Dora Bruder (8 page)

 

A bare three lines on the “case of Bruder Dora.” The
entries that come after it in the blotter for 17 April concern other
“cases”:

Gaul Georgette Paulette, born 30.7.23 Pantin, Seine,
to Georges and Pelz Rose, spinster, lives in hotel 11 Rue
Pigalle. Prostitution.

Germaine Mauraire, born 9.10.21 Entre-Deux-Eaux
(Vosges). Lives in hotel. 1 P.M. report.
¹

J.-R. CRETET, 9TH ARRONDISSEMENT

So the list goes on, throughout the Occupation, in the
police blotters: prostitutes, lost dogs, abandoned babies. And
runaway adolescents—like Dora—guilty of vagrancy.

Apparently, “Jews” as such never came into it. And yet they
passed through these same police stations before being taken
to the Dépôt, and from there to Drancy. And the phrase
“regained maternal domicile” suggests that the Clignancourt
police were aware that Dora's father had been arrested the
month before.

Of Dora herself, there is no trace between 14 December
1941, the day she ran away, and 17 April 1942 when, in the
words of the blotter, she regained the maternal domicile, that
is, the hotel room at 41 Boulevard Ornano. For those four
months, we have no idea where she went, what she did, whom
she was with. Nor do we know the circumstances of her
return to the “maternal domicile.” Was it of her own accord,
after having heard of her father's arrest? Or had she in fact
been stopped in the street, the Brigade for the Protection of
Minors having issued a warrant for her arrest? So far, I haven't
found a single clue, a single witness who might shed light on
these four months of absence, for us, a blank in her life.

One way not to lose all touch with Dora Bruder over this
period would be to report on the changes in the weather. The
first snow fell on 4 November 1941. Winter got off to a cold
start on 22 December. On 29 December, the temperature
dropped still further, and windowpanes were covered with a
thin coating of ice. From 13 January onwards, the cold
became Siberian. Water froze. This lasted some four weeks. On
12 February, the sun came out briefly, like a tentative
annunciation of spring. The snow on the sidewalks, trampled
by pedestrians, turned to a blackish slush. It was on that
evening of 12 February that my father was picked up by the
Jewish Affairs police. On 22 February it snowed again. On 25
February, there was a fresh, much heavier snowfall. On 3
March, just after 9
P.M.
, the first bombs fell on the suburbs.
Windows rattled in Paris. On 13 March, in broad daylight, the
sirens sounded a general alert. Passengers were stuck in the
métro for two hours. They were led out through the tunnel.
A second alert that same day, at 10
P.M.
15 March was a
beautiful sunny day. On 28 March, about 10
P.M.
, a distant air raid,
lasting till midnight. On 2 April, around 4
A.M.
, an alert,
followed by a heavy bombardment till six. More raids from 11
P.M.
On 4 April, the buds on the chestnut trees burst open.
On 5 April, toward evening, a passing spring storm brought
hail and, with it, a rainbow. Don't forget: rendezvous
tomorrow afternoon, on the terrace of the Café des Gobelins.

 

A few months ago, I managed to get hold of a photograph of
Dora Bruder, one that is in complete contrast to those already
in my collection. It may be the last ever taken of her. Her face
and demeanor have none of the childlike qualities that shine
out from all the earlier photographs, in the gaze, the rounded
cheeks, the white dress worn on a school assembly day  .  .  .  I
don't know when this photograph was taken. It could only have
been in 1941, when Dora was a boarder at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie,
or else early in the spring of 1942, when she returned
to the Boulevard Ornano after her escape in December.

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 16
bis
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
.