How a daring nun saved 83 Jewish children

Two Jewish ladies from Alsace found themselves in good hazard when Germany invaded France 80 years prior to now. Nevertheless whereas their dad and mother and youthful sister have been caught and murdered, they survived – with dozens of various Jewish kids – due to the bravery of a nun in a convent near Toulouse.

Twelve-year-old Hélène Bach was having fun with inside the yard collectively along with her youthful sister, Ida, after they seen a navy truck approaching and rushed inside.

The two ladies and their mother had left their dwelling in Alsace Lorraine, north-eastern France, after the German invasion in Would possibly 1940 and started travelling within the course of the “free zone” inside the south of the nation.

To chop again the prospect of your complete family being caught, it had been decided that the daddy, Aron, and oldest daughter, Annie, would make the journey individually. Nevertheless when Aron and Annie have been arrested in 1941 and dropped at a detention camp near Excursions, Hélène’s mother rented a house shut by. And they also have been nonetheless there a 12 months later, when the German troopers bought right here driving up the road.

Hélène and eight-year-old Ida ran into the kitchen to warn their mother.

“My mother instructed us to run – to cowl inside the woods,” Hélène says. “I was holding my little sister by the hand nonetheless she did not want to incorporate me. She wished to return to my mother. I’d hear the Germans. I let her hand go and he or she ran once more.”

Isolated inside the woods, Hélène hid until she felt the coast was clear.

Then she crept once more to the house and situated some money her mother had left on the desk.

“She knew I might come once more,” she says.

Hélène went to stay with buddy she’d made inside the area. She certainly not seen her mother or youthful sister as soon as extra.

Hélène’s older sister, Annie, had her private slim escape. After a 12 months on the camp near Excursions, she succeeded in escaping by the use of some fencing and working away.

Aged 16, Annie succeeded this time in making the journey alone to her aunt’s dwelling inside the southern metropolis of Toulouse, nonetheless even there she wasn’t protected. Whereas her aunt’s family weren’t formally registered as Jews and can fake to be Catholics, this wasn’t an alternative open to Annie.

Sooner or later inside the autumn of 1942, the police rang on the door “They ordered, ‘Current your family members e-book and your whole kids, we have to study!'” she says.

“The luck of my life is that my cousin, Ida, had gone to buy bread – that’s the reason sometimes I think about in miracles. So my aunt talked about that’s Estelle, Henri, Hélène and, pointing at me, Ida.”

Not prolonged after Annie’s arrival in Toulouse, her aunt obtained a letter from Hélène, from her hiding place near Excursions. She then made preparations for her to be rescued.

So one evening time a youthful woman from the French Resistance, the Maquis, knocked on the door of the house the place Hélène was staying.

“She talked about that she bought right here to hunt out me, to cross the demarcation line,” Hélène remembers. To level out that she is likely to be trusted, the shopper pulled out {{a photograph}} of Hélène that her aunt had provided.

It was a difficult journey. The youthful woman had false papers whereby she and Hélène have been described as school college students, even supposing Hélène was so youthful. They’ve been stopped and questioned a variety of situations.

The “free zone” inside the south of France did not reside as a lot as its establish. The federal authorities of Marshal Philippe Pétain, based in Vichy, handed anti-Jewish authorized tips, allowed Jews rounded up in Baden and Alsace Lorraine to be interned on its territory, and seized Jewish property.

On 23 August 1942 the archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Geraud Saliège, wrote a letter to his clergymen, asking them to recite a letter to their congregations.

“In our diocese, shifting scenes have occurred,” it went. “Kids, women, males, fathers and mothers are dealt with like a lowly herd. Members of a single family are separated from each other and carted away to an unknown trip spot. The Jews are males, the Jewesses are women. They’re part of the human race; they’re our brothers like so many others. A Christian can’t overlook this.”

He protested to the Vichy authorities about their Jewish protection, whereas most of the French Catholic hierarchy remained silent. Out of 100 French bishops, he was actually certainly one of solely six who spoke out in direction of the Nazi regime.

