Dora Bruder (3 page)

Life in Budapest and Vienna being equally hard after the
First World War, they had had to flee west yet again. They
ended up in Paris, at the Jewish refuge in the Rue Lamarck.
Within a month of their arrival, three of the girls, aged
fourteen, twelve, and ten, were dead of typhoid fever.

 

Were Cécile and Ernest Bruder already living in the Avenue
Liégeard, Sevran, at the time of their marriage? Or in a hotel
in Paris? For the first years of their marriage, after Dora's birth,
they always lived in hotel rooms.

They are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually
anonymous. Inseparable from those Paris streets, those
suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered that they had
lived. Often, what I know about them amounts to no more
than a simple address. And such topographical precision
contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this
blank, this mute block of the unknown.

 

I tracked down Ernest and Cécile Bruder's niece. I talked to
her on the telephone. The memories that she retains of them
are those of childhood, at once fuzzy and sharp. She
remembers her uncle's gentleness, his kindness. It was she who gave
me the few details that I have noted down about their family.
She had heard it said that before they lived in the hotel on the
Boulevard Ornano, Ernest, Cécile, and their daughter, Dora,
had lived in another hotel. In a street off the Rue des
Poissonniers. Looking at the street map, I read her out a
succession of names. Yes, that was it, the Rue Polonceau. But she
had never heard any mention of Sevran, nor Freinville, nor
the Westinghouse factory.

 

It is said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of
their previous inhabitants. Stamp: an imprint, hollow or in
relief. Hollow, I should say, in the case of Ernest and Cécile
Bruder, of Dora. I have a sense of absence, of emptiness,
whenever I find myself in a place where they have lived.

Two hotels, for that date, in the Rue Polonceau: the
tenant of one, at number 49, was called Roquette. In the
telephone directory he appears under Hôtel Vin. The other, at
number 32, was owned by a Charles Campazzi. As hotels, they
had a bad reputation. Today, they no longer exist.

Often, around 1968, I would follow the boulevards as far
as the arches of the overhead métro. My starting point was
the Place Blanche. In December, a traveling fair occupied the
open ground. Its lights grew dimmer the nearer you got to the
Boulevard de la Chapelle. At the time, I knew nothing of Dora
Bruder and her parents. I remember that I had a peculiar
sensation as I hugged the wall of Lariboisière Hospital, and again
on crossing the railway tracks, as though I had penetrated the
darkest part of Paris. But it was merely the contrast, after the
dazzling lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, with the black,
interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the métro arches  .  .  .

Nowadays, on account of the railway lines, the proximity
of the Gare du Nord and the rattle of the high-speed trains
overhead, I still think of this part of the Boulevard de la
Chapelle as a network of escape routes  .  .  .  A place where
nobody would stay for long. A crossroads, where everybody went
their separate ways to the four points of the compass.

All the same, I made a note of local schools where, if they
still exist, I might find Dora Bruder's name in the register:

Nursery school: 3 Rue Saint-Luc

Primary schools for girls: 11 Rue Cavé, 43 Rue des
Poissonniers, Impasse d'Oran

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

A
ND, AT THE PORTE DE CLIGNANCOURT, THE YEARS
slipped by till the outbreak of war. I know nothing about
the Bruders during this time. Was Cécile already working as
a “furrier's seamstress,” or rather, as it says in the files,
“salaried garment worker”? Her niece thinks that she was
employed in a workshop near the Rue de Ruisseau, but she can't
be sure. Was Ernest Bruder still working as an unskilled
laborer, if not at the Westinghouse factory in Freinville, then
elsewhere, in some other suburb? Or had he too found work
in a garment workshop in Paris? Next to the words trade or
profession on the file that they had drawn up on him during
the Occupation, and on which I had read “French legionnaire,
2d class, 100% disabled,” it says “None.”

A few photographs from this period. The earliest, their
wedding day. They are seated, their elbows resting on a sort
of pedestal. She is enveloped in a long white veil that trails
to the floor and seems to be knotted at her left ear. He wears
tails with a white bow tie. A photograph with their
daughter, Dora. They are seated, Dora standing between them: she
can't be more than two years old. A photograph of Dora,
surely taken after a special school assembly. She is aged twelve
or thereabouts and wears a white dress and ankle socks. She
holds a book in her right hand. Her hair is crowned by a
circlet of what appear to be white flowers. Her left hand rests
on the edge of an enormous white cube patterned with rows
of black geometric motifs, clearly a studio prop. Another
photograph, taken in the same place at the same period,
perhaps on the same day: the floor tiles are recognizable, as
is the big white cube with black geometric motifs on which
Cécile Bruder is perched. Dora stands on her left, in a
high-necked dress, her left arm bent across her body so as to place
her hand on her mother's shoulder. In another photograph
with her mother, Dora is about twelve years old, her hair
shorter than in the previous picture. They are standing in
front of what appears to be an old wall, though it must be
one of the photographer's screens. Both wear black dresses
with a white collar. Dora stands slightly in front and to the
right of her mother. An oval-shaped photograph in which
Dora is slightly older—thirteen or fourteen, longer hair—and
all three are in single file, their faces turned toward the
camera: first Dora and her mother, both in white blouses, then
Ernest Bruder, in jacket and tie. A photograph of Cécile
Bruder in front of what appears to be a suburban house. The
lefthand wall in the foreground is covered in a mass of ivy.
She is sitting on the edge of three concrete steps. She wears
a light summer dress. In the background, the silhouette
of a child with her back to the camera, her arms and legs
bare, wearing either a black cardigan or a bathing suit.
Dora? And behind a wooden fence, the facade of another
house, with a porch and a single upstairs window. Where
could this be?

