Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

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.
    Â 
    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.
    â€œSocial 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