Saliège’s message struck a chord with Sister Denise Bergon, the youthful mother superior of the Convent of Notre Dame de Massip in Capdenac, 150km (93 miles) north-east of Toulouse.

“This title deeply moved us, and such emotion grabbed our hearts. A useful response to this letter was a testament to the power of our religion, above all occasions, all races,” she wrote after the battle in 1946.

“It was moreover an act of patriotism, as by defending the oppressed we’ve been defying the persecutors.”

The convent ran a boarding school and Sister Denise knew it will likely be doable to cowl Jewish kids amongst her Catholic pupils. Nevertheless she apprehensive about endangering her fellow nuns, and regarding the dishonesty that this might entail.

Her private bishop supported Pétain so she wrote to Archbishop Saliège for advice. She knowledge his response in her journal: “Let’s lie, let’s lie, my daughter, as long as we’re saving human lives.”

By the winter of 1942, Sister Denise Bergon was amassing Jewish kids who had been hiding inside the wooded valleys and gorges of the world spherical Capdenac, usually referred to as L’Aveyron.

As round-ups of Jews intensified – carried out by German troops and, from 1943, by a fascist militia, the Milice – the number of Jewish kids taking refuge inside the convent would lastly swell to 83.

Amongst them have been Annie Beck, whose aunt realised she might be safer there than in Toulouse, shortly adopted by Hélène, taken on to the convent by her info from the Resistance.

Hélène lastly felt protected, though was overwhelmed with emotion on her arrival.

“At first, Madame Bergon took me proper right into a room and he or she tried to make me actually really feel as if my dad and mother have been proper right here, and so she was like a mother truly,” she says.

On the same time, the future of her youthful sister, Ida, weighed intently on her.

“Every evening, we would have liked to first do our homework. After which after we accomplished we’d exit and play. I always thought if my sister had not let go of my hand, she would have been inside the convent with me,” she says.

One different Jewish refugee from Alsace Lorraine was a boy known as Albert Seifer, who was a few years youthful than the sisters.

“Surrounded by huge partitions, we’ve been like in a fortress,” he says. “We have now been very joyful.” We did not truly actually really feel the battle although we’ve been surrounded by hazard.”

Mom and father and guardians would ship their kids with money, jewellery or completely different valuables with a function to pay for the children’s upkeep, sooner than they did their biggest to flee from France. Sister Denise saved cautious knowledge.

“From the beginning of 1944, the round-ups of Jews have been turning into tighter and fairly just a few,” she recalled in 1946. “Requests come from all sides and we obtained spherical 15 little ladies, just a few of whom have merely escaped in a miraculous method from the pursuit of the Gestapo.”

She added: “That they’d merely grow to be our kids, and we had devoted ourselves to endure the whole thing in an effort to return them safely to their households.”

Except for Sister Denise, solely the faculty’s director, Marguerite Rocques, its chaplain and two completely different sisters knew the truth regarding the kids’s origins. The alternative 11 nuns have been acutely aware that fairly just a few the children have been refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, nonetheless did not know they’ve been Jewish – and nor did the officers whom Sister Denise pressed for more and more extra ration books.

The youngsters’s lack of familiarity with Catholic rituals threatened to disclose them, nonetheless an proof was found.

“We bought right here from the east of France, a spot with many industrial cities and a great deal of employees who’ve been communists,” says Annie. “So we posed as communist kids who knew nothing of religion!”

The longer the battle continued, the additional dangerous the children’s place grew to turn into and Sister Denise began to stress about doable searches.

“Even if all compromising papers and the jewellery from the children’s households had already been hidden in in all probability probably the most secret corners of the house, we did not actually really feel protected,” she wrote in her 1946 journal. “So, late at evening time, when all people was asleep within the house, we dug a spot for the hidden points inside the convent’s yard and we buried as deep as doable one thing that is likely to be compromising.”

In Would possibly 1944 a battle-hardened elite SS Division usually referred to as Das Reich arrived inside the area from the Jap entrance.

About this time, Annie remembers {{that a}} member of the Resistance arrived with an alarming warning.

“Sooner or later the doorbell rang. As a result of the sister answerable for the door was a bit far, I opened it myself,” she says.

