Dora Bruder

by Patrick Modiano

  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.

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  FOR 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 police1 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 Minors2 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 Maria3 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.

  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.

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  BLACK 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.