus, on the right, is cold and desolate. Treeless, I seem to remember. But the solitude of returning, on those Sunday evenings.
The Boulevard Mortier is a hill. It slopes southward. On my way there, that Sunday of 28 April 1996, I took the following route: Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the hill of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived.
To the right, the Rue des Pyrénées, offering a vista of trees. Rue de Ménilmontant. The apartment blocks at number 140 lay deserted in the glare of the sun. For the last part of the Rue Saint-Fargeau, I seemed to be traversing an abandoned village.
Plane trees line the Boulevard Mortier. At the top, just before you reach the Porte des Lilas, the old Tourelles barracks are still there.
On that particular Sunday, the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep that I could hear the rustling of the plane trees. The buildings of the former barracks are hidden behind a high perimeter wall. I followed it. Affixed to it was a sign that read:
MILITARY ZONE
FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED
I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. Behind the wall there lay a no-man’s-land, a zone of emptiness and oblivion. Unlike the boarding school in the Rue de Picpus, the twin blocks of Tourelles barracks had not been pulled down, but they might as well have been.
And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation. Out of suspicion and a guilty conscience they had put up the sign, “Military zone. Filming or photography forbidden.”
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IN A DIFFERENT PART OF PARIS, WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I remember having the same sensation of emptiness as I had had when confronted by the Tourelles wall, without knowing the reason why.
I had a girlfriend who lived in various borrowed flats and country houses. I regularly took advantage of this to relieve their libraries of art books and numbered editions, which I then sold. One day, when we were by ourselves in a flat on the Rue du Regard, I stole an antique music box and also, after rifling the closets, several very smart suits, a few shirts, and about ten pairs of handmade shoes. I searched the yellow pages for a secondhand dealer to whom I could resell these items and found one in the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul.
This street leads up from the Quai des Célestins on the Seine and intersects the Rue de Charlemagne near the school where, the year before, I had gone through the ordeal of my baccalauréat. One
of the last buildings on the right just before the Rue de Charlemagne had a rusting iron curtain at street level, half raised. I pushed my way into a junkshop piled high with furniture, clothes, ironwork, automobile parts. The forty-year-old man who greeted me was most obliging, offering to come and collect the “goods” in a few days’ time.
Having taken my leave of him, I walked down the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul toward the Seine. All the buildings on the lefthand side of the street had been pulled down not long before. As had the other buildings behind them. In their place, nothing but a wasteland, itself surrounded by half-demolished walls. On these walls, open to the sky, you could still make out the patterned paper of what was once a bedroom, the trace of a chimney. You would have said that the district had been hit by a bomb, and the vista of the Seine at the bottom of the street only increased the impression of emptiness.
On the following Sunday, by appointment, the secondhand dealer came to my girlfriend’s father’s place on the Boulevard Kellermann, near the Porte de Gentilly, where I was to hand over the “goods.” He loaded music box, suits, shirts, and shoes on to his van, giving me seven hundred old francs for the lot.
He suggested going for a drink. We stopped at one of two cafés opposite Charlety stadium.
He asked me what I did for a living. I didn’t quite know what to say. In the end, I told him that I had dropped out of school. I questioned him in return. The junkshop in the Rue de Jardins-Saint-Paul belonged to his cousin, who was also his business partner. He himself had another, near the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt. It turned out that he came from a local family of Polish Jews.
I was the one who brought up the subject of the war and the Occupation. He was eighteen at the time. He remembered that, one Saturday, the police had made a swoop on the Saint-Ouen flea market to round up the Jews, and he had escaped by a miracle. What had shocked him most was that one of the police inspectors had been a woman.
I told him about the wasteland stretching to the foot of the apartment blocks on the Boulevard Ney that I had noticed on the Saturdays when my mother took me to the flea markets. That was the place where he and his family had lived. Rue Élisabeth-Rolland. He was surprised that I should make a note of its name. A district known as the Plain. Completely demolished after the war, it was now a playing field.
Talking to him, I thought of my father, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. When he was nineteen, my age, before he lost himself in dreams of high finance, my father had lived by wheeling and dealing at the gates of Paris: he smuggled drums of gasoline for resale to garage owners, liquor, and various other goods. All without paying excise tax.
As we parted, he said in a friendly way that if I had any more items for him, I could contact him at the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. And he gave me an extra hundred francs, no doubt touched by my air of being a guileless, likeable young chap.
