Dora Bruder (11 page)

1.
Roger Gompel was the director of a chain of department stores, including Les
Trois Quartiers. He was interned at Drancy but later released.

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

T
WICE IN APRIL 1966 I SPENT A SUNDAY IN THE EASTERN
districts of Paris, looking for some trace of Dora Bruder
in the areas around the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie and Tourelles.
I felt this was best done on a Sunday, when the town is
deserted, at the lowest ebb of the tide.

Nothing is left of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. A modern
apartment block stands at the corner of the Rue de Picpus and
the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. The section that has replaced
the school's tree-shaded wall now displays the last odd
numbers in the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. Opposite, a little
further along on the even-numbered side, the street is
unchanged.

It's hard to believe that one July morning in 1942, while
Dora was interned at Tourelles, the police had come to arrest
nine young children and adolescents at number 48
bis,
where
the windows overlooked the garden of the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. It's a five-story building in light-colored brick. On each
floor, two windows flank two smaller windows. Number 40
next door is a grayish building, recessed. In front of it, a low
brick wall with an iron gate. Other small houses opposite, on
the same side as the perimeter wall of the old boarding school,
have remained as they were. Number 54, just before you reach
the Rue de Picpus, used to be a café owned by a Mlle Lenzi.

All of a sudden, I felt certain that, on the night when she
had made her escape, Dora had slipped away from the
boarding school by the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. I visualized her,
hugging the school wall. Perhaps streets named after a station
evoke thoughts of escape.

I wandered around for a while, and then the sadness of
those other Sundays when it was time to return to the
boarding school began to weigh me down. I felt sure that she left
the métro at Nation. She put off the moment when she must
enter the gate and cross the courtyard. She prolonged her
walk, choosing streets at random. It grew dark. The Avenue
de Saint-Mandé is quiet, bordered by trees. I forget if there is
open ground. You pass the entrance to the old Picpus métro
station. Did she ever emerge from there? In comparison with
the Avenue de Saint-Mandé, the Avenue de Picpus, on the
right, is cold and desolate. Treeless, I seem to remember. But
the solitude of returning, on those Sunday evenings.

 

The Boulevard Mortier is a hill. It slopes southward. On my
way there, that Sunday of 28 April 1996, I took the following
route: Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the hill of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena
had lived.

To the right, the Rue des Pyrénées, offering a vista of trees.
Rue de Ménilmontant. The apartment blocks at number 140
lay deserted in the glare of the sun. For the last part of the Rue
Saint-Fargeau, I seemed to be traversing an abandoned village.

Plane trees line the Boulevard Mortier. At the top, just
before you reach the Porte des Lilas, the old Tourelles barracks
are still there.

On that particular Sunday, the boulevard was empty, lost
in a silence so deep that I could hear the rustling of the plane
trees. The buildings of the former barracks are hidden behind
a high perimeter wall. I followed it. Affixed to it was a sign
that read:

MILITARY ZONE

FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED

I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore.
Behind the wall there lay a no-man's-land, a zone of emptiness
and oblivion. Unlike the boarding school in the Rue de
Picpus, the twin blocks of Tourelles barracks had not been pulled
down, but they might as well have been.

And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of
amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant,
muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like
finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no
pendulum to pick up the radiation. Out of suspicion and a guilty
conscience they had put up the sign, “Military zone. Filming
or photography forbidden.”

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

I
N A DIFFERENT PART OF PARIS, WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I
remember having the same sensation of emptiness as I had
had when confronted by the Tourelles wall, without knowing
the reason why.

I had a girlfriend who lived in various borrowed flats and
country houses. I regularly took advantage of this to relieve
their libraries of art books and numbered editions, which I
then sold. One day, when we were by ourselves in a flat on the
Rue du Regard, I stole an antique music box and also, after
rifling the closets, several very smart suits, a few shirts, and
about ten pairs of handmade shoes. I searched the yellow
pages for a secondhand dealer to whom I could resell these
items and found one in the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul.

This street leads up from the Quai des Célestins on the
Seine and intersects the Rue de Charlemagne near the school
where, the year before, I had gone through the ordeal of my
baccalauréat.
One of the last buildings on the right just before
the Rue de Charlemagne had a rusting iron curtain at street
level, half raised. I pushed my way into a junkshop piled high
with furniture, clothes, ironwork, automobile parts. The
forty-year-old man who greeted me was most obliging,
offering to come and collect the “goods” in a few days' time.

Having taken my leave of him, I walked down the Rue des
Jardins-Saint-Paul toward the Seine. All the buildings on the
lefthand side of the street had been pulled down not long
before. As had the other buildings behind them. In their place,
nothing but a wasteland, itself surrounded by half-demolished
walls. On these walls, open to the sky, you could still make
out the patterned paper of what was once a bedroom, the trace
of a chimney. You would have said that the district had been
hit by a bomb, and the vista of the Seine at the bottom of the
street only increased the impression of emptiness.

On the following Sunday, by appointment, the secondhand
dealer came to my girlfriend's father's place on the Boulevard
Kellermann, near the Porte de Gentilly, where I was to hand
over the “goods.” He loaded music box, suits, shirts, and shoes
on to his van, giving me seven hundred old francs for the lot.

He suggested going for a drink. We stopped at one of two
cafés opposite Charlety stadium.

He asked me what I did for a living. I didn't quite know
what to say. In the end, I told him that I had dropped out of
school. I questioned him in return. The junkshop in the Rue
de Jardins-Saint-Paul belonged to his cousin, who was also his
business partner. He himself had another, near the flea
market at the Porte de Clignancourt. It turned out that he came
from a local family of Polish Jews.

