Dora Bruder (5 page)

And suddenly, you have a sensation of vertigo, as if Cosette
and Jean Valjean, to escape Javert and his police, have taken
a leap into space: thus far, they have been following real Paris
streets, and now, abruptly, Victor Hugo thrusts them into the
imaginary district of Paris that he calls the Petit Picpus. It is
the same sense of strangeness that overcomes you when you
find yourself walking through an unfamiliar district in a
dream. On waking, you realize, little by little, that the pattern
of its streets had overlaid the one with which, in daytime, you
are familiar.

And here is what disturbs me: at the end of their flight
across a district whose topography and street names had been
invented by Victor Hugo, Cosette and Jean Valjean just
manage to escape a police patrol by slipping behind a wall. They
find themselves in “a sort of garden, very large and of
singular appearance; one of those gloomy gardens which seem to
be made to be seen in the winter and at night.” This garden
where the pair hide is that of a convent, which Victor Hugo
situates precisely at number 62 Rue du Petit-Picpus, the same
address as that of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie school where
Dora was a boarder.

“At the period to which this history relates,” Victor Hugo
writes, “a boarding-school was attached to the convent.  .  .  .These
young girls  .  .  .  were dressed in blue with a white
cap.  .  .  .There
were in the inclosure of the Petit Picpus three perfectly
distinct buildings, the Great Convent, in which the nuns
lived, the school building, in which the pupils lodged, and
finally what was called the Little Convent.”

And, having given a minute description of the place, he
continues: “We could not pass by this extraordinary,
unknown, obscure house without entering and leading in those
who accompany us, and who listen as we relate, for the benefit
of some, perhaps, the melancholy history of Jean Valjean.”

 

Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and,
sometimes, in the novelist's gift for clairvoyance—the word
“gift” not being the exact term, for it implies a kind of
superiority. No, it simply comes with the profession: the
imaginative leaps this requires, the need to fix your mind on points
of detail—to the point of obsession, in fact—so as not to lose
the thread and give in to natural laziness—all this tension, this
cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to “flashes of
intuition concerning events past and future,” as the Larousse
dictionary puts it, under the heading “clairvoyance.”

In December 1988, after reading the notice about the
search for Dora in the
Paris-Soir
of December 1941, I thought
about it incessantly for months. The precision of certain
details haunted me: “41 Boulevard Ornano, 1 m 55, oval-shaped
face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover,
navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes.” And all enveloped
in night, ignorance, forgetfulness, oblivion. It seemed to me
that I should never succeed in finding the faintest trace of Dora
Bruder. At the time, the emptiness I felt prompted me to write
a novel,
Voyage de noces
, it being as good a way as any of
continuing to fix my attention on Dora Bruder, and perhaps, I
told myself, of elucidating or divining something about her,
a place where she had been, a detail of her life. When it came
to her parents, and the circumstances of her escape, I was
completely ignorant. All I had to go on was this: I had seen
her name,
BRUDER DORA
—nothing else, no date or place of
birth—above that of her father—
BRUDER ERNEST
,
21.5.99,
Vienna. Stateless.
—on the list of those dispatched on the
transport that had left on 18 September 1942 for Auschwitz.

I was thinking, when writing
Voyage de noces
, of certain
women whom I knew in the sixties, women like Anne B.,
Bella D.—the same age as Dora, one of them almost to the
month—who, during the Occupation, were in the same
situation and might have shared her fate, and whom she probably
resembled. Today, it occurs to me that I had had to write two
hundred pages before I captured, unconsciously, a vague
gleam of the truth.

It was a matter of a few words: “The terminus was Nation.
Rigaud and Ingrid had allowed Bastille, the stop where they
should have changed for Porte Dorée, to go by. Emerging from
the exit, they were confronted by a vast expanse of
snow.  .  .  .The
sleigh cut through the back streets to reach the Boulevard
Soult.”

These back streets lay behind the Rue de Picpus and the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school from which Dora
Bruder made her escape, one December evening when it was
probably snowing in Paris.

