Dora Bruder (4 page)

The teaching certainly went beyond the arts of
housekeeping and sewing. The Sisters of the Christian Schools of
Divine Mercy, whose mother house was the ancient abbey of
Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy, had founded the
charitable institution of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, Rue de
Picpus, in 1852. In those days, it was a vocational boarding
school for five hundred girls, the daughters of working men's
families, with a staff of seventy-five nuns.

 

At the time of the fall of France in June 1940, nuns and pupils
were evacuated to the department of Maine-et-Loire. Dora
would have left with them, on one of the last packed trains
still running from the Gare d'Orsay and the Gare
d'Austerlitz. They formed part of the endless procession of refugees
on routes leading southward to the Loire.

July, and the return to Paris. Boarding-school life. I don't
know what the school uniform consisted of. Was it, quite
simply, the clothes listed in the notice about the search for Dora:
maroon pullover, navy blue skirt, brown gym shoes? And, over
this, a smock? I can more or less guess the daily timetable. Rise
about six. Chapel. Classroom. Refectory. Classroom.
Playground. Refectory. Classroom. Chapel. Dormitory. Day of
rest, Sunday. I imagine that life behind those walls was hard
for these girls for whom Our Lord had always shown His
special love.

I have heard that the Sisters of the Christian Schools of
Divine Mercy of the Rue de Picpus had established a holiday
camp at Béthisy. Was it at Béthisy-Saint-Martin? Or
Béthisy-Saint-Pierre? Both villages are near Senlis, in the Valois.
Perhaps Dora Bruder and her classmates spent a few days there,
in the summer of 1941.

 

The buildings of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie no longer exist.
Modern apartment blocks have taken their place, giving an
idea of the vastness of the grounds. I don't possess a single
photograph of the vanished school. On an old map of Paris,
its site is marked “House of religious education.” Four little
squares and a cross symbolize the school buildings and chapel.
And a long, narrow rectangle, extending from the Rue de
Picpus to the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly, outlines the perimeter.

Opposite the school, on the other side of the Rue de
Picpus, the map shows, successively, the houses of the Mère de
Dieu congregation, then the Dames de l'Adoration, the
Oratory of Picpus and the Picpus cemetery where, in the last
months of the Terror, over one thousand victims of the
guillotine were buried in a common grave. And on the same side
of the street as the boarding school, almost an extension of
it, the large property belonging to the Dames de
Sainte-Clothilde. Then that of the Dames Diaconesses, where, one
day, aged eighteen, I went for treatment. I remember the
garden of the Diaconesses. I didn't know then that this
establishment had served as a rehabilitation center for delinquent
girls. Not unlike the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. Not unlike the
Bon-Pasteur. These institutions, where you were shut up, not
knowing when or if you would be released, certainly rejoiced
in some curious names: the Bon-Pasteur d'Angers. The Refuge
de Darnetal. The sanctuary of Sainte-Madeleine de Limoges.
The Solitude-de-Nazareth.

Solitude.

 

The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, 60–62 Rue de Picpus, stood at the
corner of the Rue de Picpus and the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly.
In Dora's time, this street still had a countrified air. A high
wall ran the length of its lefthand side, shaded by the school's
trees.

The few details that I have managed to glean about these
places, such as Dora Bruder would have seen them, day in,
day out, for a year and a half, are as follows: the large garden
ran the length of the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly, and the school
buildings must have stood between it and the courtyard.
Within this courtyard, hollowed out beneath rocks in the form
of an imitation grotto, lay the burial vault of the Madre
family, the school's benefactors.

 

I don't know if Dora Bruder made friends at the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. Or if she kept to herself. Until such time as I have
the testimony of one of her former classmates, I am reduced
to conjecture. Today, in Paris, or somewhere in the suburbs,
there must be a seventy-year-old woman who remembers her
erstwhile neighbor in classroom or dormitory—a girl named
Dora, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown
eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and
hat, brown gym shoes.

In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse
beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have
no faith. But I live in hope.

