Dora Bruder (9 page)

 

So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the
year I was born.

As a child, in the apartment at 15 Quai de Conti where my
father had lived since 1942—the same apartment that
Maurice Sachs
²
had rented the year before—my room overlooked
the courtyard. Maurice Sachs relates that he lent these rooms
to somebody called Albert, nicknamed “le Zébu.”
³
And that
he in turn had filled them with “young actors who dreamed
of forming a company of their own, and with adolescents who
were beginning to write.” This “Zébu,” Albert Schaky, had the
same first name as my father and, like him, came from a
family of Italian Jews in Salonika. And like me at the same age
exactly thirty years later, he published his first novel with
Gallimard, in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, under the name
François Vernet. He later joined the Resistance. The Germans
arrested him. On the wall of Cell 218, Fresnes, second
division, he wrote: “Zébu arrested 10.2.44. Three months on bread
and water, interrogated 9–28 May, visited by doctor 8 June,
two days after Allied landing.”

He was deported from Compiègne camp on the transport
of 2 July 1944 and died in Dachau in March 1945.

Thus, in the apartment where Sachs had carried on his gold
trafficking and where, later on, under a false name, my father
had hidden, Zébu had occupied my childhood bedroom. Just
before I was born, he and others like him had taken all the
punishments meted out to them in order that we should
suffer no more than pinpricks. I had already worked this out at
the age of eighteen while on that journey with my father in
the police van, a journey that was a harmless repetition, a
parody, of other such journeys—in the same police vans and to
the same police stations—but from which nobody had ever
returned home, on foot, as I had on that occasion.

 

I remember, aged twenty-three, late one afternoon on 31
December when, like today, it had grown dark very early, going
to see Dr. Ferdière. This man showed me the greatest
kindness at a period of my life that, for me, was full of anguish and
uncertainty. I vaguely knew that he had admitted Antonin
Artaud to the psychiatric hospital at Rodez and had done his best
to treat him.
⁴
But I remember that particular evening for a
striking coincidence: I had taken Dr. Ferdière a copy of my
first book,
La Place de l'Étoile
, the title of which surprised him.
He fetched a slim, gray volume from his library to show me:
La Place de l'Étoile
by Robert Desnos,
⁵
whose friend he was.
Dr. Ferdière had had it published himself, in Rodez, a few
months after Desnos's death in the camp at Terezin in 1945,
the year I was born. I had no idea that Desnos had written a
book called
La Place de l'Étoile
. Quite unwittingly, I had stolen
his title from him.

1.
Allusion to a report by the Police des Moeurs, or Vice Squad.

2.
Writer and aesthete, Sachs describes his life as a black marketeer during the
Occupation in
La Chasse à courre
.

3.
A
zébu
is a domestic camel with a muscular hump and sharp
horns.

4.
Artaud—actor, poet, influential cineaste, and theatrical pioneer—remained in
Rodez asylum, in the Free Zone, until 1946; he died in 1948.

5.
Leading figure in Paris artistic circles, later active in the
Resistance.

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

T
WO MONTHS AGO, IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE YIVO INSTITUTE
in New York, a friend of mine found the following
note among the documentation relating to the former Union
Générale des Israélites de France,
¹
a body founded under the
Occupation:

3L/SBL/

17 JUNE 1942

0032

MEMO TO MLLE SALOMON

Dora Bruder was restored to her mother on the 15th of
this month, courtesy of the Clignancourt police.

In view of the fact that she has repeatedly run away it
would seem advisable to remand her to a juvenile home.

The father being interned and the mother in a state of
penury, police social workers (Quai de Gesvres) will take the
necessary action if required.

Thus, after her return to the maternal domicile on 17 April
1942, Dora Bruder had run away a second time. We have no
means of knowing for how long. A month, a month and a half,
stolen from the spring of 1942? A week? Where, and in what
circumstances, had she been arrested and taken to
Clignancourt police station?

Since 7 June, the wearing of the yellow star had been
mandatory. Jews whose names began with A and B had been
collecting theirs at police stations since Tuesday 2 June,
signing the registers opened for the purpose. Would Dora Bruder
have been wearing the star when she was taken to the police
station? I doubt it, remembering what her cousin had said
about her. A rebel, independent-minded. And besides, in all
likelihood she had been on the run long before the beginning
of June.

Was she stopped in the street for not wearing the star? I
have found the circular dated 6 June 1942 specifying the lot
of those picked up for violation of the eighth statute relating
to the wearing of the insignia:

From the Directors of the Criminal Investigation
Department and the Metropolitan Police:

To Divisional Chief Superintendents, Superintendents
of street police for each arrondissement,
Superintendents of Paris districts, and all other metropolitan and
criminal investigation departments (copies to
Directorates of Intelligence Services, Technical Services, Alien
and Jewish Affairs  .  .  .

Procedure:

1—Jews—males aged 18 and over:

Any Jew in breach of the law shall be remanded to the
Dépôt by the street police together with a specific and
individual transfer warrant in duplicate (the second copy
to be sent to Divisional Superintendent Roux, chief of
the Motor Vehicles Department—Dépôt unit). This
document is to specify, in addition to the place, day,
time, and circumstances of the arrest, the surname, first
name, date and place of birth, family status, occupation,
domicile, and nationality of the statutory detainee.

2—Jewish females and minors of both sexes aged between
16 and 18 years.

The above shall also be remanded to the Dépôt by
the street police under the terms and conditions stated
above.

Dépôt personnel are to send the original transfer
warrant to the Directorate for Alien and Jewish Affairs,
which will rule on each case after consultation with the
German authorities. No release may be effected without
written orders from the said directorate.

DIRECTORATE OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

TANGUY

DIRECTORATE OF METROPOLITAN POLICE

HENNEQUIN

That June, hundreds of adolescents like Dora were arrested
on the street in accordance with Tanguy's and Hennequin's
precise and detailed instructions. They passed through the
Dépôt and then Drancy on their way to Auschwitz. It goes
without saying that the specific and individual transfer
warrants of which Superintendent Roux received copies were
destroyed after the war, or even, perhaps, as each arrest was
completed. All the same, a few remain, inadvertently overlooked.

Police report dated 25 August 1942:

I am dispatching the following to the Dépôt for
failure to wear the Jewish insignia: Sterman Esther, born
13 June 1926, Paris 12th, 42 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

Rotsztein Benjamin, born 19 December 1922,
Warsaw, 5 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, arrested Gare
d'Austerlitz by inspectors of the Intelligence Service,
Section 3.

Police report dated 1 September 1942:

From Inspectors Curinier and Lasalle to the Chief
Superintendent, Special Branch:

We are dispatching Jacobson Louise born Paris
twelfth arrondissement twenty-four December nineteen
hundred twenty-four [ .  .  . ] naturalized French nineteen
hundred twenty-five, race Jewish, spinster. Domiciled
with mother, 8 Rue des Boulets, eleventh
arrondissement. Student.

Arrested today at approx. fourteen hundred hours
at the maternal domicile in the following circumstances:

The Jacobson girl returned as we were proceeding
with a domiciliary visit at the above address and we
noted that she was not wearing the Jewish insignia in
accordance with a German decree.

She stated that she had left home at eight thirty hours
to study for her
baccalauréat
at the Lycée Henri IV, Rue
Clovis. The girl's neighbors also informed us that she
often went out without wearing the insignia.

Neither we nor the Criminal Investigation
Department have any record of the Jacobson girl in our files.

 

17 May 1944. Yesterday, at 2245 hours, on their
rounds, two officers from the 18th arrondissement
arrested the French Jew Barmann Jules, born 25 March
1925, Paris, 10th, domiciled 40
bis
Rue du Ruisseau
(18th) who being without the yellow star ran away on
being questioned by the officers. Having fired three shots
without hitting him, the officers effected the arrest on
the 8th floor of the apartment building at 12 Rue
Charles-Nodier (18th) where he had taken refuge.

