Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano Page B

yellow star, forbidden to cross
the demarcation line into the Free Zone, forbidden to use the
telephone, to possess a bicycle, a radio  .  .  .
    The register has the following entry for 19 June 1942:
Arrivals 19 June 1942
    439. 19.6.42. Bruder Dora, 25.2.26. Paris 12th.
French. 41 Bd Ornano. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.
    For the same date, there follow the names of five other girls,
all about the same age as Dora:
40. 19.6.42. 5th Winerbett Claudine. 26.11.24. Paris
9th. French. 82 Rue des Moines. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.
    1. 19.6.42. 5th Strohlitz Zélie. 4.2.26. Paris 11th.
French. 48 Rue Molière. Montreuil. J. Drancy 13/8/42.
    2. 19.6.42. Israelowicz Raca. 19.7.1924. Lodz. Ind. J.
26 Rue [illegible]. Deported by German authorities
convoy 19.7.42.
    3. Nachmanowicz Marthe. 23.3.25. Paris. French. 258
Rue Marcadet. J. xx Drancy. 13/8/42.
    4. 19.6.42. 5th. Pitoun Yvonne. 27.1.25. Algiers.
French. 3 Rue Marcel-Sembat. J. xx Drancy 13/8/42.
    The police had allotted each girl a registration number.
Dora’s was 439. I don’t know the meaning of 5th. The letter J stands for Jewish. Drancy 13/8/42 is added in each case: on
13 August 1942, the day when the three hundred Jewish
women who were still interned at Tourelles were transferred
to Drancy camp.

.................
    O N THAT THURSDAY, 19 JUNE, THE DAY THAT DORA arrived at Tourelles, all the women were assembled on
the barracks square after breakfast. Three German officers
were present. Jewish women between the ages of eighteen and
forty were ordered to line up, backs turned. One of the
Germans had ready a complete list of these women and called out
their names in the order written. The rest returned to their
rooms. The sixty-six women thus segregated from their
companions were locked up in a large, empty room without beds
or chairs where they remained in isolation for three days, a
policeman guarding the door.
    On Sunday 22 June, at five o’clock in the morning, buses
arrived to take them to Drancy. They were deported the same
day, put on a train with over nine hundred men. It was the
first transport to leave France with women on board. For the
Jewish women in Tourelles, the hovering menace they’d never
quite been able to put a name to and, at moments, had
succeeded in forgetting, had become fact. And in this oppressive
atmosphere Dora spent the first three days of her internment.
On the Sunday morning, while it was still dark, she and all
her fellow internees watched through closed windows as the
sixty-six women were driven away.
    On 18 June, or else on the following morning, a desk clerk
would have made out Dora’s transfer warrant for Tourelles.
Had this been done at Clignancourt police station, or at the
Quai de Gesvres? It had had to be made out in duplicate and
the copies handed, complete with check marks and signatures,
to the guards on the police van. As he signed his name, did the
clerk consider the implications of his act? After all, for him, it
was merely a routine signature, and besides, the girl was being
sent to a place still reassuringly designated by the Prefecture
of Police as “Hostel. Supervised short-term accommodation.”
    I have managed to identify a few of those women who left
Tourelles on Sunday 22 June at five o’clock in the morning,
and who had come into contact with Dora after her arrival
there on the Thursday.
    Claude Bloch was thirty-two years old. She had been picked
up while on her way to Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue
Foch to ask for news of her husband, who had been arrested
in December 1941. She was the only person on that transport
to survive.
    Josette Delimal was twenty-one. Claude Bloch had met
her in the Dépôt at police headquarters, and both were taken
to Tourelles on the same day. According to Claude, “Josette
had had a tough time before the war and hadn’t built up
the strength you can draw from happy memories. She broke
down completely. I did my best to comfort her