In those days, the Mother Superior of the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie was Mother Marie-Jean-Baptiste. She was born—so her
biographical note tells us—in 1903. After her novitiate, she
was sent to Paris, to the house of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie,
where she stayed for seventeen years, from 1929 to 1946. She
was barely forty years old when Dora Bruder was a boarder
there.

She was “independent and warm-hearted”—according to
the biographical note—and “endowed with a strong
personality.” She died in 1985, three years before I knew of Dora
Bruder's existence. She would certainly have remembered
Dora—if only because the girl had run away. But, after all,
what could she have told me? A few humdrum facts of daily
existence? Warm-hearted or not, she certainly failed to divine
what was going through Dora Bruder's head, neither how the
girl was coping with boarding-school life nor how she reacted
to chapel morning and evening, the fake grotto in the
courtyard, the garden wall, the dormitory with its rows of beds.

 

I traced a woman who had entered the boarding school in
1942, a few months after Dora Bruder ran away. She was about
ten years old at the time, younger than Dora. And her
memories of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie are merely those of a child.
She had been living alone with her mother, a Jew of Polish
origin, in a street in the Goutte-d'Or district, the Rue de
Chartres, no distance from the Rue Polonceau where Cécile,
Ernest, and Dora Bruder had lived. To avoid dying of
starvation, the mother worked night shifts in a workshop that made
mittens for the Wehrmacht. The daughter went to school in
the Rue Jean-François-Lépine. At the end of 1942, because of
the roundups, the headmistress had advised the mother to
send her child into hiding, and it was doubtless she who had
given her the address of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie.

To disguise her origins, she was enrolled at the boarding
school under the name of “Suzanne Albert.” Shortly
afterward, she fell ill. She was sent to the infirmary. There, she saw
a doctor. After a while, since she refused to eat, it was decided
to send her home.

She remembers everything in that boarding school as
being black—walls, classrooms, infirmary—except for the white
coifs of the nuns. It seemed more like an orphanage. Iron
discipline. No heating. Nothing to eat but root vegetables.
Boarders' prayers took place at “six o'clock,” and I forgot to ask her
whether she meant six in the morning or six at night.

1.
The Écoles chrétiennes de la Miséricorde ran the boarding school (the Holy
Heart of Mary).

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

D
ORA SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1940 AT THE BOARDING
school. On Sundays, she would certainly have gone to
visit her parents, who were still living in the hotel room at 41
Boulevard Ornano. I look at the plan of the métro and try to
retrace her route in my mind. The simplest, avoiding too many
changes, is to take a train from Nation, a station fairly near the
boarding school. Pont-de-Sèvres line. Change at
Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. Porte de Clignancourt line. She would have got
out at Simplon, just opposite the cinema and the hotel.

Twenty years later, I often took the métro at Simplon. It was
always about ten o'clock at night. At that hour, the station was
deserted, and there were long intervals between trains.

Late on Sunday afternoons, she too would have returned
by the same route. Did her parents go with her? Once at
Nation, she had to walk, and the quickest way to the Rue de
Picpus was via the Rue Fabre-d'Églantine.

It was like going back to prison. The days were drawing in.
It was already dark when she crossed the courtyard, passing
the funerary monument with its imitation grotto. Above the
steps, a single lamp was lit over the door. She followed the
corridors. Chapel, for Sunday evening Benediction. Then, into
line, in silence as far as the dormitory.

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

A
UTUMN HAD COME. ON 2 OCTOBER, THE PARIS
NEWSPAPERS
published the decree obliging all Jews to register
at police stations for a census. A declaration by the head of
the family sufficed for all. To avoid long lines, those affected
were asked to attend in alphabetical order, on the dates
indicated in the table below  .  .  .

The letter B fell on 4 October. On that day, Ernest Bruder
went to Clignancourt police station to fill in the census form.
But he failed to register his daughter. Everybody reporting for
the census was allotted a number, later attached to the
“family file.” This was known as the “Jewish dossier” number.

Ernest and Cécile Bruder had the Jewish dossier number
49091. But Dora had no number of any sort.

