Dora Bruder (6 page)

My father had barely mentioned this young girl when
telling me about his narrow escape for the first and only time
in his life, one night in June 1953, in a restaurant off the
Champs-Élysées almost opposite the one where he was
arrested twenty years before. He had given me no details of her
looks, of her clothes. I had all but forgotten her until the day
that I learned of Dora Bruder's existence. Then suddenly the
memory of her presence among the other unknowns who
were with my father in the Black Maria on that February night
resurfaced in my mind, and it occurred to me that she might
have been Dora Bruder, that she too had just been arrested
and was about to be sent to Tourelles.

Perhaps it was that I wanted them to have met, she and my
father, in that winter of 1942. Utterly different though they
were, one from the other, both, that winter, had been classed
in the same category, as outlaws. My father, too, had missed
the census in October 1940 and, like Dora Bruder, had no
“Jewish dossier” number. Consequently, no longer having any
legal existence, he had cut all threads with a world where you
were nothing without a job, a family, a nationality, a date of
birth, an address. Henceforth he was in limbo. Not unlike
Dora, after her escape.

But on reflection, their respective fates were very different.
There were few courses open to a sixteen-year-old girl left to
fend for herself, in Paris, in the winter of 1942, after having
escaped from a boarding school. In the eyes of the police and
the authorities of the day, her situation was doubly
“irregular”: she was not only Jewish, she was a juvenile on the run.

As for my father, who was fourteen years older than Dora
Bruder, the way was already mapped out; since they had made
him into an outlaw, he had no choice but to follow that same
course, to live on his wits in Paris and vanish into the swamps
of the black market.

 

Not so long ago, I discovered that the girl in the Black Maria
could not have been Dora Bruder. I was looking for her name
on the list of women who had been interned in Tourelles camp.
Of these, two, Polish Jews aged twenty and twenty-one, had
entered Tourelles on 18 and 19 February 1942. Their names
were Syma Berger and Fredel Traister. The dates fitted, but was
she in fact either girl? After passing through the Dépôt, men
were sent to the camp at Drancy, women to Tourelles.
Perhaps, like my father, the unknown girl had escaped the
common fate in store for them. I believe that she will always
remain anonymous, like all those shadowy figures arrested that
night. The Jewish Affairs police having destroyed their files,
there are no records of arrests made during a roundup, nor of
individuals picked up on the street. Were I not here to record
it, there would be no trace of this unidentified girl's presence,
nor that of my father's, in a Black Maria on the Champs-Élysées
in February 1942. Nothing but those individuals—living or
dead—officially classed as “person unknown.”

Twenty years later, my mother was acting in a play at the
Théâtre Michel. Often, I would wait for her in a café on the
corner of the Rue des Mathurins and the Rue Greffulhe. I
didn't know then that my father had risked his life near there,
or that I had entered a zone that was once a black hole. We
would dine in a restaurant on the Rue Greffulhe—perhaps on
the ground floor of the PQJ building where my father had
been hustled into Superintendent Schweblin's office. Jacques
Schweblin. Born 1901, Mulhouse. It was his men, at the camps
of Drancy and Pithiviers, who eagerly undertook the search
of internees prior to each departure for Auschwitz:

M. Schweblin, head of the PQJ, would arrive at the
camp accompanied by 5 or 6 aides whom he identified as
“auxiliaries,” giving nobody's name but his own. Each of
these plainclothes policemen wore a uniform belt with a
pistol hanging from one side and a nightstick from the
other.

Once he had installed his aides, M. Schweblin left the
camp, returning only in the evening to collect the fruits
of their search. Each aide would set himself up in a hut
containing a table and, beside it, two receptacles, one for
cash, the other for jewelry. The internees then filed past
the men, who proceeded to subject them to a minute
and humiliating search. Very often they were beaten or
forced to remove their trousers and submit to a hard
kicking, accompanied by remarks like “Hey you! Want
another taste of the police boot?” Frequently, on the
pretext of expediting the search, inside and outside
pockets were torn. I will pass over the intimate body
searches suffered by the women.

Once the search was over, cash and jewelry were piled
anyhow into boxes that were bound with string and
sealed before being loaded into M. Schweblin's car.

This process was a farce, given that the sealing tongs
were in the hands of the policemen, who were free to
help themselves to banknotes and jewels. In fact, these
men would openly produce a valuable ring from their
pockets, saying “Hey, that's not bad!,” or a fistful of
1,000- or 500-franc notes, saying “Hey, I forgot this.”
Bedding in the huts was also searched: mattresses,
eiderdowns, and bolsters were torn apart. Of all the
many searches performed by the Jewish Affairs police,
not a single trace remains.
⁵

The search team always consisted of the same seven men.
Plus one woman. Their names are unknown. They were young
at the time, so some must still be alive today. But their faces
would be unrecognizable.

