How a daring nun saved 83 Jewish children

Two Jewish ladies from Alsace discovered themselves in nice hazard when Germany invaded France 80 years in the past. However whereas their dad and mom and youthful sister had been caught and murdered, they survived – with dozens of different Jewish children – due to the bravery of a nun in a convent close to Toulouse.

Twelve-year-old Hélène Bach was enjoying within the backyard along with her youthful sister, Ida, after they noticed a army truck approaching and rushed inside.

The 2 ladies and their mom had left their residence in Alsace Lorraine, north-eastern France, after the German invasion in Could 1940 and began travelling in the direction of the “free zone” within the south of the nation.

To scale back the chance of the entire household being caught, it had been determined that the daddy, Aron, and oldest daughter, Annie, would make the journey individually. However when Aron and Annie had been arrested in 1941 and brought to a detention camp close to Excursions, Hélène’s mom rented a home close by. And so they had been nonetheless there a yr later, when the German troopers got here driving up the street.

Hélène and eight-year-old Ida bumped into the kitchen to warn their mom.

“My mom advised us to run – to cover within the woods,” Hélène says. “I used to be holding my little sister by the hand however she didn’t need to include me. She needed to return to my mom. I might hear the Germans. I let her hand go and he or she ran again.”

Remoted within the woods, Hélène hid till she felt the coast was clear.

Then she crept again to the home and located some cash her mom had left on the desk.

“She knew I’d come again,” she says.

Hélène went to stick with a pal she’d made within the space. She by no means noticed her mom or youthful sister once more.

Hélène’s older sister, Annie, had her personal slim escape. After a yr on the camp close to Excursions, she succeeded in escaping by way of some fencing and working away.

Aged 16, Annie succeeded this time in making the journey alone to her aunt’s residence within the southern metropolis of Toulouse, however even there she wasn’t secure. Whereas her aunt’s household weren’t formally registered as Jews and will fake to be Catholics, this wasn’t an possibility open to Annie.

Sooner or later within the autumn of 1942, the police rang on the door “They ordered, ‘Present your loved ones e-book and all of your children, we need to examine!'” she says.

“The luck of my life is that my cousin, Ida, had gone to purchase bread – that is why generally I consider in miracles. So my aunt mentioned that is Estelle, Henri, Hélène and, pointing at me, Ida.”

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

So one evening a younger girl from the French Resistance, the Maquis, knocked on the door of the home the place Hélène was staying.

“She mentioned that she got here to seek out me, to cross the demarcation line,” Hélène remembers. To indicate that she might be trusted, the customer pulled out a {photograph} of Hélène that her aunt had supplied.

It was a tough journey. The younger girl had false papers through which she and Hélène had been described as college students, regardless that Hélène was so younger. They had been stopped and questioned a number of instances.

The “free zone” within the south of France didn’t reside as much as its title. The federal government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, based mostly in Vichy, handed anti-Jewish legal guidelines, allowed Jews rounded up in Baden and Alsace Lorraine to be interned on its territory, and seized Jewish belongings.

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. “Children, girls, males, fathers and moms are handled like a lowly herd. Members of a single household are separated from one another and carted away to an unknown vacation spot. The Jews are males, the Jewesses are girls. They’re a part of the human race; they’re our brothers like so many others. A Christian can not neglect this.”

He protested to the Vichy authorities about their Jewish coverage, whereas many of the French Catholic hierarchy remained silent. Out of 100 French bishops, he was one in every of solely six who spoke out in opposition to the Nazi regime.

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

“This name deeply moved us, and such emotion grabbed our hearts. A beneficial response to this letter was a testomony to the energy of our faith, above all events, all races,” she wrote after the struggle in 1946.

“It was additionally an act of patriotism, as by defending the oppressed we had been defying the persecutors.”

The convent ran a boarding college and Sister Denise knew it might be potential to cover Jewish children amongst her Catholic pupils. However she fearful about endangering her fellow nuns, and in regards to the dishonesty that this is able to entail.

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

By the winter of 1942, Sister Denise Bergon was amassing Jewish children who had been hiding within the wooded valleys and gorges of the area round Capdenac, often known as L’Aveyron.

As round-ups of Jews intensified – carried out by German troops and, from 1943, by a fascist militia, the Milice – the variety of Jewish children taking refuge within the convent would ultimately swell to 83.

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

Hélène lastly felt secure, although was overwhelmed with emotion on her arrival.

“Initially, Madame Bergon took me into a room and he or she tried to make me really feel as if my dad and mom had been right here, and so she was like a mom actually,” she says.

On the identical time, the destiny of her youthful sister, Ida, weighed closely on her.

“Each night, we needed to first do our homework. After which once we completed we might exit and play. I all the time thought if my sister had not let go of my hand, she would have been within the convent with me,” she says.

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

“Surrounded by large partitions, we had been like in a fortress,” he says. “We had been very completely satisfied.” We didn’t actually really feel the struggle even though we had been surrounded by hazard.”

