Dora Bruder (10 page)

I believe that on 15 June, at Clignancourt police station,
Dora and her mother were caught up in a chain reaction over
which they no longer had any control. Children are liable to
expect more from life than their parents and, faced with
adversity, their reaction is the more violent. They go farther,
much farther than their parents. And, thereafter, their
parents are unable to protect them.

Confronted with the police, Mlle Salomon, social workers,
German decrees and French laws, Cécile Bruder, with her
yellow star, her husband interned in Drancy and her “state of
penury,” would have felt herself utterly defenseless. And quite
unable to cope with Dora, who was a rebel and had more than
once shown her determination to tear a hole in this net that
had been thrown over her and her parents.

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

 

Perhaps Dora was taken from Clignancourt police station to
the Dépôt at police headquarters, that being the usual
practice. In which case she would have known that huge,
windowless basement, its cells, its straw mattresses heaped with
Jewish women, prostitutes, “criminals,” and “political”
prisoners huddled together anyhow. She would have known the
lice, the foul stink, and the wardresses, those terrifying
blackclad nuns with little blue veils from whom it was useless to
expect the least pity.

Or else she was taken directly to the Quai de Gesvres, open
0930 h. to 1200 h. She went down the passage on the right,
stopping outside the door the number of which I shall never
know.

Either way, on 19 June 1942, she must have climbed into
a police van, where she would have found five girls of her age
already installed. Unless these five were picked up as the van
did the rounds of police stations. It took them all to the
internment center of Tourelles, Boulevard Mortier, at the Porte
des Lilas.

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

T
HE TOURELLES REGISTER FOR 1942 SURVIVES. ON ITS
cover is one word:
WOMEN
. It listed the names of internees
in order of arrival. These women had been arrested for acts
of resistance, for being Communists and, up to August 1942,
in the case of Jews, for having failed to comply with German
decrees: Jews were forbidden to go out after eight o'clock at
night, compelled to wear the yellow star, forbidden to cross
the demarcation line into the Free Zone, forbidden to use the
telephone, to possess a bicycle, a radio  .  .  .

The register has the following entry for 19 June 1942:

Arrivals 19 June 1942

439. 19.6.42. Bruder Dora, 25.2.26. Paris 12th.
French. 41 Bd Ornano. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

For the same date, there follow the names of five other girls,
all about the same age as Dora:

40. 19.6.42. 5th Winerbett Claudine. 26.11.24. Paris
9th. French. 82 Rue des Moines. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

1. 19.6.42. 5th Strohlitz Zélie. 4.2.26. Paris 11th.
French. 48 Rue Molière. Montreuil. J. Drancy 13/8/42.

2. 19.6.42. Israelowicz Raca. 19.7.1924. Lodz. Ind. J.
26 Rue [illegible]. Deported by German authorities
convoy 19.7.42.

3. Nachmanowicz Marthe. 23.3.25. Paris. French. 258
Rue Marcadet. J. xx Drancy. 13/8/42.

4. 19.6.42. 5th. Pitoun Yvonne. 27.1.25. Algiers.
French. 3 Rue Marcel-Sembat. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.

The police had allotted each girl a registration number.
Dora's was 439. I don't know the meaning of 5th. The letter
J
stands for Jewish. Drancy 13/8/42 is added in each case: on
13 August 1942, the day when the three hundred Jewish
women who were still interned at Tourelles were transferred
to Drancy camp.

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

O
N THAT THURSDAY, 19 JUNE, THE DAY THAT DORA
arrived at Tourelles, all the women were assembled on
the barracks square after breakfast. Three German officers
were present. Jewish women between the ages of eighteen and
forty were ordered to line up, backs turned. One of the
Germans had ready a complete list of these women and called out
their names in the order written. The rest returned to their
rooms. The sixty-six women thus segregated from their
companions were locked up in a large, empty room without beds
or chairs where they remained in isolation for three days, a
policeman guarding the door.

On Sunday 22 June, at five o'clock in the morning, buses
arrived to take them to Drancy. They were deported the same
day, put on a train with over nine hundred men. It was the
first transport to leave France with women on board. For the
Jewish women in Tourelles, the hovering menace they'd never
quite been able to put a name to and, at moments, had
succeeded in forgetting, had become fact. And in this oppressive
atmosphere Dora spent the first three days of her internment.
On the Sunday morning, while it was still dark, she and all
her fellow internees watched through closed windows as the
sixty-six women were driven away.