Schweblin disappeared in 1943. The Germans disposed of
him themselves. Yet when my father was telling me about
being taken to this man's office, he said that he was positive that
he had recognized him at the Porte Maillot, one Sunday after
the war.

1.
The Police aux Questions Juives (PQJ), established November 1941.

2.
Brigade des mineurs.

3.
The French phrase is
panier à salade
, a colloquial term for the police van with
an open wire cage that resembles a salad-washing basket.

4.
A holding center in the Prefecture of Police.

5.
Extract from an official report drawn up in November 1943 by a manager from
Pithiviers Tax Office.

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

B
LACK MARIAS REMAINED MUCH THE SAME TILL THE
early sixties. The only time I ever found myself in one it
was with my father, and I wouldn't mention it now had not
this episode taken on a symbolic character in my eyes.

The circumstances were banal in the extreme. I was
eighteen years old, still a minor. My parents, though separated,
still lived in the same block, my father with a woman who had
yellow hair the color of straw and was very high-strung, a sort
of imitation Mylène Demongeot. And I with my mother. That
day, on the landing, a quarrel had broken out between my
parents about the very modest sum that my father had been
ordered to pay for my support following a series of judicial
proceedings: High Court of the Seine. 1st Auxiliary Chamber,
Court of Appeals Notification of Judgment. My mother wished
me to ring at his door and demand this money, which he
hadn't paid. It was, alas, all we had to live on. Grumbling, I
did as I was told. I rang my father's bell meaning to ask him
nicely, even to apologize for bothering him. He slammed the
door in my face; I could hear the pseudo Mylène Demongeot
on the telephone to the police emergency service, screaming
something about “a hooligan making trouble.”

They came for me at my mother's about ten minutes later,
and my father and I climbed into the waiting Black Maria. We
sat facing one another, on wooden benches, each flanked by
two policemen. I thought to myself that if it was the first time
in my life that something like this had happened to me, my
father had been through it all before, on that February night
twenty years ago when the Jewish Affairs police had taken him
away in a Black Maria much like this one. And I wondered
if, at that moment, he was thinking the same thing. But he
avoided my gaze, pretending not to see me.

I remember every minute of that drive. The embankments
along the Seine. The Rue des Saint-Pères. The Boulevard
Saint-Germain. The stop at the lights opposite the terrace of
the Café des Deux-Magots. I peered enviously through the
barred windows at the drinkers sitting on the terrace in the
sun. Luckily, I had little to worry about: we were in that
anodyne, innocuous period later known as the “Thirty Glorious
Years.”
¹

Yet I was surprised that, after all he had been through
during the Occupation, my father should have offered not the
slightest objection to my being taken away in a Black Maria.
Sitting there, opposite me, impassive, with an air of faint
disgust, he ignored me as if I had the plague, and, knowing that
I could expect no sympathy from him, I dreaded our arrival
at the police station. And I felt the injustice of this all the more
since I had embarked on a book—my first—in which, putting
myself in his shoes, I relived his feelings of distress during the
Occupation. A few years earlier, among his books, I had come
across certain anti-Semitic works from the forties, books that
he must have bought at the time in an effort to understand
what it was that these writers had against him. And I can well
imagine his surprise at the portrayal of this imaginary,
phantasmagoric monster with clawlike hands and hooked nose
whose shadow flitted across the walls, this creature corrupted
by every vice, responsible for every evil, guilty of every crime.
As for me, I wanted my first book to be a riposte to all those
who, by insulting my father, had wounded me. And, on the
terrain of French prose, to silence them once and for all. I can
see now that my plan was childishly naive: most of the authors
had disappeared, executed by firing squad, exiled, far gone in
senility, or dead of old age. Yes, alas, I was too late.

The Black Maria drew up in the Rue de l'Abbaye outside
Saint-Germain police station. Our guards led us into the
superintendent's office. Crisply, my father explained to him that
I was a “hooligan” who had been “giving trouble” since I was
sixteen years old. The superintendent declared—addressing
me in the tone you use to a delinquent—that he would keep
me in, “if there's a next time.” I had the distinct impression
that if the superintendent had carried out his threat and sent
me to the Dépôt, my father wouldn't have lifted a finger to
help me.

My father and I left the police station together. I asked him
if it was really necessary to call the emergency service and
“charge” me in front of our guards. He didn't answer. I bore
him no grudge. Since we lived in the same building, we set
off home side by side, in silence. I was tempted to remind him
of that night in February 1942 when he too had been taken
away in a Black Maria, to ask him whether he had been
thinking of that, just now. But perhaps it meant less to him than it
did to me.

On the way back, we didn't exchange a single word, not
even when we parted on the stairs. I was to see him once or
twice in August of the following year, on an occasion when
he hid my call-up papers as a ruse to have me carted off by
force to the Reuilly army barracks. I never saw him again
after that.

1.
“Les Trentes Glorieuses,” the postwar boom in France.

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

W
HAT 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?

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

T
HE 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.