Dora Bruder. Patrick Modiano
of Paris; originally control points for game, later also used for goods subject to excise tax, they were abolished in the late 1920s.
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ON 9 MAY 1940, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, DORA BRUDER was enrolled in the boarding school of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, run by the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy1 at 60–62 Rue de Picpus in the 12th arrondissement.
The school register contains the following entry:
Name, last and first: Bruder, Dora
Date and place of birth: 26 February 1926, Paris 12
Parents: Ernest and Cécile Bruder née Brudej
Family status: legitimate
Date and conditions of admission: 9 May 1940. Full boarder
Date and reason for departure: 14 December 1941. Pupil has run away
What were her parents’ reasons for sending her to this religious school? No doubt it was difficult living three to a room in the Boulevard Ornano hotel. I wonder if Ernest and Cécile Bruder, as ex-Austrians and “nationals of the Reich,” were not threatened with a form of internment, Austria having ceased to exist in 1938 and become part of the “Reich.”
In the autumn of 1939, men who were ex-Austrian or otherwise nationals of the “Reich” were interned in “assembly camps.” They were divided into two categories: suspect and non-suspect. Non-suspects were taken to Yves-du-Manoir stadium, in Colombes. Then, in December, they were included with the group known as “foreign statute laborers.” Was Ernest Bruder among those laborers?
On 13 May 1940, four days after Dora Bruder’s arrival at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, ex-Austrian women and nationals of the Reich were called up in their turn and taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they were interned for thirteen days. Then, with the approach of the German army, they were transferred to the camp at Gurs, in the Basses-Pyrénées. Was Cécile Bruder among those called up?
You were placed in bizarre categories you had never heard of and with no relation to who you really were. You were called up. You were interned. If only you could understand why.
I also wonder how Cécile and Ernest Bruder came to hear of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school. Who had advised them to send Dora there?
I imagine that, by the age of fourteen, she must have given proof of independence, and that the rebellious spirit her cousin mentioned to me had already manifested itself. Her parents felt that she was in need of discipline. For this, these Jews chose a Christian institution. But were they themselves practicing Jews? And what choice did they have? According to the biographical note on the institution’s Mother Superior when Dora was a boarder there, the pupils at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie came from poor backgrounds: “Often they are orphans, or children dependent on social welfare, those to whom Our Lord has always shown His special love.” And, in a brochure about the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy, “The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie was called upon to render signal service to young children and adolescents from the capital’s least fortunate families.”
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.
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