Dora Bruder
Page 9
On the evening of 12 August, a rumor spread through Tourelles that all Jewish women and “Jews’ friends” were to leave for Drancy camp on the following day.
At ten o’clock on the morning of 13 August, the interminable roll call began under the chestnut trees on the barracks square. A last meal. A meager ration that left you famished.
The buses arrived. In sufficient number—apparently—for each prisoner to have a seat. Dora included. It was a Thursday, visiting day.
The convoy set out. It was escorted by helmeted policemen on motorcycles. It took the route that you follow today for the Roissy airport. More than fifty years have passed. By building a highway, razing houses to the ground, and transforming the landscape of this northeastern suburb, they have rendered it, like the former Block 16, as neutral and gray as possible. But the blue road signs on the road to the airport still bear the old names: DRANCY or ROMAINVILLE. And, stranded and forgotten on the shoulder of the highway, near the Porte de Bagnolet, there is an old wooden barn on which someone has painted this name, clearly visible: DUREMORD.
At Drancy, among the milling crowds, Dora found her father. He had been interned there since March. That particular August, as in the Dépôt at police headquarters, as at Tourelles, the camp filled up day by day with an increasing flood of men and women. Some came in the thousands by freight train from the Free Zone. Many hundreds of women, forcibly separated from their children, came from the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. And, from 15 August onward, after their mothers had been deported, the children arrived in turn, four thousand of them. In many cases their names, hastily scribbled on their clothes before they left Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, were no longer legible. Unidentified child no. 122. Unidentified child no. 146. Girl aged three. First name Monique. Unidentified.
Because of the overcrowding in the camp, and in anticipation of the convoys still to arrive from the Free Zone, on 2 and 5 September the authorities decided to transfer Jews of French nationality from Drancy to Pithiviers. Four girls who had arrived at Tourelles on the same day as Dora—Claudine Winerbett, Zélie Strohlitz, Marthe Nachmanowicz, and Yvonne Pitoun—all aged sixteen or seventeen, left on this convoy of some fifteen hundred French Jews. They were probably under the illusion that their nationality would protect them. Dora, being French, could have left with them. The reason she didn’t do so is easy to guess: she preferred to stay with her father.
Father and daughter departed Drancy on 18 September, in company with thousands of other men and women, on a convoy of trains bound for Auschwitz.
Dora’s mother, Cécile Bruder, was arrested on 16 July 1942, the day of the great roundup, and interned at Drancy. She was reunited with her husband for a few days while their daughter was at Tourelles. Doubtless because she was born in Budapest and the authorities had not yet received orders to deport Hungarian Jews, Cécile Bruder was released from Drancy on 25 July.
Had she been able to visit Dora at Tourelles, one Thursday or Sunday, during that summer of 1942? On 9 January 1943, she was once again interned in Drancy camp and, on 11 February 1943, five months after her husband and daughter, she was put on a convoy for Auschwitz.
On Saturday 19 September, the day after Dora and her father left, the occupying authorities imposed a curfew in retaliation for a bomb placed in the Cinéma Rex. Nobody was allowed out after three o’clock in the afternoon until the following morning. The city was deserted, as if to mark Dora’s absence.
Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on that day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush hour, when the crowds are hurrying toward the mouths of the métro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighborhood or that. The other evening, it was near the Gare du Nord.
I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.
1. A native of Papua, New Guinea.