An earlier photograph of Dora alone, aged nine or ten.
Caught in a ray of sunshine, entirely surrounded by shadow,
she might be on a rooftop. Dressed in a white blouse and
ankle socks, she stands, hand on hip, her right foot placed on
the concrete rim of what appears to be a large cage or aviary,
although, owing to the shadow, you can't make out the
animals or birds confined there. These shadows and patches of
sunlight are those of a summer's day.

 
Dora Bruder with her mother

 
Dora Bruder with her mother and grandmother

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

O
THER SUMMER DAYS WERE SPENT IN CLIGNANCOURT
.
Her parents would take Dora to the Cinéma Ornano 43.
It was just across the street. Or did she go on her own? From
a very young age, according to her cousin, she had been
rebellious, independent, with an eye for the boys. The hotel
room was far too cramped for three people.

As a child, she would have played in the Square
Clignancourt. At times, this part of town seemed like a village. In the
evenings, the neighbors would place their chairs outside and
sit on the sidewalk for a chat. Or take a lemonade together on
the café terrace. Sometimes men who could have been either
real goatherds or else peddlers from the fairs would come by
with a few goats and sell you tall glasses of milk for almost
nothing. The froth gave you a white mustache.

At the Porte de Clignancourt, the toll house and gate.
¹
To
its left, between the flea market and the tall apartment blocks
of the Boulevard Ney, an entire district of shacks,
warehouses, acacias, and low-built houses, since pulled down. This
wasteland had impressed me, aged fourteen. I thought I
recognized it in two or three photographs, taken in winter: a kind
of esplanade, a passing bus in sight. A truck at a standstill,
seemingly forever. Waiting beside an expanse of snow, a
trailer and a black horse. And in the far background, the dim
masses of high buildings.

I remember experiencing for the first time that sense of
emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been
destroyed, razed to the ground. As yet, I was ignorant of the
existence of Dora Bruder. Perhaps—in fact, I'm sure of it—she
explored this zone that, for me, evokes secret lovers'
trysts, pitiful moments of lost happiness. Here, reminders of
the countryside still surfaced in the street names: Allée du
Puits, Allée du Métro, Allée des Peupliers, Impasse des Chiens.

1.
One of the 18th-c. gates (
barrières
) in the fortifications of Paris; originally
control points for game, later also used for goods subject to excise tax, they were
abolished in the late 1920s.

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

O
N 9 MAY 1940, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, DORA BRUDER
was enrolled in the boarding school of the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, run by the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine
Mercy
¹
at 60–62 Rue de Picpus in the 12th arrondissement.

The school register contains the following entry:

Name, last and first: Bruder, Dora

Date and place of birth: 26 February 1926, Paris 12

Parents: Ernest and Cécile Bruder
née
Brudej

Family status: legitimate

Date and conditions of admission: 9 May 1940. Full boarder

Date and reason for departure: 14 December 1941. Pupil
has run away

What were her parents' reasons for sending her to this
religious school? No doubt it was difficult living three to a room
in the Boulevard Ornano hotel. I wonder if Ernest and Cécile
Bruder, as ex-Austrians and “nationals of the Reich,” were not
threatened with a form of internment, Austria having ceased
to exist in 1938 and become part of the “Reich.”

In the autumn of 1939, men who were ex-Austrian or
otherwise nationals of the “Reich” were interned in “assembly
camps.” They were divided into two categories: suspect and
non-suspect. Non-suspects were taken to Yves-du-Manoir
stadium, in Colombes. Then, in December, they were included
with the group known as “foreign statute laborers.” Was
Ernest Bruder among those laborers?

On 13 May 1940, four days after Dora Bruder's arrival
at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, ex-Austrian
women and nationals of the Reich were called up in their turn
and taken to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, where they were interned
for thirteen days. Then, with the approach of the German
army, they were transferred to the camp at Gurs, in the
Basses-Pyrénées. Was Cécile Bruder among those called up?

You were placed in bizarre categories you had never heard
of and with no relation to who you really were. You were called
up. You were interned. If only you could understand why.

 

I also wonder how Cécile and Ernest Bruder came to hear of
the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school. Who had advised
them to send Dora there?

I imagine that, by the age of fourteen, she must have given
proof of independence, and that the rebellious spirit her
cousin mentioned to me had already manifested itself. Her
parents felt that she was in need of discipline. For this, these
Jews chose a Christian institution. But were they themselves
practicing Jews? And what choice did they have? According
to the biographical note on the institution's Mother Superior
when Dora was a boarder there, the pupils at the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie came from poor backgrounds: “Often they are
orphans, or children dependent on social welfare, those to whom
Our Lord has always shown His special love.” And, in a
brochure about the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine
Mercy, “The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie was called upon to
render signal service to young children and adolescents from the
capital's least fortunate families.”