Perhaps Ernest Bruder felt that she was out of harm's way,
in a free zone, at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school,
and that it was best not to draw attention to her. Then again,
the classification “Jew” meant nothing to the
fourteen-year-old Dora. When it came down to it, what exactly did the
Bruders understand by the term “Jew”? For himself, he never gave
it a thought. He was used to being put into this or that
category by the authorities and accepted it without question.
Unskilled laborer. Ex-Austrian. French legionnaire. Non-suspect.
Ex-serviceman 100% disabled. Foreign statute laborer. Jew.
And the same went for his wife, Cécile. Ex-Austrian.
Non-suspect. Furrier's seamstress. Jewess. As yet, the only person
who had escaped all classification, including the number
49091, was Dora.

Who knows, she might have escaped to the end. She had
only to remain within the boarding school's dark walls and
merge into their shadows; and, by scrupulously observing its
daily and nightly routine, avoid drawing attention to
herself. Dormitory. Chapel. Refectory. Playground. Classroom.
Chapel. Dormitory.

 

It chanced—but was it really chance—that, at the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, she was back within sight of her
birthplace on the opposite side of the street. 15 Rue Santerre.
The Rothschild Hospital maternity ward. Rue Santerre was a
continuation of the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly and thus ran
alongside the school wall.

A quiet, tree-shaded neighborhood. When, twenty-five
years ago, in June 1971, I spent an entire day walking around
there, I found it unchanged. Occasionally, a summer shower
obliged me to take shelter in an archway. That afternoon,
without knowing why, I had the impression of walking in
another's footsteps.

After the summer of '42, the area around the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie became particularly dangerous. For two years there
had been a succession of roundups, at the Rothschild
Hospital, at its orphanage of the same name, Rue Lamblardie, and
at the hospice, 76 Rue de Picpus, where the Gaspard Meyer
who had signed Dora's birth certificate lived and worked. The
Rothschild Hospital was a trap for the sick from Drancy camp,
sent there only to be returned to the camp whenever it suited
the Germans, who were keeping watch on 15 Rue Santerre
with the help of a private police agency, the Agence Faralicq.
A great many children and adolescents of Dora's age were
arrested, taken from their hiding place in the Rothschild
Orphanage, Rue Lamblardie, the first street on the right after the
Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. And, on the Rue de la
Gare-de-Reuilly itself, at number 48
bis
, exactly opposite the boarding
school wall, nine boys and girls of Dora's age or, in some cases,
younger, were arrested with their families. Indeed, the garden
and courtyard of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school
were the sole enclave in this entire block of houses to remain
inviolate. But only on condition that you never went out, that
you stayed forgotten within the shadow of those dark walls,
themselves engulfed by the darkness of the curfew.

 

I'm writing these pages in November 1996. It seldom stops
raining. Tomorrow we shall be in December, and fifty-five
years will have passed since Dora ran away. It gets dark early,
and it's just as well: night obliterates the grayness and
monotony of these rainy days when you wonder if it really is
daytime, or if we are going through some intermediary stage, a
sort of gloomy eclipse lasting till dusk. Then the street lamps
and shop windows and cafés light up, the evening air
freshens, contours sharpen, there are traffic jams at the crossroads
and hurrying crowds in the streets. And in the midst of all
these lights, all this hubbub, I can hardly believe that this is
the city where Dora lived with her parents, where my father
lived when he was twenty years younger than I am now. I feel
as though I am alone in making the link between Paris then
and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There
are moments when the link is strained and in danger of
snapping, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears
to me in fleeting gleams behind that of today.

I've been rereading the fifth and sixth volumes of
Les
Misérables
. Victor Hugo describes Cosette and Jean Valjean,
tracked by Javert, making their way across Paris, by night,
from the Barrière Saint-Jacques to the Petit Picpus. You can
follow part of their itinerary on a map. They are near the Seine.
Cosette begins to tire. Jean Valjean carries her in his arms.
Taking the back streets, they skirt the Jardin des Plantes and
come to the riverbank. They cross the Pont d'Austerlitz.
Scarcely has Jean Valjean set foot on the right bank than he
thinks he sees shadowy figures on the bridge. Their only
means of escape—he tells himself—is to take the little Rue du
Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine.