Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Page A

brunette with hair almost down to her shoulders, carries a
satchel. The one on the right appears to be wearing lipstick.
Behind the brunette, two wall plaques read: POLICE SOCIAL
SERVICES . Below this, an arrow, and underneath it: “Open
0930 h. to 1200 h.” The writing on the lower plaque is half
obscured by the brunette’s head and kepi. Nevertheless, you
can read:
DEPARTMENT OF E  .  .  .
    INSPECTORS
    Underneath, an arrow: “Passage on Right. Door number  .  .  .”
    We shall never know the number of this door.
    Â 
    1. In polite society, Israélite was used to avoid the connotations of the word “Jew.”

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    W HAT HAPPENED TO DORA, I WONDER, IN THE INTERVAL between 15 June, when she found herself in
Clignancourt police station, and 17 June, the date of the “Memo
for Mlle Salomon.” Had she been allowed to leave the police
station with her mother?
    If she had been allowed to return to the Boulevard Ornano
hotel with her mother—it was no distance, just down the Rue
Hermel—it means that the social workers would have come
for her three days later, after Mile Salomon had made contact
with the Quai de Gesvres.
    But I have a feeling that things were not quite as
straightforward as that. I have often taken the Rue Hermel, in both
directions, toward the Butte Montmartre and toward the
Boulevard Ornano, and, try as I might, closing my eyes, I find
it hard to picture Dora and her mother walking along this
street on their way back to their hotel room on a sunny June
afternoon as though it was just another day.
    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.
    â€œIn view of the fact that she has repeatedly run away, it
would seem advisable to remand her to a juvenile home.”
    Â 
    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.

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    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