Dora Bruder

by Patrick Modiano

  She is with her mother and her maternal grandmother. The three women are side by side, the grandmother between Cécile Bruder and Dora. Cécile Bruder wears a black dress, her hair cut short, the grandmother’s dress is flowered. Neither woman is smiling. Dora wears a two-piece dress in black—or navy blue—with a white collar, but this could equally well be a cardigan and skirt—the photograph is too dark to see. She wears stockings and ankle-strap shoes. Her midlength hair, held back by a headband, falls almost to her shoulders, her left arm hangs at her side, fingers clenched, her right arm is hidden behind her grandmother. She holds her head high, her eyes are grave, but a smile is beginning to float about her lips. And this gives her face an expression of sad sweetness and defiance. The three women are standing in front of a wall. The ground is paved, as in the passage of some public place. Who could have been the photographer? Ernest Bruder? Or does the fact that he is not present in the photograph mean that he had already been arrested? In any case, it would seem that the three women have put on their Sunday best to face this anonymous lens.

  Could it be that Dora is wearing the navy blue skirt mentioned in the missing notice in Paris-Soir?

  Such photographs exist in every family. They were caught in a few seconds, the duration of the exposure, and these seconds have become an eternity.

  Why, I wonder, does the lightning strike in one place rather than another? Suddenly, as I write these lines, I find myself thinking of former colleagues in my profession. Today, I am visited by the memory of a German writer. His name was Friedo Lampe.

  It was his name that first caught my attention, and the title of one of his books, Au bord de la nuit, translated into French some twenty years ago, at which time I had come across it in a bookshop on the Champs-Élysées. I had never heard of this writer. But even before opening the book, I had divined its tone and atmosphere, as though I had already read him in another life.

  Friedo Lampe. Au bord de la nuit. For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze. You are persuaded that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there. Only a lamp, left burning in the empty room.

  Friedo Lampe was born in Bremen in 1899, the same year as Ernest Bruder. He had gone to Heidelberg university. He had begun his first novel, Au bord de la nuit, in Hamburg, where he worked as a librarian. Later, he took a job with a publisher in Berlin. He took no interest in politics. His passion was for writing about the port of Bremen at nightfall, the lilac-white of the floodlights, the sailors, the wrestlers, the bands, the whistling of the trains, the railway bridge, the siren of a steamship, and all those who seek out their fellow beings at night . . . His novel appeared in October 1933, by which time Hitler was already in power. Au bord de la nuit was withdrawn from the bookshops and pulped, and its author declared “suspect.” He was not even Jewish. To what, then, could they possibly object? Quite simply, to the charm and nostalgia of his book. His one ambition—he confided in a letter—was “to bring alive the atmosphere of a port for a few hours in the evening, between eight o’clock and midnight. I’m thinking here of the Bremen district where I grew up. Of short scenes unfolding as in a film, interlocking people’s lives. The whole thing light and fluid, linked together very loosely, pictorial, lyric, full of atmosphere.”

  Toward the end of the war, at the time of the advance of the Russian troops, he was living in a Berlin suburb. On 2 May 1945, he was stopped in the street by two Russian soldiers who asked him for his papers, then dragged him into a garden. And there, without having taken the time to distinguish between the good and the wicked, they beat him to death. Some neighbors buried him nearby, in the shade of a birch tree, and arranged for the police to receive his remains: his papers and his hat.

