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indeed, three
hundred Jewish women were transferred from Tourelles to Drancy.
    Tourelles prison “camp,” or rather internment center,
occupied former colonial infantry barracks at 11 Boulevard
Mortier, near the Porte des Lilas. It had been opened in
October 1940 for the internment of foreign Jews whose
situation was deemed “irregular.” But after 1941, while men were
sent directly to Drancy, or to camps in the Loiret, only
Jewish women who contravened German regulations were to be
interned in Tourelles, together with women who were
Communists or common criminals.
    When, and for what precise reasons, was Dora Bruder sent
to Tourelles? I thought there might have been a document, a
clue, to provide me with the answer. I was reduced to
making assumptions. She was probably stopped in the street. In
February 1942—two months after her escape—the Germans
had issued a decree forbidding Jews to change address or leave
home after eight o’clock at night. Surveillance in the streets
thus became stricter than in preceding months. Eventually, I
came to the conclusion that Dora was captured during that
dismal, icy-cold February when the Jewish Affairs police 1 set
their ambushes in the corridors of the métro, at the entrances
to cinemas, the exits of theaters. In fact, it astonished me that
a sixteen-year-old girl, whose description and disappearance
in December were known to the police, had managed to elude
her captors for so long. Unless she had found a hideout. But
where, in that Paris winter of 1941–42, the darkest and most
severe of the Occupation, with snow from November onward,
a temperature of –15° C in January, frozen puddles and black
ice everywhere and renewed heavy snowfalls in February? So
what refuge could she have found? And how did she manage
to survive in a Paris like that?
    It would have been February, I imagine, when “they” had
caught her in their net. “They” could as easily have been
uniformed men on the beat as inspectors from either the Brigade
for the Protection of Minors 2 or the Jewish Affairs police
carrying out an identity check in a public place  .  .  .  I had read in
a book of memoirs that girls of eighteen or nineteen, and even
some as young as sixteen, Dora’s age, had been sent to
Tourelles for trivial infringements of “German decrees.” That same
February, on the evening when the German decrees came into
force, my father was caught in a roundup on the
Champs-Élysées. Inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police had blocked the
exits of a restaurant in the Rue de Marignan where he was
dining with a girlfriend. They asked everybody for their papers.
My father carried none. He was arrested. In the Black Maria 3 taking them from the Champs-Élysées to PQJ headquarters
in the Rue Greffulhe, he noticed, among other shadowy
figures, a young girl of about eighteen. He lost sight of her as
they were being hustled up to the floor of this police den where
its chief, a certain Superintendent Schweblin, had his office.
Then, taking advantage of a light on a time switch that went
out just as he was being escorted downstairs to be taken to the
Dépôt, 4 he succeeded in making his escape.
    My father had barely mentioned this young girl when
telling me about his narrow escape for the first and only time
in his life, one night in June 1953, in a restaurant off the
Champs-Élysées almost opposite the one where he was
arrested twenty years before. He had given me no details of her
looks, of her clothes. I had all but forgotten her until the day
that I learned of Dora Bruder’s existence. Then suddenly the
memory of her presence among the other unknowns who
were with my father in the Black Maria on that February night
resurfaced in my mind, and it occurred to me that she might
have been Dora Bruder, that she too had just been arrested
and was about to be sent to Tourelles.
    Perhaps it was that I wanted them to