That was the only moment in the book when, without
knowing it, I came close to her in space and time.

.................

T
HUS WE FIND NEXT TO DORA BRUDER'S NAME IN THE
school register, under the heading “Date and reason for
departure”: “14 December 1941. Pupil has run away.”

It was a Sunday. I imagine that she would have taken
advantage of the free day to visit her parents. That evening, she
failed to return to the school.

Those dying weeks of the year were the blackest, most
claustrophobic period that Paris had experienced since the
beginning of the Occupation. Between 8 and 14 December,
in reprisal for two assassination attempts, the Germans
ordered a curfew from six o'clock in the evening. Next came the
roundup of seven hundred French Jews on 12 December; and
the fine of one billion francs levied on the Jewish community
as a whole. And then, on the morning of the same day, the
shooting of seventy hostages at the Mont-Valérien fortress.
On 10 December, by order of the Prefect of Police, French and
foreign Jews living in the department of the Seine had to
submit to “periodic checks,” producing special identity cards
stamped “Jew” or “Jewess.” Henceforth they were forbidden
to travel outside the department, and any change of address
had to be registered at a police station.

In the 18th arrondissement, a curfew imposed by the
Germans had been in force since 1 December. Nobody could
enter the area after six o'clock at night. Local métro stations were
closed, including Simplon, the one nearest to where Ernest
and Cécile Bruder lived. A hand grenade had been thrown in
the Rue Championnet, very close to their hotel.

The curfew lasted three days. No sooner had it been lifted
than the Germans imposed another throughout the entire
10th arrondissement, where, on the Boulevard Magenta,
persons unknown had fired at an officer of the occupying
authorities. Then came the general curfew of 8 to 14
December—the Sunday of Dora's escape.

Around the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, as the
lights were extinguished in district after district, the city
became a dark prison. While Dora was behind the high walls of
60–62 Rue de Picpus, her parents were confined to their
hotel room.

Her father having failed to declare her a “Jewess” in
October 1940, she had not been allotted a “Jewish dossier”
number. But the decree issued by the Prefecture of Police on 10
December, pertaining to the control of Jews, had stipulated
that “subsequent changes in the family situation must be
reported.” I doubt if Dora's father would have had either the
time or the inclination to get her inscribed on a file before her
escape. He must have thought that the Prefecture of Police
would never suspect her existence while she remained at the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie.

What makes us decide to run away? I remember my own
flight on 18 January 1960, at a period that had none of the
blackness of December 1941. Along my escape route, past
the hangars of Villacoublay airfield, the only point I had in
common with Dora was the season: winter. A calm, ordinary
winter, not to be compared with the winter of eighteen years
earlier. But it seems that the sudden urge to escape can be
prompted by one of those cold, gray days that makes you more
than ever aware of your solitude and intensifies your feeling
that a trap is about to close.

 

Sunday 14 December was the first day that the curfew had
been lifted for almost a week. People were now free to go out
after six o'clock in the evening. But because of German Time,
¹
darkness fell in the afternoon.

At what moment of the day did the Sisters of Divine Mercy
first notice that Dora was missing? It is certain to have been
evening. Perhaps after Benediction in the chapel, as the
boarders went up to the dormitory. I expect the Mother Superior
tried to reach Dora's parents at once, to find out if she had
stayed with them. Did she know that Dora and her parents
were Jewish? According to her biographical note, “Many
children from the families of persecuted Jews found refuge in the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, thanks to the courageous and
charitable actions of Sister Marie-Jean-Baptiste. Supported in this
by the discreet and no less courageous attitude of her nuns,
she shrank from nothing, whatever the risk.”

But Dora's was a special case. In May 1940, when she
entered the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, the persecutions had not yet
begun. She had missed the census in October 1940. And it was
not till July 1942, after the great roundup, that religious
institutions began to hide Jewish children. She had been at the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie for a year and a half. In all likelihood,
she was its sole Jewish pupil. Was this common knowledge
among the nuns, among her fellow boarders?

