Pedigree by Patrick Modiano Page B

mother died in 1937 in a boardinghouse on Rue Roquépine, where he had lived for a time with his brother Ralph. Then he had taken a room in the Hôtel Terminus, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, which he’d left without settling his bill. Just before the war, he took over management of a shop selling stockings and perfume at71 Boulevard Malesherbes. It seems he was then residing on Rue Frédéric-Bastiat, in the 8th.
    And war broke out at a time when he had no capital whatsoever and was already living by his wits. In 1940, he had his mail sent to the Hôtel Victor-Emmanuel III at 24 Rue de Ponthieu. In a letter of that year to his brother Ralph, sent from Angoulême where he was stationed in an artillery regiment, he mentioned a chandelier that they’d pawned. In another letter, he asked to have the
Courier des pétroles
forwarded to him in Angoulême. In 1937–39, he was in “business” with a certain Enriquez, the Société Royalieu, dealing in Romanian petroleum.
    The fall of France in June 1940 caught him in his barracks in Angoulême. He was not taken away in the mass of prisoners, as the Germans didn’t arrive in Angoulême until after the armistice was signed. He took refuge in Les Sables-d’Olonne, where he stayed until September. There he ran into his friend Henri Lagroua and two girls they knew, one called Suzanne and the other Gysèle Hollerich, a dancer at the Tabarin.
    Back in Paris, he did not register with the authorities as a Jew. He lived with his brother Ralph, at the home of Ralph’s girlfriend, a Mauritian with a British passport. The apartment was at 5 Rue des Saussaies, right next to the Gestapo. Because of her British passport, the Mauritian had to appear at police headquarters every week; she would be detained for several months in Besançon and Vittel as an “Englishwoman.” My father had a girlfriend, Hela H., a German Jew who had been engaged to Billy Wilder back in Berlin. They were picked up during a raid one evening in February 1942, in a restaurant on Rue de Marignan, during an identity check—which were frequent that month because of the new regulations forbidding Jews from being out on the street or in public after 8 P.M . My father and his girlfriend were not carrying any papers. They were carted off in a Black Maria by police inspectors, who brought them to Rue Greffulhe for “verification,” before a certain Superintendent Schweblin. My father had to state his identity. He got separated from his girlfriend andmanaged to escape as they were about to transfer him to the “Depot,” the holding tank, taking advantage of a moment when the hall light went out. Hela H. would be released from the Depot the next day, probably on a word from a friend of her father’s. Who? I’ve often wondered. After his escape, my father hid under the staircase of a building on Rue des Mathurins, trying not to attract the notice of the concierge. He spent the night there because of the curfew. In the morning, he went home to 5 Rue des Saussaies. Then he hid out with the Mauritian and his brother Ralph in a hotel, the Alcyon de Breteuil, whose manageress was the mother of a friend of theirs. Later, he lived with Hela H. in a furnished room on Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse and at the Marronniers on Rue de Chazelles.
    Among the people he knew at the time, the ones I’ve managed to identify are Henri Lagroua; Sacha Gordine; Freddie McEvoy, an Australian bobsled champion and racing driver with whom he shared an “office” on the Champs-Elysées right after the war (I’ve neverbeen able to determine the name of the company); a certain Jean Koporindé, 189 Rue de la Pompe; Geza Pellmont; Toddie Werner (who called herself “Mme Sahuque”) and her friend Hessien (Liselotte); and a Russian girl, Kissa Kuprin, daughter of the writer Aleksandr Kuprin. She had acted in a few films and in one of Roger Vitrac’s