Dad and mom and guardians would ship their children with cash, jewelry or different valuables in an effort to pay for the children’s maintenance, earlier than they did their finest to flee from France. Sister Denise stored cautious information.

“From the start of 1944, the round-ups of Jews had been turning into tighter and quite a few,” she recalled in 1946. “Requests come from all sides and we acquired round 15 little ladies, a few of whom have simply escaped in a miraculous manner from the pursuit of the Gestapo.”

She added: “That they had merely change into our children, and we had dedicated ourselves to undergo every little thing in order to return them safely to their households.”

Aside from Sister Denise, solely the college’s director, Marguerite Rocques, its chaplain and two different sisters knew the reality in regards to the children’s origins. The opposite 11 nuns had been conscious that a variety of the children had been refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, however didn’t know they had been Jewish – and nor did the officers whom Sister Denise pressed for increasingly more ration books.

The children’s lack of familiarity with Catholic rituals threatened to show them, however an evidence was discovered.

“We got here from the east of France, a place with many industrial cities and a lot of employees who had been communists,” says Annie. “So we posed as communist children who knew nothing of faith!”

The longer the struggle continued, the extra harmful the children’s place grew to become and Sister Denise started to fret about potential searches.

“Though all compromising papers and the jewelry from the children’s households had already been hidden in essentially the most secret corners of the home, we didn’t really feel secure,” she wrote in her 1946 journal. “So, late at evening, when everybody was asleep in the home, we dug a gap for the hidden issues within the convent’s backyard and we buried as deep as potential something that might be compromising.”

In Could 1944 a battle-hardened elite SS Division often known as Das Reich arrived within the space from the Japanese entrance.

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

“Sooner or later the doorbell rang. Because the sister accountable for the door was a bit far, I opened it myself,” she says.

“A younger man was standing there. He mentioned: ‘Fast! I need to communicate to your director! It is rather, very pressing!’

“The person advised us that we had been denounced. Information had unfold that the convent was hiding Jewish children.”

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

“The children would fall asleep, the older ones paired up with the youthful ones and, on the first detonation heard within the evening, in silence however in haste, they need to get to the woods and go away the home to the invaders,” she wrote in 1946.

However quickly she determined to cover the children with out ready for the invaders to reach. One group, together with Annie, was taken to the chapel.

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

The tiny underground area was 2.5m lengthy and fewer than 1.5m excessive.

Seven children huddled collectively there for 5 days. They might not arise or lie all the way down to sleep throughout the lengthy nights, and had been solely allowed out for brief durations within the early hours of the morning, to train, eat, drink and go to the bathroom.

Air got here by way of a small vent that opened on to the courtyard.

“After 5 days there it was now not potential to endure,” Annie says.

“Think about if the nuns had been arrested,” she provides.

These days hidden underground marked Annie for all times – she has slept with a night-light ever since. Hélène was lucky sufficient to be housed as a substitute with a native household.

Although they did not enter the convent, the SS did go away a path of destruction proper on the convent’s doorstep.

“We discovered some

maquisards [members of the Maquis] who had been killed and tossed on the street. The Germans set an instance in order that others didn’t resist,” Annie says.

Sister Denise needed to pay her respects to the lifeless and requested Annie to assist her place flowers on every of the lifeless our bodies.

In June 1944, Das Reich was ordered north to hitch the hassle to repel the Allied landings in Normandy. On the way in which it took half in two massacres designed to punish locals for Maquis exercise within the space. Then, on arrival in Normandy, it was encircled by the US 2nd Armoured Division and crushed, dropping 5,000 males and greater than 200 tanks and different fight automobiles.

After southern France was liberated, in August 1944, the Jewish children slowly left the convent. Albert Seifer was reunited along with his household, together with his father, who returned alive from Auschwitz.

Annie and Hélène weren’t so lucky.

Though their aunt survived, their dad and mom and youthful sister, Ida, had been murdered in Auschwitz.

Annie settled in Toulouse, married, had children and just lately grew to become a great-grandmother. She nonetheless usually 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 one another as typically as they’ll.

They discuss with Sister Denise as “notre dame de la guerre” – our girl of the struggle.

They had been unhappy to say goodbye to her, and usually visited her for the remainder of her life.

When Annie’s children had been younger she typically took them along with her, in an effort to hold this era of historical past alive for them – a fixed reminder of what the Jewish folks endured.

Sister Denise remained on the convent and continued working till her dying in 2006 on the age of 94. Later in life she helped deprived children, after which immigrants from North Africa.

In 1980, she was honoured by the Holocaust Memorial Middle, Yad Vashem, as Righteous Among the many Nations. A road is known as after her in Capdenac, however aside from that the one memorial to her act of bravery is within the grounds of the convent.

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

It stands near the spot the place Sister Denise buried the jewelry, cash and helpful gadgets dad and mom left behind – and which she gave again, untouched, after the struggle to assist the households begin once more.

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