Dora Bruder (12 page)

Two groups of Jewish women, about a hundred in all, had
already left for Drancy camp on 19 and 27 July. Among them,
an eighteen-year-old Pole, Raca Israelowicz, who had arrived
at Tourelles on the same day as Dora, probably in the same
police van. And who was doubtless one of her neighbors in
the dormitory.

 

On the evening of 12 August, a rumor spread through
Tourelles that all Jewish women and “Jews' friends” were to
leave for Drancy camp on the following day.

At ten o'clock on the morning of 13 August, the
interminable roll call began under the chestnut trees on the barracks
square. A last meal. A meager ration that left you famished.

The buses arrived. In sufficient number—apparently—for
each prisoner to have a seat. Dora included. It was a Thursday, visiting day.

The convoy set out. It was escorted by helmeted policemen
on motorcycles. It took the route that you follow today for
the Roissy airport. More than fifty years have passed. By
building a highway, razing houses to the ground, and
transforming the landscape of this northeastern suburb, they have
rendered it, like the former Block 16, as neutral and gray as
possible. But the blue road signs on the road to the airport
still bear the old names:
DRANCY
or
ROMAINVILLE
. And,
stranded and forgotten on the shoulder of the highway, near
the Porte de Bagnolet, there is an old wooden barn on which
someone has painted this name, clearly visible:
DUREMORD
.

 

At Drancy, among the milling crowds, Dora found her
father. He had been interned there since March. That
particular August, as in the Dépôt at police headquarters, as at
Tourelles, the camp filled up day by day with an increasing
flood of men and women. Some came in the thousands by
freight train from the Free Zone. Many hundreds of women,
forcibly separated from their children, came from the camps
at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. And, from 15 August
onward, after their mothers had been deported, the children
arrived in turn, four thousand of them. In many cases their
names, hastily scribbled on their clothes before they left
Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, were no longer legible.
Unidentified child no. 122. Unidentified child no. 146. Girl
aged three. First name Monique. Unidentified.

Because of the overcrowding in the camp, and in
anticipation of the convoys still to arrive from the Free Zone, on
2 and 5 September the authorities decided to transfer Jews of
French nationality from Drancy to Pithiviers. Four girls who
had arrived at Tourelles on the same day as Dora—Claudine
Winerbett, Zélie Strohlitz, Marthe Nachmanowicz, and
Yvonne Pitoun—all aged sixteen or seventeen, left on this
convoy of some fifteen hundred French Jews. They were
probably under the illusion that their nationality would protect
them. Dora, being French, could have left with them. The
reason she didn't do so is easy to guess: she preferred to stay with
her father.

Father and daughter departed Drancy on 18 September, in
company with thousands of other men and women, on a
convoy of trains bound for Auschwitz.

 

Dora's mother, Cécile Bruder, was arrested on 16 July 1942,
the day of the great roundup, and interned at Drancy. She was
reunited with her husband for a few days while their
daughter was at Tourelles. Doubtless because she was born in
Budapest and the authorities had not yet received orders to
deport Hungarian Jews, Cécile Bruder was released from Drancy
on 25 July.

Had she been able to visit Dora at Tourelles, one
Thursday or Sunday, during that summer of 1942? On 9 January
1943, she was once again interned in Drancy camp and, on
11 February 1943, five months after her husband and
daughter, she was put on a convoy for Auschwitz.

On Saturday 19 September, the day after Dora and her father
left, the occupying authorities imposed a curfew in retaliation
for a bomb placed in the Cinéma Rex. Nobody was allowed
out after three o'clock in the afternoon until the following
morning. The city was deserted, as if to mark Dora's absence.

Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps
has remained as silent and deserted as it was on that day. I walk
through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even
at dusk, during the rush hour, when the crowds are hurrying
toward the mouths of the métro. I think of her in spite of
myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighborhood or
that. The other evening, it was near the Gare du Nord.

I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid,
in whose company she passed the winter months of her first
escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the
second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that
not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying
authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History,
time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to
take away from her.

1.
A native of Papua, New Guinea.