Dora Bruder (7 page)

The following figures are written in the margin, but I have
no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12.

The superintendent at Clignancourt police station, 12 Rue
Lambert, behind the Butte Montmartre, was called Siri. But
Ernest Bruder probably went to the divisional station, 74 Rue
du Mont-Cenis, next to the town hall, which was also part of
the Clignancourt district: it was nearer his home. The
superintendent there was called Cornec.

Dora had run away thirteen days earlier, and Ernest Bruder
had waited all that time before notifying the police of his
daughter's disappearance. His anguish and indecision during
those long thirteen days can be imagined. During the census
of October 1940, he had omitted to register Dora at this very
police station, and they were bound to notice. By trying to find
her, he was drawing attention to her.

The transcript of Ernest Bruder's interview is missing from
the Prefecture of Police archives. No doubt local police stations
destroy documents of that kind as they become obsolete.
A few years after the war, other police records were
destroyed, such as the special registers opened during the week
in June 1942 when every Jewish person over the age of six was
issued with three yellow stars. These registers, which had a
column in the margin where you signed on receipt of your stars,
recorded your civil status, identity card number, and domicile.
Police stations in Paris and the suburbs compiled over
fifty such registers.

We shall never know how Ernest Bruder answered the
questions put to him about his daughter and himself. Perhaps
he chanced on a desk clerk for whom it was a matter of routine,
like before the war, and who saw no particular difference
between Ernest Bruder and his daughter and any other French
citizen. To be sure, the man was an “ex-Austrian,” and an
unskilled laborer living in a hotel. But his daughter was born in
Paris and had French nationality. A runaway adolescent. It
happens more and more in these troubled times. Did this
policeman advise Ernest Bruder to put the missing notice in
Paris-Soir,
given that almost two weeks had passed since
Dora's disappearance? Or did a
Paris-Soir
reporter, touring
the police stations in search of “filler,” happen to see it among
other incidents of the day and glean it for the paper's “From
Day to Day” columns?

 

I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run
in January 1960—an intensity such as I have seldom known.
It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke: the clean
break, deliberately made, from enforced rules, boarding
school, teachers, classmates; you have nothing to do with these
people from now on; the break from your parents, who have
never understood you, and from whom, you tell yourself, it's
useless to expect any help; feelings of rebellion and solitude
carried to flash point, taking your breath away and leaving you
in a state of weightlessness. It was probably one of the few
times in my life when I was truly myself and following my own
bent.

This ecstasy cannot last. It has no future. You are swiftly
brought down to earth.

Running away—it seems—is a call for help and
occasionally a form of suicide. At least you experience a moment of
eternity. You have broken your ties not only with the world
but also with time. And one fine morning you find that the
sky is a pale blue and that nothing now weighs you down. In
the Tuileries garden, the hands on the clock have stopped for
good. An ant is transfixed in its journey across a patch of
sunlight.

 

I think of Dora Bruder. I remind myself that, for her, running
away was not as easy as it was for me, twenty years later, in a
world that had once more been made safe. To her, everything
in that city of December 1941, its curfews, its soldiers, its police,
was hostile, intent on her destruction. At sixteen years old,
without knowing why, she had the entire world against her.

Other rebels, in the Paris of those years, equally
solitary, were throwing hand grenades at the Germans, into their
conveys and meetings. They were her age. Some of their faces
appeared on the
Affiche Rouge
,
¹
and, despite myself, I keep
associating them in my mind with Dora.

 

In the summer of 1941, one of the films made under the
Occupation, first shown in Normandy, came to the local Paris
cinemas. It was a harmless comedy:
Premier rendez-vous.
The
last time I saw it, I had a strange feeling, out of keeping with
the thin plot and the sprightly tones of the actors. I told
myself that perhaps, one Sunday, Dora Bruder had been to see
this film, the subject of which was a girl of her age who runs
away. She escapes from a boarding school much like the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. During her flight, as in fairy tales and
romances, she meets her Prince Charming.

This film paints a rosy, anodyne picture of what had
happened to Dora in real life. Did it give her the idea of running
away? I concentrated on details: the dormitory, the school
corridors, the boarders' uniforms, the café where the
heroine waits after dark  .  .  .  I could find nothing that might
correspond to the reality, and in any case most of the scenes were
shot in the studio. And yet, I had a sense of unease. It
stemmed from the film's peculiar luminosity, from the grain
of the actual stock. Every image seemed veiled in an arctic
whiteness that accentuated the contrasts and sometimes
obliterated them. The lighting was at once too bright and too
dim, either stifling the voices or making their timbre louder,
more disturbing.

Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with
the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation—people
from all walks of life, most of whom would not have
survived the war. They had been taken out of themselves
after having seen this film one Saturday night, their night out.
While it lasted, you forgot the war and the menacing world
outside. Huddled together in the dark of a cinema, you were
caught up in the flow of images on the screen, and nothing
more could happen to you. And, by some kind of chemical
process, this combined gaze had materially altered the actual
film, the lighting, the voices of the actors. That is what I had
sensed, thinking of Dora Bruder and faced with the ostensibly
trivial images of
Premier rendez-vous.

1.
“Wanted” posters printed in red, put up by the Germans.