The Café Marchal on the ground floor of the hotel at 41
Boulevard Ornano had a telephone: Montmartre 44–74; but
I don't know if it had a line to the hotel, or if that, too, was
owned by Marchal. The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school
is not listed in the telephone directory for the period. I've
found a separate address for the Sisters of the Christian Schools
of Divine Mercy, but in 1942 this must have been an annex to
the boarding school: 64 Rue Saint-Maur. Did Dora go there?
It too had no telephone number.

Who knows? The Mother Superior may have waited till
Monday morning before telephoning the Café Marchal or, as
is more likely, sending a nun to 41 Boulevard Ornano.
Unless Cécile and Ernest Bruder went to the boarding school
themselves.

It would help to know if the weather was fine on 14
December, the day of Dora's escape. Perhaps it was one of those
mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday
and eternity—the illusory feeling that the course of time is
suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach
to escape the trap that is closing around you.

1.
The occupying authorities had brought the clocks forward by one hour to
correspond with German Reich time.

.................

F
OR A LONG TIME, AFTER HER ESCAPE AND THE NOTICE
about the search for her that was printed in
Paris-Soir
, I
knew nothing about Dora Bruder. Then I learned that, eight
months later, on 13 August 1942, she had been interned in the
camp at Drancy. The dossier showed that she had come from
Tourelles camp. On that very 13 August, indeed, three
hundred Jewish women were transferred from Tourelles to Drancy.

Tourelles prison “camp,” or rather internment center,
occupied former colonial infantry barracks at 11 Boulevard
Mortier, near the Porte des Lilas. It had been opened in
October 1940 for the internment of foreign Jews whose
situation was deemed “irregular.” But after 1941, while men were
sent directly to Drancy, or to camps in the Loiret, only
Jewish women who contravened German regulations were to be
interned in Tourelles, together with women who were
Communists or common criminals.

When, and for what precise reasons, was Dora Bruder sent
to Tourelles? I thought there might have been a document, a
clue, to provide me with the answer. I was reduced to
making assumptions. She was probably stopped in the street. In
February 1942—two months after her escape—the Germans
had issued a decree forbidding Jews to change address or leave
home after eight o'clock at night. Surveillance in the streets
thus became stricter than in preceding months. Eventually, I
came to the conclusion that Dora was captured during that
dismal, icy-cold February when the Jewish Affairs police
¹
set
their ambushes in the corridors of the métro, at the entrances
to cinemas, the exits of theaters. In fact, it astonished me that
a sixteen-year-old girl, whose description and disappearance
in December were known to the police, had managed to elude
her captors for so long. Unless she had found a hideout. But
where, in that Paris winter of 1941–42, the darkest and most
severe of the Occupation, with snow from November onward,
a temperature of –15° C in January, frozen puddles and black
ice everywhere and renewed heavy snowfalls in February? So
what refuge could she have found? And how did she manage
to survive in a Paris like that?

It would have been February, I imagine, when “they” had
caught her in their net. “They” could as easily have been
uniformed men on the beat as inspectors from either the Brigade
for the Protection of Minors
²
or the Jewish Affairs police
carrying out an identity check in a public place  .  .  .  I had read in
a book of memoirs that girls of eighteen or nineteen, and even
some as young as sixteen, Dora's age, had been sent to
Tourelles for trivial infringements of “German decrees.” That same
February, on the evening when the German decrees came into
force, my father was caught in a roundup on the
Champs-Élysées. Inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police had blocked the
exits of a restaurant in the Rue de Marignan where he was
dining with a girlfriend. They asked everybody for their papers.
My father carried none. He was arrested. In the Black Maria
³
taking them from the Champs-Élysées to PQJ headquarters
in the Rue Greffulhe, he noticed, among other shadowy
figures, a young girl of about eighteen. He lost sight of her as
they were being hustled up to the floor of this police den where
its chief, a certain Superintendent Schweblin, had his office.
Then, taking advantage of a light on a time switch that went
out just as he was being escorted downstairs to be taken to the
Dépôt,
⁴
he succeeded in making his escape.