Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online

have met, she and my
father, in that winter of 1942. Utterly different though they
were, one from the other, both, that winter, had been classed
in the same category, as outlaws. My father, too, had missed
the census in October 1940 and, like Dora Bruder, had no
“Jewish dossier” number. Consequently, no longer having any
legal existence, he had cut all threads with a world where you
were nothing without a job, a family, a nationality, a date of
birth, an address. Henceforth he was in limbo. Not unlike
Dora, after her escape.
    But on reflection, their respective fates were very different.
There were few courses open to a sixteen-year-old girl left to
fend for herself, in Paris, in the winter of 1942, after having
escaped from a boarding school. In the eyes of the police and
the authorities of the day, her situation was doubly
“irregular”: she was not only Jewish, she was a juvenile on the run.
    As for my father, who was fourteen years older than Dora
Bruder, the way was already mapped out; since they had made
him into an outlaw, he had no choice but to follow that same
course, to live on his wits in Paris and vanish into the swamps
of the black market.
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    Not so long ago, I discovered that the girl in the Black Maria
could not have been Dora Bruder. I was looking for her name
on the list of women who had been interned in Tourelles camp.
Of these, two, Polish Jews aged twenty and twenty-one, had
entered Tourelles on 18 and 19 February 1942. Their names
were Syma Berger and Fredel Traister. The dates fitted, but was
she in fact either girl? After passing through the Dépôt, men
were sent to the camp at Drancy, women to Tourelles.
Perhaps, like my father, the unknown girl had escaped the
common fate in store for them. I believe that she will always
remain anonymous, like all those shadowy figures arrested that
night. The Jewish Affairs police having destroyed their files,
there are no records of arrests made during a roundup, nor of
individuals picked up on the street. Were I not here to record
it, there would be no trace of this unidentified girl’s presence,
nor that of my father’s, in a Black Maria on the Champs-Élysées
in February 1942. Nothing but those individuals—living or
dead—officially classed as “person unknown.”
    Twenty years later, my mother was acting in a play at the
Théâtre Michel. Often, I would wait for her in a café on the
corner of the Rue des Mathurins and the Rue Greffulhe. I
didn’t know then that my father had risked his life near there,
or that I had entered a zone that was once a black hole. We
would dine in a restaurant on the Rue Greffulhe—perhaps on
the ground floor of the PQJ building where my father had
been hustled into Superintendent Schweblin’s office. Jacques
Schweblin. Born 1901, Mulhouse. It was his men, at the camps
of Drancy and Pithiviers, who eagerly undertook the search
of internees prior to each departure for Auschwitz:
M. Schweblin, head of the PQJ, would arrive at the
camp accompanied by 5 or 6 aides whom he identified as
“auxiliaries,” giving nobody’s name but his own. Each of
these plainclothes policemen wore a uniform belt with a
pistol hanging from one side and a nightstick from the
other.
    Once he had installed his aides, M. Schweblin left the
camp, returning only in the evening to collect the fruits
of their search. Each aide would set himself up in a hut
containing a table and, beside it, two receptacles, one for
cash, the other for jewelry. The internees then filed past
the men, who proceeded to subject them to a minute
and humiliating search. Very often they were beaten or
forced to remove their trousers and submit to a hard
kicking, accompanied by remarks like “Hey you! Want
another taste of the police boot?” Frequently, on the
pretext of expediting the search, inside and outside
pockets were torn. I will pass over the intimate body
searches suffered by the