But according to the “Memo to Mlle Salomon,” Dora
Bruder had been returned to her mother. Whether or not she
was wearing the star—her mother would have been wearing
hers for at least a week—it means that, at Clignancourt
police station, she was treated the same as any other runaway girl.
Or it may be that the police themselves were responsible for
the “Memo to Mlle Salomon.”

I have been unable to trace Mlle Salomon. Is she still alive?
Evidently, she was a member of UGIF, the organization
administered by leading French Israelites who coordinated
charity work among the Jewish community during the
Occupation. Unfortunately, while the Union Générate des Israélites
de France certainly came to the aid of a great many French
Jews, its origins were ambiguous: it had been founded on the
initiative of the Germans and the Vichy government on the
assumption that control of such a body would facilitate their
ends, as in the case of the
Judenräte
in the towns and cities of
Poland.

Both patrons and staff of the UGIF carried what was called
a “legitimization card” to protect them from being rounded
up or interned. But this irregular privilege was soon to prove
illusory. From 1943 onward, leaders and employees of UGIF
were arrested and deported in the hundreds. On the list of these
I have found the name of an Alice Salomon, who had worked
in the Free Zone. I doubt she could be the Mlle Salomon to
whom the memo about Dora was addressed.

Who wrote this memo? If it was somebody on the staff of
the UGIF, it suggests that Dora Bruder and her parents had
been known to the UGIF for some time. Very likely Cécile
Bruder, Dora's mother, in common with the majority of lews
living in extreme poverty with no other means of support, had
turned to this organization as a last resort. It was her only
means of getting news of her husband, interned at Drancy
since March, and of sending him food parcels. And she may
have thought that, with the help of the UGIF, she would
eventually find her daughter.

“Social workers attached to the police (Quai de Gesvres)
will take the necessary action if required.” In 1942, these
consisted of twenty women attached to the Brigade for the
Protection of Minors, a branch of the Criminal Investigation
Department. They formed an autonomous section under a senior
social worker.

I have found a photograph dating from this period. Two
women aged about twenty-five. They are in black—or navy
blue—uniform, with a sort of kepi that sports a badge of two
intertwined
P
s: Prefecture of Police. The woman on the left,
a brunette with hair almost down to her shoulders, carries a
satchel. The one on the right appears to be wearing lipstick.
Behind the brunette, two wall plaques read:
POLICE SOCIAL
SERVICES
. Below this, an arrow, and underneath it: “Open
0930 h. to 1200 h.” The writing on the lower plaque is half
obscured by the brunette's head and kepi. Nevertheless, you
can read:

DEPARTMENT OF E  .  .  .

INSPECTORS

Underneath, an arrow: “Passage on Right. Door number  .  .  .”

We shall never know the number of this door.

1.
In polite society,
Israélite
was used to avoid the connotations of the word “Jew.”

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

W
HAT HAPPENED TO DORA, I WONDER, IN THE INTERVAL
between 15 June, when she found herself in
Clignancourt police station, and 17 June, the date of the “Memo
for Mlle Salomon.” Had she been allowed to leave the police
station with her mother?

If she had been allowed to return to the Boulevard Ornano
hotel with her mother—it was no distance, just down the Rue
Hermel—it means that the social workers would have come
for her three days later, after Mile Salomon had made contact
with the Quai de Gesvres.

But I have a feeling that things were not quite as
straightforward as that. I have often taken the Rue Hermel, in both
directions, toward the Butte Montmartre and toward the
Boulevard Ornano, and, try as I might, closing my eyes, I find
it hard to picture Dora and her mother walking along this
street on their way back to their hotel room on a sunny June
afternoon as though it was just another day.