On 18 June, or else on the following morning, a desk clerk
would have made out Dora's transfer warrant for Tourelles.
Had this been done at Clignancourt police station, or at the
Quai de Gesvres? It had had to be made out in duplicate and
the copies handed, complete with check marks and signatures,
to the guards on the police van. As he signed his name, did the
clerk consider the implications of his act? After all, for him, it
was merely a routine signature, and besides, the girl was being
sent to a place still reassuringly designated by the Prefecture
of Police as “Hostel. Supervised short-term accommodation.”

I have managed to identify a few of those women who left
Tourelles on Sunday 22 June at five o'clock in the morning,
and who had come into contact with Dora after her arrival
there on the Thursday.

Claude Bloch was thirty-two years old. She had been picked
up while on her way to Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue
Foch to ask for news of her husband, who had been arrested
in December 1941. She was the only person on that transport
to survive.

Josette Delimal was twenty-one. Claude Bloch had met
her in the Dépôt at police headquarters, and both were taken
to Tourelles on the same day. According to Claude, “Josette
had had a tough time before the war and hadn't built up
the strength you can draw from happy memories. She broke
down completely. I did my best to comfort her [ .  .  . ]. When
they took us to the dormitory to assign us to our beds, I
refused to let them separate us. We were together until
Auschwitz, where typhus soon carried her off.” That's all I
know about Josette Delimal. I wish I knew more.

Tamara Isserlis. She was twenty-four. A medical student.
She was arrested at Cluny métro station “for concealing the
French flag beneath the star of David.” Her identity card has
been found and gives her address as 10 Rue de Buzenval,
Saint-Cloud. She had an oval-shaped face, light brown hair, and
dark eyes.

Ida Levine. Twenty-nine. A few of her letters to her
family survive, written first from the Dépôt, then from Tourelles.
She threw her last letter from the train at Bar-le-Duc station,
where a railroad worker mailed it. She writes: “I'm writing this
on a train to an unknown destination, but it's traveling east,
so perhaps we're going quite far away  .  .  . ”

Hena: I shall call her by her first name. She was nineteen.
She had got herself arrested because she and her boyfriend had
burgled an apartment, stealing jewelry and cash worth one
hundred and fifty thousand old francs. Perhaps, with this
money, she dreamed of leaving France and escaping the threats
hanging over her. She was taken before a magistrate and
sentenced for theft. Being Jewish, she was sent not to an ordinary
prison but to Tourelles. I feel a certain solidarity with her act
of burglary. In 1942, my father and his accomplices had
plundered the SKF warehouse on the Avenue de la Grande-Armée
of its stock of ball bearings, loading their loot onto trucks and
transporting it back to the den on the Avenue Hoche from
which they operated their black market business. According
to German decrees, Vichy laws, and articles in the press, they
were no better than vermin and common criminals, so they
felt justified in behaving like outlaws in order to survive. For
them, it was a point of honor. And I applaud them for it.

The rest of what I know about Hena amounts to almost
nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in
Poland, and she lived at 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply
sloping street I have so often climbed.

Annette Zelman. She was twenty-one years old. She was a
blonde. She lived at 58 Boulevard de Strasbourg with a young
man, Jean Jausion, the son of a professor of medicine. His first
poems had been published in
Les Réverbères
, a Surrealist
magazine that he had started with some friends just before the war.

Annette Zelman. Jean Jausion. In 1942, they were often to
be seen together at the Café de Flore. For a while they had
hidden in the Free Zone. Then disaster struck. A few words in a
letter from an officer in the Gestapo tell the story:

21 MAY 1942 REFERENCE MARRIAGE BETWEEN JEWS
AND NON-JEWS

It has come to my knowledge that the French national
Jean Jausion (Aryan), a 24 year-old philosophy student,
and the Jewess Anna Melka Zelman, born Nancy on 6
October 1921, plan to marry over the Pentecost holidays.

Jausion's parents wish to prevent this union at all costs
but lack the means to do so.

Consequently, I have taken the precaution of ordering
the arrest of the Jewess Zelman and her internment in the
camp at Tourelles barracks  .  .  .

And a French police file:

Annette Zelman, Jewess, born Nancy 6 October 1921.
French: arrested 23 May 1942. Held under lock and key
at police headquarters Dépôt from 23 May to 10 June,
transferred to Germany 22 June. Reason for arrest:
projected marriage to an Aryan, Jean Jausion. Couple
signed a written statement renouncing all plans to marry
at the express wish of Dr. H. Jausion, who hoped that
they would be dissuaded thereby, and that the Zelman
girl would be returned to her family without any
recriminations.

