Dora Bruder (2 page)

 

It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth:
25 February 1926. And a further two years to find out her place
of birth: Paris, 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man.
I can wait for hours in the rain.

 

One Friday afternoon in February 1996 I went to the 12th
arrondissement Register Office. The registrar—a young
man—handed me a form:

To be completed by the person applying for the certificate. Fill in your

Surname

First name

Address

I require a full copy of the Birth Certificate for

Surname BRUDER

First Name DORA

Date of birth: 25 February 1926

Check if you are:

□ The person in question

□ Son or daughter

□ Father or mother

□ Husband or wife

□ Grandfather or grandmother

□ Legal representative (You have power of attorney, and an identity
card for the person in question)

No persons other than the above may be supplied with a copy of a Birth
Certificate.

I signed the form and handed it back to him. After
reading it through, he said that he was unable to supply me with
a standard birth certificate: I bore no legal relationship
whatever to the person in question.

At first, I took him for one of those sentinels of oblivion
whose role is to guard a shameful secret and deny access to
anybody seeking to uncover the least trace of a person's
existence. But he was a decent fellow. He advised me to go to the
Palais de Justice, 2 Boulevard du Palais, and apply for a
special exemption from the Superintendent Registrar, Section 3,
5th floor, Staircase 5, Room 501. Monday to Friday, 2 to 4
P.M.

I was about to enter the main courtyard through the big
iron gates at 2 Boulevard du Palais when a functionary
directed me to another entrance a little farther down: the same
as that for the Sainte-Chapelle. Tourists were waiting in a line
between the barriers and I wanted to go straight on, through
the porch, but another functionary gestured at me impatiently
to line up with the rest.

At the back of the foyer, regulations required you to empty
your pockets of anything metal. I had nothing on me except
a bunch of keys. This I was supposed to place on a sort of
conveyor belt for collection on the far side of a glass partition,
but for a moment I couldn't think what to do. My hesitation
earned me a rebuke from another functionary. Was he a
guard? A policeman? Was I also supposed to hand over my
shoelaces, belt, wallet, as at the gates of a prison?

I crossed a courtyard, followed a corridor, and emerged
into a vast concourse milling with men and women carrying
black briefcases, some dressed in legal robes. I didn't dare ask
them how to get to Staircase 5.

A guard seated at a table directed me to the back of the
concourse. And here I entered a deserted hall whose high
windows let in a dim, gray light. I searched every corner of this
room without finding Staircase 5. I was seized with panic, with
that sense of vertigo you have in bad dreams when you can't
get to the station, time is running out and you are going to
miss your train.

Twenty years before, I had had a similar experience. I had
learned that my father was in hospital, in the Pitié-Salpêtrière.
I hadn't seen him since the end of my adolescent years. I
therefore decided to pay him an impromptu visit.

I remember wandering for hours through the vastness of
that hospital in search of him. I found my way into ancient
buildings, into communal wards lined with beds, I
questioned nurses who gave me contradictory directions. I came
to doubt my father's existence, passing and repassing that
majestic church, and those spectral buildings, unchanged since
the seventeenth century, which, for me, evoke Manon Lescaut
and the era when, under the sinister name General Hospital,
the place was used as a prison for prostitutes awaiting
deportation to Louisiana. I tramped the paved courtyards till
dusk. It was impossible to find my father. I never saw him
again.

 

But I found Staircase 5 in the end. I climbed several flights. A
row of offices. I was directed to Room 501. A bored-looking
woman with short hair asked me what I wanted.

Curtly, she informed me that to obtain particulars of a birth
certificate I should write to the Public Prosecutor,
¹
Department B, 14 Quai des Orfèvres, Paris 3.

Three weeks later, I had a reply.

At nine ten
P.M.
on twenty-five February nineteen
hundred twenty-six, at 15 Rue Santerre, a female child,
Dora, was born to Ernest Bruder, unskilled laborer, born
Vienna (Austria) twenty-one May eighteen hundred
ninety-nine, and to his wife, Cécile Burdej, housewife,
born Budapest (Hungary) seventeen April nineteen
hundred seven, both domiciled at 2 Avenue Liégeard,
Sevran (Seine-et-Oise). Registered at three thirty
P.M.
on twenty-seven February nineteen hundred
twenty-six on the declaration of Gaspard Meyer, aged
seventy-three, employed and domiciled at 76 Rue de Picpus,
having been present at the birth, who has read and
signed it with Us, Auguste Guillaume Rossi, Deputy
Mayor, 12th arrondissement, Paris.

15 Rue Santerre is the address of the Rothschild Hospital.
Many children of poor Jewish families, recent immigrants to
France, were born in its maternity ward around the same time
as Dora. Seemingly, on that Thursday of 25 February 1926,
Ernest Bruder had been unable to get time off from work in
order to register his daughter himself at the 12th
arrondissement town hall. Perhaps there is a register somewhere with
more information about the Gaspard Meyer who had signed
the birth certificate. 76 Rue de Picpus, where he was
“employed and domiciled,” is the address of the Rothschild
Hospice, an establishment for the old and indigent.

In that winter of 1926 all trace of Dora Bruder and her
parents peters out in Sevran, the suburb to the northeast,
bordering the Ourcq canal. One day I shall go to Sevran, but I
fear that, as in all suburbs, houses and streets will have changed
beyond recognition. Here are the names of a few businesses
and inhabitants of the Avenue Liégeard dating from that
period: the Trianon de Freinville occupied number 24. Was this
a café? A cinema? The Île-de-France wine cellars at number
31. There was a Dr. Jorand at number 9, a pharmacist, Platel,
at number 30.

The Avenue Liégeard where Dora's parents lived was part
of a built-up area that sprawled across the communities of
Sevran, Livry-Gargan, and Aulnay-sous-Bois and was known
as Freinville.
²
It had grown up around the Westinghouse
Brake Factory, established there at the beginning of the
century. A working-class area. In the thirties, it had tried to gain
its autonomy, without success, and so had remained a
dependency of the three adjoining communities. But it had its
own railway station nevertheless: Freinville.

In that winter of 1926, Ernest Bruder, Dora's father, is sure
to have been employed at the Westinghouse Brake Factory.

1.
An official who has a number of nonjudicial functions in France.

2.
The equivalent of Brakesville,
from
frein
, a brake.

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

E
RNEST BRUDER, BORN VIENNA, AUSTRIA, 21 MAY 1899
.
His childhood would have been spent in that city's
Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt. His own parents were almost
certainly natives of Galicia or Bohemia or Moravia, having come,
like the majority of Vienna's Jews, from the eastern provinces
of the Empire.

I had turned twenty in Vienna, in 1965, also the year when
I was frequenting the Clignancourt districts. I lived on the
Taubenstummengasse, behind the Karlskirche. My first few
nights were spent in a seedy hotel near the Western Station.
I have memories of summer evenings spent in Sievering and
Grinzing, and of parks where bands were playing. And, not
far from Heilingenstadt, of a shack in the middle of some sort
of allotment. Everything was closed on those July weekends,
even the Café Hawelka. The city was deserted. Tramlines
glistened in the sunlight, crisscrossing the northwestern districts
as far as Pötzleinsdorf Park.

Some day, I shall go back to Vienna, a city I haven't seen
for over thirty years. Perhaps I shall find Ernest Bruder's birth
certificate in the Register Office of Vienna's Jewish
community. I shall learn his father's first name, occupation, and
birthplace, his mother's first name and maiden name. And
whereabouts they had lived in that zone of the 2d district,
somewhere between the Northern Station, the Prater, and the
Danube.

Child and adolescent, he would have known the Prater,
with its cafés, and its theater, the home of the Budapester. And
the Sweden Bridge. And the courtyard of the Commodities
Exchange, near the Taborstrasse. And the market square of
the Carmelites.

In 1919, his life as a twenty-year-old in Vienna had been
harder than mine. Following the first defeats of the Austrian
army, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from Galicia,
Bukovina, and the Ukraine had arrived in successive waves to
crowd into the slums around the Northern Station. A city
adrift, cut off from an empire that had ceased to exist. Ernest
Bruder must have been indistinguishable from those bands
of unemployed roaming the streets of shuttered shops.

