Documented around the telling
She was Elfriede Wolff, a Berlin dancer, later a Bluebell at the Folies Bergère in Paris. The museum quotes her on that line: the girls who kept their clothes on. They married on 11 February 1939 at Boulogne-Billancourt. The civil acte is number 69. The First Lady title is Hall of Fame tradition, 2022, Enthusiast Category. The ashes of both are interred at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green.
The car, as the museum and Burton name it
The museum’s collections page on a painting by Elfi says this: while living in France she bought a winning lottery ticket that, along with a present from her father, allowed her to purchase an MG J2 Midget. She also owned a Mathis roadster and a Chenard, former race cars converted for street use. Burton, sourcing Zora in 1989, puts the lottery and the father’s present on the same car. The car was bought in France. It was not driven Berlin to Paris.
The J2 is a real machine. MG built it at Abingdon from mid-1932 into early 1934. About two thousand were made. It is a two-seater, ten feet long, 847 cubic centimetres, a crash gearbox, cable brakes, a slab tank on the tail. New it cost just under two hundred pounds. By the time a dancer in Paris could buy one it was already used. It is not a later T-type. We do not correct the museum’s model without a photograph or a carte grise.
His racing MGs, run in France with a wealthy friend, are a different stable. Hers is the road car. Which French lottery, and how money still moved from a Jewish house in Berlin, neither the museum nor Burton says. We do not invent a draw or a wire.
Museum narrative and Burton body
In June 1940 German tanks entered Paris. Zora Arkus-Duntov was in the southwest of France, in bombardier training with the French Air Force, at Toulouse. The Folies Bergère had gone dark on general mobilization. The museum’s Hall of Fame telling is plain: she threw what she had into the back of a little MG and got out.
Burton, from Elfi in 1997, names the morning. On 13 June 1940, the day before the tanks, she refused a ride south with Zora’s parents. She would not leave the MG. She packed what the two-seater would take, including his technical books, and pointed the nose out of Paris. She had a stateless passport issued after the marriage. She had given up the German one when she married him. She was not German on the paper that day.
The road is Burton’s, labelled, not a diary we hold. A stop for fuel went nowhere. A Scottish camp got the MG running again and told her not to stop the engine. A police station held her overnight and let her go. That overnight is not a camp. We do not write internment onto it.
Where the reunion sits still fights. The museum and the 2008 memorial put it at Toulouse, about four days later. Burton’s body puts her, on the fourth day, at the Mérignac gate, with Zora coming off a military truck toward the MG. The posted city in the house lock is Toulouse. The fight is not a scene.
Later, in Marseilles, Burton writes that Zora sold the MG to a Frenchman who wanted it for his soldier son. The money from that sale paid the train toward Lisbon and the ship. The car does not follow them onto the Nyassa.
Corvette history starts later. Chevrolet hired him on 1 May 1953. She is already in the marriage when that letter is written. The MG is the harder drive. The museum name comes after.
Margot Dorée is writing the forthcoming novel in that lane. North Star Publishing Group will publish it. Expected September 2026. It is independent. It is not in the museum shop. It will not invent Gestapo on her road, or a last speech the record does not hold.
While that book is still on the way, the live book in the same house is The Woman on the Bonnet: another woman, another machine, another record that will not be decorated.
Sources: National Corvette Museum Hall of Fame page for Elfi Arkus-Duntov (tanks, little MG, Toulouse, Folies, 2022 induction). NCM collections page “Painting by Elfi Arkus-Duntov” (MG J2 Midget, lottery and father’s present, Mathis, Chenard, 11 February 1939 Billancourt, Bluebell line). Jerry Burton, Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette (Bentley, 2002), Ch. 3–4 and Notes: lottery/MG (ZAD-PL 14 Sept 1989); 13 June 1940 flight, stateless passport, Scottish camp, police overnight-and-release, Mérignac reunion (EAD Feb/Mar 1997); MG sold at Marseilles (Burton body, p. 69). Boulogne-Billancourt acte 69, 11 Feb 1939. MG J2 production: MG Owners’ Club / public J-type record (1932–34, 847 cc). Hire date 1 May 1953 from the Chevrolet record as used on this site. No carte grise seen. No invented scenes.