But this doctor with the strange methods of dissuasion was
too trusting: the police failed to return Annette Zelman to her
family.

In 1944, Jean Jausion went off to be a war correspondent.
In a newspaper dated 11 November 1944, I came across the
following announcement:

Missing. The management of our sister paper
Le
Franc-Tireur
¹
would be grateful to anybody having
information about the disappearance of one of its
contributors, Jean Jausion, born Toulouse 20 August
1917, domiciled Paris, 21 Rue Théodore-de-Banville.
Left 6 September on an assignment for
Franc-Tireur
,
accompanied by a young couple named Lecomte, former
maquisards, in a black Citroën 11, front-wheel drive,
license number
RN
6283, bearing a white
Franc-Tireur
sticker at the rear.

I heard that Jean Jausion launched his car at a German
infantry column. He fired a machine gun at them until they had
a chance to shoot back and give him the death that he had
sought.

A book by Jean Jausion came out the following year, in
1945. It was entitled
Un Homme marche dans la ville.

1.
An underground Resistance newspaper published openly after the liberation
of Paris in August 1944.

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

T
WO YEARS AGO, ON ONE OF THE BOOKSTALLS ALONG
the Seine, I happened to find the last letter written by a
man who was on the transport of 22 June with Claude Bloch,
Josette Delimal, Tamara Isserlis, Hena, Jean Jausion's
girlfriend, Annette  .  .  .

The fact that the letter was for sale, like any other
manuscript, suggests that the sender and his family had disappeared
in their turn. A square of thin paper covered back and front
in minuscule handwriting. It was written from Drancy camp
by a certain Robert Tartakovsky. I've discovered that he was
born in Odessa on 24 November 1902, and that, before the
war, he wrote a column on art for
Illustration
. Today, fifty
years later, on Wednesday, 29 January 1997, I reproduce his
letter.

19 JUNE 1942. FRIDAY.

MADAME TARTAKOVSKY

50 RUE GODEFROY-CAVAIGNAC. PARIS XI
E

 

Yesterday I was picked to go. I've been mentally prepared
for a long time. The camp is panic-stricken, many men are
crying, they are afraid. The only thing bothering me is
that most of the clothes I keep asking for still haven't arrived.
I sent off a coupon for a clothes parcel: will what I need
come in time? I don't want my mother or any of you to
worry. I'll do my utmost to keep safe and well. If you don't
hear from me, be patient, if necessary, go to the Red Cross.
Ask the Saint-Lambert police (town hall XV
^e
), Vaugiraud
métro, to return the documents seized on 3/5. Be sure
and ask about my certificate of voluntary enlistment,
Regimental no. 10107, it may be at the camp and I don't
know if they'll let me have it back. Please take a cast of
Albertine to Mme
BIANOVICI
,
14 Rue Deguerry, Paris XI
^e
,
it's for a friend in my hut. She'll give you 1,200 francs for
it. Write first to be sure of finding her in. I approached M.
Gompel
,
¹
an internee at Drancy, and the sculptor is to be
invited to exhibit at Les Trois Quartiers. Should the gallery
want the entire edition, keep back three casts, saying either
that they've been sold or else reserved for the publisher. You
can make two extra casts
following said request
if you think
the mold will bear it. Don't distress yourselves too much. I
wish Marthe to go on vacation. Never think that no news
means bad news. If you get this note in time, send the
maximum number of food parcels, moreover the weight
will be less carefully checked. Any thing glass will be sent
back, and we are forbidden knives, forks, razor-blades,
pens, etc. Even needles. But I'll manage somehow. Army
biscuits or unleavened bread welcome. In one of my regular
notecards I mentioned a friend
PERSIMAGI
,
see Swedish
Embassy on his behalf (Irène), he's even taller than me and
his clothes are in tatters (see Gattégno, 13 Rue
Grande-Chaumière). A bar or two of good soapy some shaving soapy
a shaving brush, toothbrush, nailbrush, all welcome, I'm
trying to think of everything at once, to mix the practical
with all the other things I have to say to you. Nearly a
thousand of us are to go. There are also Aryans in the
camp. They are forced to wear the Jewish insignia. SS
Captain Doncker arrived at the camp yesterday, scattering
people in all directions. Advise our friends to get away
somewhere if they can, for here one must abandon all hope.
We may be sent to Compiègne before we leave for good, I'm
not sure. I won't be sending back any laundry, I'll do it
here. The cowardice of most people here appals me. What
will be its effect once we're there, I wonder. If you can, go
and see Mme de Salzman, not to ask her for anything in
particular, just for information. Perhaps I'll get a chance to
meet the person whom Jacqueline wanted to get released.
Urge my mother to be very careful, people are being
arrested daily, some here are very young, 17, 18, others as
old as 72. Up to Monday morning, you can send parcels
here as often as you like. It's not true that they no longer
accept parcels at the usual addresses, don't take no for an
answer, telephone the UGIF at the Rue de la Bienfaisance. I
didn't mean to alarm you in my previous letters, was only
surprised not to have received the clothes I'll need for the
journey. I'll be sending my watch back for Marthe,
probably also my pen, I'll entrust these to B. Put nothing
perishable in food parcels in case things have to be
forwarded to me. Photographs without letters in food parcels
or underwear. I'll probably send back the art books for
which my warmest thanks. Doubtless I'll be spending the
winter there, don't worry, I'm prepared. Reread my cards.
You'll see which things I've been asking for from the first
and have slipped my mind. Darning wool. Scarf Sterogyl
15. My mother's metal box, as sugar crumbles. What upsets
me is that all deportees have their heads shaved, it makes
you even more conspicuous than the insignia. In the event
of dispersal, I'll go on sending news via the Salvation Army,
let Irène know.