Or did he come from a less poverty-stricken background
than the refugees from the east? The son of a Taborstrasse
shopkeeper, perhaps? How are we to know?

 

On a file card, one of thousands in an index created some
twenty years later to facilitate the roundup of Jews during the
Occupation, and which still lies around to this day at the
Veterans' Administration, Ernest Bruder is described as “French
legionnaire, 2d class.” So he must have enlisted in the Foreign
Legion, though I have no means of knowing precisely when.
1919? 1920?

A man enlisted for five years. He didn't even need to go to
France, it was enough to visit a French consulate. Was that
what Ernest Bruder did, in Austria? Or was he already in
France by then? Either way, along with other Germans and
Austrians in his situation, he was probably sent to the barracks
at Belfort and Nancy, where they were not exactly received
with open arms. Then it was Marseille and the Fort Saint-Jean,
where the reception was cooler still. After that, the troopship:
in Morocco, it seemed, Lyautey was short of thirty thousand
troops.

I'm trying to reconstitute Ernest Bruder's tour of duty. The
bounty, handed out at Sidi Bel Abbès. The condition of most
enlisted men—Germans, Austrians, Russians, Rumanians,
Bulgarians—is so miserable that they are dazed by the idea of
receiving a bounty. They can't believe their luck. Hastily, they
stuff the money into their pockets, as if it might be taken
back from them. Then comes the training, long runs over the
dunes, interminable marches under a leaden African sun. For
volunteers from Central Europe, like Ernest Bruder, it is hard
going: they have been undernourished throughout
adolescence, owing to four years of wartime rationing.

Next, the barracks at Meknès, Fez, or Marrakesh. They are
sent on operations intended to pacify the still rebellious
territories of Morocco.

April 1920. Fighting at Bekrit and the Ras-Tarcha. June
1921. Legion battalion under Major Lambert engaged in the
Djebel Hayane. March 1922. Fighting at Chouf-ech-Cherg.
Captain Roth. May 1922. Fighting at Tizi Adni. Nicolas
battalion. April 1923. Fighting at Arbala, and in the Taza
corridor. May 1923. Heavy fighting for the Talrant Bab-Brida,
taken under intense fire by Naegelin's legionnaires. On the
night of the 26th, in a surprise attack, the Naegelin
battalion occupies the Ichendirt massif. June 1923. Fighting at
Tadout. Naegelin battalion takes the ridge. Legionnaires raise
the tricolor over an important casbah to the sound of
bugles. Fighting at Oued Athia, where the Barrière battalion has
to make two bayonet charges. Buchsenschutz battalion takes
entrenched positions on the pinnacle south of Bou-Khamouj.
Fighting in the El-Mers basin. July 1923. Fighting on the
Immouzer plateau. Cattin battalion. Buchsenschutz battalion.
Susini and Jenoudet battalions. August 1923. Fighting at
Oued Tamghilt.

At night, in this landscape of stone-strewn sand, did he
dream of Vienna, the city of his birth, and the chestnut trees
of the Hauptallee? The file of Ernest Bruder, “French
legionnaire, 2d class” also indicates: “100% disabled.” In which of
these battles was he wounded?

 

At the age of twenty-five, he was back on the streets of Paris.
The Legion must have released him from his engagement
because of his war wound. I don't suppose he talked about it to
anybody. Not that anybody would have been interested. I'm
almost sure he didn't receive a disability pension. He was never
given French nationality. In fact, I've seen his disability
mentioned only once, and that was in one of the police files
designed to facilitate the roundups during the Occupation.

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

I
N 1924, ERNEST BRUDER MARRIED A YOUNG WOMAN OF
seventeen, Cécile Burdej, born 17 April 1907 in Budapest.
I don't know where this marriage took place, nor do I know
the names of their witnesses. How did they happen to meet?
Cécile Burdej had arrived in Paris the year before, with her
parents, her brother, and her four sisters. A Jewish family of
Russian origin, they had probably settled in Budapest at the
beginning of the century.