  Like Friedo Lampe, the German writer Felix Hartlaub was a native of the port of Bremen. He was born in 1913. During the Occupation he found himself in Paris. He had a horror of this war, and his uniform the color of verdigris. I know very little about him. In the fifties, a magazine published an extract, in French, from a short book of his, Von Unten Gesehen, the manuscript of which he had entrusted to his sister in January 1945. This extract was entitled “Notes et impressions.” In it, he observes a Paris station-restaurant with its typical crowd, and the abandoned Ministry of Foreign Affairs as it was when the Germans moved in, with its hundreds of empty, dusty offices, the chandeliers left burning and the clocks all chiming incessantly in the silence. At night, so as to forget the war and merge with the Paris streets, he puts on civilian clothes. He gives us an account of one of these nocturnal excursions. He takes the métro from Solférino. He gets off at Trinité. The night is dark. It is summer. The air is warm. He walks up the Rue de Clichy in the blackout. On a sofa, in a brothel, he spots a solitary, pathetic Tyrolean hat. The girls file past. “They are in another world, like sleepwalkers, under the effects of chloroform. And everything is bathed”—he writes—“in the eerie light of a tropical aquarium under overheated glass.” He too is in another world. He observes everything from a distance, attentive to atmospheres, to tiny, mundane details, and at the same time detached, estranged from everything around him, as though this world at war was no concern of his. Like Friedo Lampe, he died in Berlin in the spring of 1945, at the age of thirty-three, during the final battles, in the carnage and apocalypse of a universe where he had found himself by mistake, wearing a uniform that had been imposed on him but was not his by choice.

  And now, why is it that, among so many other writers, my thoughts should turn to the poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte? He too was struck, in the same period as the two previous writers, as though the few must serve as lightning conductors in order that the others may be spared.

  As it happens, our paths had crossed. When I was his age, like him I lived in the southern suburbs of Paris: Boulevard Brune, Rue d’Alésia, Hôtel Primavera, Rue de la Voie-Verte . . . In 1938, he was still there, living near the Porte d’Orléans with a German Jewish girl, Ruth Kronenberg. Then, in 1939, still with her, he moved the short distance to the Plaisance district, to a studio at 16bis Rue Bardinet. The number of times I have taken those streets, without even knowing that Gilbert-Lecomte had been there before me . . . And in 1965, on the Right Bank, in Montmartre, I would spend entire afternoons in a corner café on the Square Caulaincourt and, unaware that Gilbert-Lecomte had also stayed there thirty years earlier, in a hotel off the Rue Caulaincourt: Montmartre 42–99 . . .

  About this time, I came across a doctor called Jean Puyaubert. I thought I had a shadow on my lung. To avoid doing military service, I asked him for a certificate. He gave me an appointment at a clinic where he worked in the Place d’Alleray, and had me x-rayed: I had nothing on my lung, I wanted an exemption, and it wasn’t as though there was a war on. It was simply that the prospect of barracks life such as I had already been leading in various boarding schools from the ages of eleven to seventeen seemed to me unendurable.

  I don’t know what became of Dr. Jean Puyaubert. Decades after I had been to see him, I learned that Roger Gilbert-Lecomte had been one of his closest friends, and that the poet, when my age, had asked him the same thing: for a medical certificate confirming that he had had pleurisy—to exempt him from military service.

  Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . . . He had dragged out his last years in Paris, under the Occupation . . . In July 1942, his friend, Ruth Kronenberg, was arrested in the Free Zone, on her return from the seaside at Collioure. She was deported in the transport of 11 September, a week before Dora Bruder. A twenty-year-old from Cologne, she had come to Paris some time in 1935 because of racial laws. She enjoyed poetry and the theater. She learned to sew in order to make theatrical costumes. It was no time before she met Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, with other artists in Montparnasse . . .

  He continued to live alone in the studio in the Rue Bardinet. Then a Mme Firmat, who had the café opposite, took him in and looked after him. He was a shadow of his former self. In
autumn 1942, he undertook several exhausting journeys across the suburbs to Bois-Colombes, where a Dr. Bréavoine in the Rue des Aubépines gave him prescriptions that allowed him to obtain a little heroin. His comings and goings were noted. On 21 October 1942, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Santé. There he remained, in the infirmary, until 19 November. He was released with a summons to appear in court a month later, charged with “having illegally bought prohibited drugs in Paris, Colombes, Bois-Colombes, Asnières, in 1942, and having in his possession heroin, morphine, cocaine . . . ”

  For a while, in early 1943, he was in a clinic at Épernay, then Mme Firmat put him up in a room above her café. A girl to whom he had lent the studio in the Rue Bardinet during his stay at the clinic, a student, had left behind a box of ampoules containing morphine that he eked out, drop by drop. I never discovered her name.