 

SATURDAY 20 JUNE 1942
.—
My dear ones, case arrived
yesterday, thank you for everything. I'm not sure, but I fear a
hurried departure. I am to have my head shaved today. From
tonight, deportees will probably be confined to a special hut
and closely guarded, even to the lavatory and back. A sinister
atmosphere hovers over the camp. I doubt that we'll be going
via Compiègne. I know we are to be given three days' rations
for the journey. I'm afraid I'll begone before more parcels
arrive, but don't worry, the last one was very generous and since
being here I've put aside all chocolate and jams, and the large
sausage. Keep calm, I'll be thinking of you. I wanted to give
Marthe the records of
Petrouchka
on 28/7, the complete set is
4 r. Saw B. last night to thank him for all he has done, he knows
I've been defending Leroy's sculptures to key people here. Am
delighted with latest photos of the works but haven't shown
them to B., apologized for not giving him one but said he could
always ask you. Sad to interrupt the edition, but there's still
time if I get back soon. I like Leroy's work, would gladly have
brought out a reduction within my means, can't stop thinking
about it, even though we are to leave in a few hours.

Please do all you can for my mother, by which I don't mean
that you should neglect your personal affairs. Tell Irène that
as she is her neighbour I wish her to do likewise. Try to
telephone Dr. André
ABADI
(if still in Paris). Tell him that I met
the person whose address he knows on 1 May and was arrested
on 3 May (was it simple coincidence?). The incoherence of
this note probably surprises you; but the atmosphere is hard to
bear, it's 6:30
A
.
M
. I'm about to send back everything I'm not
taking with me, I'm afraid of taking too much. The searchers
are liable to throw out a case at the last moment if there's no
room, it depends on their mood (they belong to the Jewish
Affairs police, either fascists or anti-Semites). Still, that has
its uses. I'll get my belongings sorted out. Don't panic the
moment you stop hearing from me, keep calm, wait patiently
and with trust, have faith in me, reassure my mother that,
having seen departures for the Beyond (as I told you), I prefer
to be on this journey. My main regret is to be parted from my
pen, not to be allowed paper (an absurd thought crosses my
mind: knives are forbidden, and I don't even possess a simple
key to a can of sardines). I'm not putting on a brave face,
don't have the heart in this atmosphere: a lot of the sick and
infirm are also picked for deportation. I'm also thinking of
Rd, hoping that he is safe at last. I had all sorts of things with
Jacques Daumal. Probably no point in moving my books out
of the house now, I leave it to you. Let's hope we have good
weather for the journey! Make sure my mother receives all her
allowances, get the UGIF to help her. I hope you've made it up
with Jacqueline by now, she is a strange girl, but good at heart
(the sky is clearing, it's going to be a fine day). I don't know if
you got my usual card, or if I'll get an answer before we leave.
I think of my mother, of you. Of all my loving friends who
did so much to help me keep my freedom. Heartfelt thanks
to those who helped me “get through” the winter. I'm leaving
this letter unfinished. It's time to pack my bag. Back soon.
A note in case I can't finish, pen and watch are for Marthe
whatever my mother says. I kiss you good-bye dearest Maman,
and you my dear ones, with all my love. Be brave. It's 7
A
.
M
.,
back soon.