“A youthful man was standing there. He talked about: ‘Quick! I’ve to converse to your director! This can be very, very urgent!’

“The particular person instructed us that we had been denounced. Data had unfold that the convent was hiding Jewish kids.”

Sister Denise hatched a plan with the Resistance, who agreed to fireplace warning images if the enemy was approaching.

“The youngsters would go to sleep, the older ones paired up with the youthful ones and, on the primary detonation heard inside the evening time, in silence nonetheless in haste, they need to get to the woods and depart the house to the invaders,” she wrote in 1946.

Nevertheless rapidly she decided to cowl the children with out prepared for the invaders to succeed in. One group, along with Annie, was taken to the chapel.

“The chaplain was sturdy and can elevate the benches. He opened a entice door. We slid down in there,” she says.

The tiny underground home was 2.5m prolonged and fewer than 1.5m extreme.

Seven kids huddled collectively there for five days. They could not come up or lie all the best way right down to sleep in the middle of the prolonged nights, and have been solely allowed out for temporary intervals inside the early hours of the morning, to coach, eat, drink and go to the lavatory.

Air bought right here by the use of a small vent that opened on to the courtyard.

“After 5 days there it was no longer doable to endure,” Annie says.

“Take into consideration if the nuns had been arrested,” she supplies.

Today hidden underground marked Annie for all instances – she has slept with a night-light ever since. Hélène was fortunate enough to be housed as an alternative with an space family.

Though they didn’t enter the convent, the SS did depart a path of destruction correct on the convent’s doorstep.

“We found some

maquisards [members of the Maquis] who had been killed and tossed on the road. The Germans set an occasion so that others did not resist,” Annie says.

Sister Denise wished to pay her respects to the lifeless and requested Annie to help her place flowers on each of the lifeless our our bodies.

In June 1944, Das Reich was ordered north to hitch the trouble to repel the Allied landings in Normandy. On the best way during which it took half in two massacres designed to punish locals for Maquis train inside the area. Then, on arrival in Normandy, it was encircled by the US 2nd Armoured Division and crushed, dropping 5,000 males and better than 200 tanks and completely different combat cars.

After southern France was liberated, in August 1944, the Jewish kids slowly left the convent. Albert Seifer was reunited alongside along with his family, collectively along with his father, who returned alive from Auschwitz.

Annie and Hélène weren’t so fortunate.

Although their aunt survived, their dad and mother and youthful sister, Ida, have been murdered in Auschwitz.

Annie settled in Toulouse, married, had kids and currently grew to turn into a great-grandmother. She nonetheless repeatedly meets Albert, now 90.

Hélène married and had a son, settling in Richmond, west London. Aged 94 and 90, the sisters journey between London and Toulouse to see each other as normally as they are going to.

They talk to Sister Denise as “notre dame de la guerre” – our woman of the battle.

They’ve been sad to say goodbye to her, and repeatedly visited her for the rest of her life.

When Annie’s kids have been youthful she normally took them collectively along with her, with a function to keep up this period of historic previous alive for them – a seamless reminder of what the Jewish people endured.

Sister Denise remained on the convent and continued working until her demise in 2006 on the age of 94. Later in life she helped disadvantaged kids, after which immigrants from North Africa.

In 1980, she was honoured by the Holocaust Memorial Center, Yad Vashem, as Righteous Among the many many Nations. A street known as after her in Capdenac, nonetheless apart from that the one memorial to her act of bravery is inside the grounds of the convent.

It says: “This cedar tree was planted on 5 April 1992 in memory of the saving of 83 Jewish kids (from December 1942 to July 1944) by Denise Bergon… on the request of Monsignor Jules-Geraud Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse.”

It stands close to the spot the place Sister Denise buried the jewellery, money and worthwhile devices dad and mother left behind – and which she gave once more, untouched, after the battle to help the households start as soon as extra.

A Jewish teenager prevented demise in occupied France due to the kindness and bravado of a doctor in a small Alpine resort. However it is a narrative native people seem reluctant to remember, Rosie Whitehouse discovers.