I’ve forgotten his face. I remember nothing about him, apart from his name. He could easily have met Dora Bruder, around the Porte de Clignancourt, around the Plain. They were the same age and lived in the same neighborhood. Perhaps he knew the full story of the times she spent on the run . . . The fact is, there are flukes, encounters, coincidences, and we shall never take advantage of them . . . I was thinking of that, this autumn, when I went back to explore the area around the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. The junkshop with its iron curtain was no more, and the buildings nearby had been restored. Once again, I had a sense of emptiness. And I understood why. After the war, most buildings in the area had been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a government plan. Due for demolition, this zone had even been allotted a name and number: Block 16. I have found some photographs. One shows the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul with the houses on the lefthand side still standing. Another, the half-demolished buildings beside Saint-Gervais church and around the Hôtel de Sens. Another, a wasteland along the banks of the Seine, with people crossing it between two now useless sidewalks: all that remains of the Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères. And here, on this wasteland, they have put up row upon row of houses, altering the course of an old street in the process.
The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the concrete the color of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have not been content with putting up a sign like that on the wall of Tourelles barracks: “No filming or photography.” They have obliterated everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.
The patches of wallpaper that I had seen thirty years ago in the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul were remnants of former rooms—rooms that had been home to young people of Dora’s age until the day when the police had come for them in July 1942. The list of their names is always associated with the same streets. And the street names and house numbers no longer correspond to anything at all.
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WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, TOURELLES HAD MEANT NO more than a name I had read at the back of a book by Jean Genet, Miracle de la Rose. There, he lists the places where the book was written: LA SANTÉ, TOURELLES PRISON 1943. Shortly after Dora Bruder’s departure from Tourelles, he too had been imprisoned there, as a common criminal, and their paths may have crossed. Miracle de la Rose is not only impregnated with memories of the penal settlement at Mettray—one of those juvenile homes where they had wanted to send Dora—but also, I now realize, of La Santé and Tourelles.
I know sentences from this book by heart. I remember one in particular: “What that child taught me is that the true roots of Parisian slang lie in its sad tenderness.” This phrase evokes Dora Bruder for me so well that I feel I knew her. The children with Polish or Russian or Rumanian names who were forced to wear the yellow star, were so Parisian that they merged effortlessly into the facades, the apartment blocks, the sidewalks, the infinite shades of gray that belong to Paris alone. Like Dora Bruder, they all spoke with the Parisian accent, using a slang whose sad tenderness Jean Genet had recognized.
At Tourelles, when Dora was a prisoner there, you could receive parcels, and also visits, on Thursdays and Sundays. And, on Tuesdays, you could attend Mass. The guards held roll call at eight o’clock in the morning. The detainees stood to attention at the end of their beds. For lunch, in the refectory, there was nothing but cabbage. Exercise period on the barracks square. Supper at six o’clock. Another roll call. Every two weeks, a trip to the shower, two at a time, accompanied by a guard. Whistle blasts. You waited. To receive a visit, you had to write a letter to the prison director, and you never knew if he would give his authorization.
Visits took place after lunch, in the refectory. Those who came had their bags searched by the guards. Parcels were opened. Often, for no reason, visits were canceled, and detainees informed only an hour beforehand.
Among the women whom Dora could have met at Tourelles were some who were known to the Germans as “Jews’ friends”: there were about ten of them, “Aryan” Frenchwomen, who, from the first day in June when Jews were obliged to wear the yellow star, had had the courage to wear it themselves out of solidarity but did so in imaginative ways that ridiculed the occupying authorities. One had fixed the yellow star to the collar of her dog. Another embroidered hers with PAPOU.1 Another, with JENNY. Another attached stars to her belt, each bearing a letter, spelling out the word VICTOIRE. All were picked up in the street and taken to the nearest police station. Then to the Dépôt at police headquarters. Then to Tourelles. Then, on 13 August, to Drancy camp. Between them, these “friends of Jews” had the following occupations: Typist. Stationer. Newsdealer. Cleaner. Postal worker. Student.
In August the number of arrests multiplied. Women no longer even passed through the Dépôt but were taken directly to Tourelles. Dormitories meant for twenty now held double that number. With the overcrowding, it was suffocatingly hot, and anxiety mounted. It was common knowledge that Tourelles was merely a holding yard where, from one
day to the next, you might be shunted off to an unknown destination.
Two groups of Jewish women, about a hundred in all, had already left for Drancy camp on 19 and 27 July. Among them, an eighteen-year-old Pole, Raca Israelowicz, who had arrived at Tourelles on the same day as Dora, probably in the same police van. And who was doubtless one of her neighbors in the dormitory.
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