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

E
RNEST BRUDER WAS ARRESTED ON 19 MARCH 1942,
or rather, that was the day he was interned at Drancy. I've
been unable to find any trace of the circumstances of his
arrest, nor of the reasons for it. In what was called a “family file,”
where data on each individual Jew were assembled for use at
the Prefecture of Police, his entry reads:

Bruder Ernest

21.5.99—Vienna

Jewish dossier no.: 49091

Trade or profession: None

French legionnaire, 2d class. 100% disabled. Gassed;
pulmonary tuberculosis

Central police register E56404

Lower down, the file has been stamped
WANTED
, next to
which somebody has penciled the words: “Traced to Drancy
camp.”

As a Jew and an “ex-Austrian,” Ernest Bruder could have
been arrested in the roundup of August 1941, during which
the French police, backed by the German army, had cordoned
off the 11th arrondissement on 20 August and then, in the
days that followed, stopped and questioned foreign Jews in
the streets of other arrondissements, including the 18th. How
had he escaped this roundup? Thanks to his rank as an
ex-French legionnaire, 2d class? I doubt it.

Evidently, from his file, he was “wanted.” But since when?
And why, exactly? If he was already “wanted” on 27
December 1941, the day he had notified the Clignancourt police of
Dora's disappearance, he wouldn't have been allowed to leave
the police station. Did he draw attention to himself on that
day?

A father tries to find his daughter, reports her
disappearance at a police station, and a wanted notice is inserted in an
evening newspaper. But the father himself is “wanted.”
Parents lose all trace of their daughter and, one 19 March, one of
them disappears in his turn, as if the winter that year was
cutting people off from one another, muddying and wiping out
their tracks to the point where their existence is in doubt. And
there is no redress. The very people whose job it is to search
for you are themselves compiling dossiers, the better to
ensure that, once found, you will disappear again—this time for
good.

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

I
DON'T KNOW WHETHER OR NOT DORA BRUDER LEARNED
of her father's arrest at once. I imagine not. By March, she
had still not returned to 41 Boulevard Ornano after her
escape in December. Or so it would seem from such traces of
her as survive in the archives of the Prefecture of Police.

Now that almost sixty years have passed, these archives will
gradually reveal their secrets. All that remains of the building
occupied by the Prefecture of Police during the Occupation
is a huge spectral barracks beside the Seine. Whenever we
evoke the past, it reminds us a little of the House of Usher.
And we can hardly believe that this building we pass every day
can be unchanged since the forties. We persuade ourselves that
these cannot be the same stones, the same corridors.

The superintendents and inspectors who hunted down the
Jews are long dead, and their names echo with a sombre ring
and give off a smell of rotting leather and stale tobacco:
Permilleux, François, Schweblin, Koerperich, Cougoule  .  .  .  Also
dead, or far gone in senility, are the street police, known to us
as the “press-gang,” who signed the transcript of every
interview with those whom they arrested during the roundups.
Every one of those tens of thousands of transcripts was
destroyed, and we shall never know the identity of the members
of the “press-gang.” But there remain, in the archives,
hundreds and hundreds of letters addressed to the Prefect of
Police of the day, and to which he never replied. They have been
there for over half a century, like sacks of airmail lying
forgotten in the recesses of a remote hangar. Now we can read
them. Those to whom they were addressed having ignored
them, it is we, who were not even born at the time, who are
their recipients and their guardians.

TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE

SIR,

I humbly draw your attention to my request. It concerns
my nephew Albert Graudens, of French nationality, aged
sixteen, who had been interned at  .  .  .

 

TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE FOR JEWISH AFFAIRS

SIR,

I implore you to have the great kindness to release my
daughter, Nelly Trautmann, from Drancy camp  .  .  .

 

TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE

SIR,

I venture to ask you a favor in respect of my husband,
Zelik Pergricht, so that I may know where he is and have a
little news  .  .  .

 

TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE

SIR,

I humbly beg you in your great kindness and generosity
for news of my daughter, Mme Jacques Lévy,
née
Violette
Joël, arrested about 10 September last as she was trying to
cross the demarcation line without wearing the regulation
star. She was accompanied by her son, Jean Lévy, aged
eight and a half  .  .  .

Forwarded to the Prefect of Police:

I beg you to have the kindness to release my grandson,
Michel Robin, aged three, French-born of a French mother,
who is interned with him at Drancy  .  .  .

 

TO THE PREFECT OF POLICE

SIR,

I would be infinitely grateful if you would be good
enough to take the following cases into consideration: my
parents, both elderly and in poor health, have just been
arrested as Jews, and my little sister, Marie Grosman, aged
fifteen and a half, a French Jew, holding French identity
card no. 1594936, grade B, and myself, Jeanette Grosman,
also a French Jew, aged nineteen, holding French identity
card no. 924247, grade B, have been left on our own  .  .  .

 

TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE FOR JEWISH AFFAIRS

SIR,

Excuse me if I presume to write to you in person about
this, but my husband was taken away at 4
A
.
M
. on 16 July
1942, and as my little girl was crying, they took her at the
same time.

Her name is Pauline Gothelf, aged fourteen and a half,
born 19 November 1927 in Paris, 12th arrondissement, and
she is French  .  .  .

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

F
OR THE DATE OF 17 APRIL 1942, THE POLICE BLOTTER
at Clignancourt station has this entry under its usual
headings,
Date and subject. Marital status. Summary:

17 April 1942. 20998 15/24. P. Minors. Case of
Bruder Dora, age 16, disappeared following Interview
1917 has regained maternal domicile.

I don't know what the figures 20998 and 15/24 stand for.
“P. Minors” must mean Protection of Minors. Interview 1917
is certainly the transcript of Ernest Bruder's deposition, and
the questions concerning Dora and himself put to him on 27
December 1941. This is the sole reference in the archives to
Interview 1917.