I was the one who brought up the subject of the war and
the Occupation. He was eighteen at the time. He remembered
that, one Saturday, the police had made a swoop on the
Saint-Ouen flea market to round up the Jews, and he had escaped
by a miracle. What had shocked him most was that one of the
police inspectors had been a woman.

I told him about the wasteland stretching to the foot of the
apartment blocks on the Boulevard Ney that I had noticed on
the Saturdays when my mother took me to the flea markets.
That was the place where he and his family had lived. Rue
Élisabeth-Rolland. He was surprised that I should make a
note of its name. A district known as the Plain. Completely
demolished after the war, it was now a playing field.

Talking to him, I thought of my father, whom I hadn't seen
for a long time. When he was nineteen, my age, before he lost
himself in dreams of high finance, my father had lived by
wheeling and dealing at the gates of Paris: he smuggled drums
of gasoline for resale to garage owners, liquor, and various
other goods. All without paying excise tax.

As we parted, he said in a friendly way that if I had any more
items for him, I could contact him at the Rue des
Jardins-Saint-Paul. And he gave me an extra hundred francs, no
doubt touched by my air of being a guileless, likeable young
chap.

I've forgotten his face. I remember nothing about him,
apart from his name. He could easily have met Dora Bruder,
around the Porte de Clignancourt, around the Plain. They
were the same age and lived in the same neighborhood.
Perhaps he knew the full story of the times she spent on the
run  .  .  .  The fact is, there are flukes, encounters, coincidences,
and we shall never take advantage of them  .  .  .  I was thinking
of that, this autumn, when I went back to explore the area
around the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. The junkshop with its
iron curtain was no more, and the buildings nearby had been
restored. Once again, I had a sense of emptiness. And I
understood why. After the war, most buildings in the area had
been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a
government plan. Due for demolition, this zone had even been
allotted a name and number: Block 16. I have found some
photographs. One shows the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul with
the houses on the lefthand side still standing. Another, the
half-demolished buildings beside Saint-Gervais church and
around the Hôtel de Sens. Another, a wasteland along the
banks of the Seine, with people crossing it between two now
useless sidewalks: all that remains of the Rue des
Nonnains-d'Hyères. And here, on this wasteland, they have put up row
upon row of houses, altering the course of an old street in the
process.

The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the
concrete the color of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold
light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial
flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have not been
content with putting up a sign like that on the wall of Tourelles
barracks: “No filming or photography.” They have obliterated
everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order
that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.

The patches of wallpaper that I had seen thirty years ago
in the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul were remnants of former
rooms—rooms that had been home to young people of Dora's
age until the day when the police had come for them in July
1942. The list of their names is always associated with the same
streets. And the street names and house numbers no longer
correspond to anything at all.

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

W
HEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, TOURELLES HAD MEANT NO
more than a name I had read at the back of a book by
Jean Genet,
Miracle de la Rose
. There, he lists the places where
the book was written:
LA SANTÉ, TOURELLES PRISON
1943.
Shortly after Dora Bruder's departure from Tourelles, he too
had been imprisoned there, as a common criminal, and their
paths may have crossed.
Miracle de la Rose
is not only
impregnated with memories of the penal settlement at Mettray—one
of those juvenile homes where they had wanted to send
Dora—but also, I now realize, of La Santé and Tourelles.

I know sentences from this book by heart. I remember one
in particular: “What that child taught me is that the true roots
of Parisian slang lie in its sad tenderness.” This phrase evokes
Dora Bruder for me so well that I feel I knew her. The
children with Polish or Russian or Rumanian names who were
forced to wear the yellow star, were so Parisian that they
merged effortlessly into the facades, the apartment blocks, the
sidewalks, the infinite shades of gray that belong to Paris alone.
Like Dora Bruder, they all spoke with the Parisian accent,
using a slang whose sad tenderness Jean Genet had recognized.

 

At Tourelles, when Dora was a prisoner there, you could
receive parcels, and also visits, on Thursdays and Sundays. And,
on Tuesdays, you could attend Mass. The guards held roll call
at eight o'clock in the morning. The detainees stood to
attention at the end of their beds. For lunch, in the refectory,
there was nothing but cabbage. Exercise period on the
barracks square. Supper at six o'clock. Another roll call. Every
two weeks, a trip to the shower, two at a time, accompanied
by a guard. Whistle blasts. You waited. To receive a visit, you
had to write a letter to the prison director, and you never knew
if he would give his authorization.

Visits took place after lunch, in the refectory. Those who
came had their bags searched by the guards. Parcels were
opened. Often, for no reason, visits were canceled, and
detainees informed only an hour beforehand.

 

Among the women whom Dora could have met at Tourelles
were some who were known to the Germans as “Jews' friends”:
there were about ten of them, “Aryan” Frenchwomen, who,
from the first day in June when Jews were obliged to wear the
yellow star, had had the courage to wear it themselves out of
solidarity but did so in imaginative ways that ridiculed the
occupying authorities. One had fixed the yellow star to the
collar of her dog. Another embroidered hers with
PAPOU
.
¹
Another, with
JENNY
. Another attached stars to her belt, each
bearing a letter, spelling out the word
VICTOIRE
. All were
picked up in the street and taken to the nearest police station.
Then to the Dépôt at police headquarters. Then to Tourelles.
Then, on 13 August, to Drancy camp. Between them, these
“friends of Jews” had the following occupations: Typist.
Stationer. Newsdealer. Cleaner. Postal worker. Student.

 

In August the number of arrests multiplied. Women no longer
even passed through the Dépôt but were taken directly to
Tourelles. Dormitories meant for twenty now held double that
number. With the overcrowding, it was suffocatingly hot, and
anxiety mounted. It was common knowledge that Tourelles
was merely a holding yard where, from one day to the next,
you might be shunted off to an unknown destination.