  He died from tetanus on 13 December 1943, at Broussais Hospital, aged thirty-six. Before the war, he had published two collections of poems; one of these books was entitled La Vie, l’Amour, la Mort, le Vide et le Vent.

  So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born.

  As a child, in the apartment at 15 Quai de Conti where my father had lived since 1942—the same apartment that Maurice Sachs2 had rented the year before—my room overlooked the courtyard. Maurice Sachs relates that he lent these rooms to somebody called Albert, nicknamed “le Zébu.”3 And that he in turn had filled them with “young actors who dreamed of forming a company of their own, and with adolescents who were beginning to write.” This “Zébu,” Albert Schaky, had the same first name as my father and, like him, came from a family of Italian Jews in Salonika. And like me at the same age exactly thirty years later, he published his first novel with Gallimard, in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, under the name François Vernet. He later joined the Resistance. The Germans arrested him. On the wall of Cell 218, Fresnes, second division, he wrote: “Zébu arrested 10.2.44. Three months on bread and water, interrogated 9–28 May, visited by doctor 8 June, two days after Allied landing.”

  He was deported from Compiègne camp on the transport of 2 July 1944 and died in Dachau in March 1945.

  Thus, in the apartment where Sachs had carried on his gold trafficking and where, later on, under a false name, my father had hidden, Zébu had occupied my childhood bedroom. Just before I was born, he and others like him had taken all the punishments meted out to them in order that we should suffer no more than pinpricks. I had already worked this out at the age of eighteen while on that journey with my father in the police van, a journey that was a harmless repetition, a parody, of other such journeys—in the same police vans and to the same police stations—but from which nobody had ever returned home, on foot, as I had on that occasion.

  I remember, aged twenty-three, late one afternoon on 31 December when, like today, it had grown dark very early, going to see Dr. Ferdière. This man showed me the greatest kindness at a period of my life that, for me, was full of anguish and uncertainty. I vaguely knew that he had admitted Antonin Artaud to the psychiatric hospital at Rodez and had done his best to treat him.4 But I remember that particular evening for a striking coincidence: I had taken Dr. Ferdière a copy of my first book, La Place de l’Étoile, the title of which surprised him. He fetched a slim, gray volume from his library to show me: La Place de l’Étoile by Robert Desnos,5 whose friend he was. Dr. Ferdière had had it published himself, in Rodez, a few months after Desnos’s death in the camp at Terezin in 1945, the year I was born. I had no idea that Desnos had written a book called La Place de l’Étoile. Quite unwittingly, I had stolen his title from him.

  1. Allusion to a report by the Police des Moeurs, or Vice Squad.

  2. Writer and aesthete, Sachs describes his life as a black marketeer during the Occupation in La Chasse à courre.

  3. A zébu is a domestic camel with a muscular hump and sharp horns.

  4. Artaud—actor, poet, influential cineaste, and theatrical pioneer—remained in Rodez asylum, in the Free Zone, until 1946; he died in 1948.

  5. Leading figure in Paris artistic circles, later active in the Resistance.

  .................

  TWO MONTHS AGO, IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE YIVO INSTITUTE in New York, a friend of mine found the following note among the documentation relating to the former Union Générale des Israélites de France,1 a body founded under the Occupation:

  3L/SBL/

  17 JUNE 1942

  0032

  MEMO TO MLLE SALOMON

  Dora Bruder was restored to her mother on the 15th of this month, courtesy of the Clignancourt police.

  In view of the fact that she has repeatedly run away it would seem advisable to remand her to a juvenile home.

  The father being interned and the mother in a state of penury, police social workers (Quai de Gesvres) will take the necessary action if required.

  Thus, after her return to the maternal domicile on 17 April 1942, Dora Bruder had run away a second time. We have no means of knowing for how long. A month, a month and a half, stolen from the spring of 1942? A week? Where, and in what circumstances, had she been arrested and taken to Clignancourt police station?

  Since 7 June, the wearing of the yellow star had been mandatory. Jews whose names began with A and B had been collecting theirs at police stations since Tuesday 2 June, signing the registers opened for the purpose. Would Dora Bruder have been wearing the star when she was taken to the police station? I doubt it, remembering what her cousin had said about her. A rebel, independent-minded. And besides, in all likelihood she had been on the run long before the beginning of June.

  Was she stopped in the street for not wearing the star? I have found the circular dated 6 June 1942 specifying the lot of those picked up for violation of the eighth statute relating to the wearing of the insignia:

  From the Directors of the Criminal Investigation Department and the Metropolitan Police:

  To Divisional Chief Superintendents, Superintendents of street police for each arrondissement, Superintendents of Paris districts, and all other metropolitan and criminal investigation departments (copies to Directorates of Intelligence Services, Technical Services, Alien and Jewish Affairs . . .

  Procedure:

  1—Jews—males aged 18 and over:

  Any Jew in breach of the law shall be remanded to the Dépôt by the street police together with a specific and individual transfer warrant in duplicate (the second copy to be sent to Divisional Superintendent Roux, chief of the Motor Vehicles Department—Dépôt unit). This document is to specify, in addition to the place, day, time, and circumstances of the arrest, the surname, first name, date and place of birth, family status, occupation, domicile, and nationality of the statutory detainee.

  2—Jewish females and minors of both sexes aged between 16 and 18 years.

  The above shall also be remanded to the Dépôt by the street police under the terms and conditions stated above.

  Dépôt personnel are to send the original transfer warrant to the Directorate for Alien and Jewish Affairs, which will rule on each case after consultation with the German authorities. No release may be effected without written orders from the said directorate.

  DIRECTORATE OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

  TANGUY

  DIRECTORATE OF METROPOLITAN POLICE

  HENNEQUIN

  That June, hundreds of adolescents like Dora were arrested on the street in accordance with Tanguy’s and Hennequin’s precise and detailed instructions. They passed through the Dépôt and then Drancy on their way to Auschwitz. It goes without saying that the specific and individual transfer warrants of which Superintendent Roux received copies were destroyed after the war, or even, perhaps, as each arrest was completed. All the same, a few remain, inadvertently overlooked.

  Police report dated 25 August 1942:

  I am dispatching the following to the Dépôt for failure to wear the Jewish insignia: Sterman Esther, born 13 June 1926, Paris 12th, 42 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. />
  Rotsztein Benjamin, born 19 December 1922, Warsaw, 5 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, arrested Gare d’Austerlitz by inspectors of the Intelligence Service, Section 3.

  Police report dated 1 September 1942:

  From Inspectors Curinier and Lasalle to the Chief Superintendent, Special Branch:

  We are dispatching Jacobson Louise born Paris twelfth arrondissement twenty-four December nineteen hundred twenty-four [ . . . ] naturalized French nineteen hundred twenty-five, race Jewish, spinster. Domiciled with mother, 8 Rue des Boulets, eleventh arrondissement. Student.

  Arrested today at approx. fourteen hundred hours at the maternal domicile in the following circumstances:

  The Jacobson girl returned as we were proceeding with a domiciliary visit at the above address and we noted that she was not wearing the Jewish insignia in accordance with a German decree.

  She stated that she had left home at eight thirty hours to study for her baccalauréat at the Lycée Henri IV, Rue Clovis. The girl’s neighbors also informed us that she often went out without wearing the insignia.

  Neither we nor the Criminal Investigation Department have any record of the Jacobson girl in our files.

  17 May 1944. Yesterday, at 2245 hours, on their rounds, two officers from the 18th arrondissement arrested the French Jew Barmann Jules, born 25 March 1925, Paris, 10th, domiciled 40bis Rue du Ruisseau (18th) who being without the yellow star ran away on being questioned by the officers. Having fired three shots without hitting him, the officers effected the arrest on the 8th floor of the apartment building at 12 Rue Charles-Nodier (18th) where he had taken refuge.