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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
Twelve-year-old
Hélène Bach was playing in the garden with her younger sister, Ida when they
saw a military truck approaching and rushed inside.
The two
girls and their mother had left their home in Lorraine, north-eastern France,
after the German invasion in May 1940 and started traveling towards the
"free zone" in the south of the country.
To reduce
the risk of the whole family being caught, it had been decided that the father,
Aron, and oldest daughter, Annie, would make the journey separately. But when
Aron and Annie were arrested in 1941 and taken to a detention camp near Tours,
Hélène's mother rented a house nearby. And they were still there a year later when the German soldiers came driving up the road.
Hélène and
eight-year-old Ida ran into the kitchen to warn their mother.
"My mother told us to run - to hide in the woods," Hélène says. "I was holding my little sister by the hand but she did not want to come with me. She wanted to go back to my mother. I could hear the Germans. I let her hand go and she ran back."
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
Isolated
in the woods, Hélène hid until she felt the coast was clear.
Then she
crept back to the house and found some money her mother had left on the table.
"She
knew I would come back," she says.
Hélène
went to stay with a friend she'd made in the area. She never saw her mother or
younger sister again.
Hélène's
older sister, Annie, had her own narrow escape. After a year at the camp near
Tours, she succeeded in escaping through some fencing and running away.
Aged 16,
Annie succeeded this time in making the journey alone to her aunt's home in the
southern city of Toulouse, but even there she wasn't safe. While her aunt's
family were not officially registered as Jews and could pretend to be
Catholics, this wasn't an option open to Annie.
One day in
the autumn of 1942, the police rang at the door "They ordered, 'Show your
family book and all your children, we want to check!'" she says.
"The
luck of my life is that my cousin, Ida, had gone to buy bread - that's why
sometimes I believe in miracles. So my aunt said this is Estelle, Henri, Hélène, and, pointing at me, Ida."
Not long
after Annie's arrival in Toulouse, her aunt received a letter from Hélène, from
her hiding place near Tours. She then made arrangements for her to be rescued.
So one
night a young woman from the French Resistance, the Maquis, knocked at the door
of the house where Hélène was staying.
"She
said that she came to find me, to cross the demarcation line," Hélène
remembers. To show that she could be trusted, the visitor pulled out a
photograph of Hélène that her aunt had provided.
It was a
difficult journey. The young woman had false papers in which she and Hélène
were described as students, even though Hélène was so young. They were stopped
and questioned several times.
The
"free zone" in the south of France did not live up to its name. The
government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, based in Vichy, passed anti-Jewish laws,
allowed Jews rounded up in Baden and Alsace Lorraine to be interned on its
territory, and seized Jewish assets.
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, moving scenes have occurred," it went. "Children, women,
men, fathers, and mothers are treated like a lowly herd. Members of a single family are separated from each other and carted away to an unknown destination.
The Jews are men, and the Jewesses are women. They are part of the human race; they
are our brothers like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this."
He
protested to the Vichy authorities about their Jewish policy, while most of the
French Catholic hierarchy remained silent. Out of 100 French bishops, he was
one of only six who spoke out against the Nazi regime.
Saliège's message struck a chord with Sister Denise Bergon, the young mother superior of the Convent of Notre Dame de Massip in Capdenac, 150km (93 miles) northeast of Toulouse.
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
"This
call deeply moved us, and such emotion grabbed our hearts. A favorable
response to this letter was a testament to the strength of our religion, above
all parties, all races," she wrote after the war in 1946.
"It
was also an act of patriotism, as by defending the oppressed we were defying
the persecutors."
The
convent ran a boarding school and Sister Denise knew it would be possible to
hide Jewish children among her Catholic pupils. But she worried about
endangering her fellow nuns, and about the dishonesty that this would entail.
Her own
bishop supported Pétain so she wrote to Archbishop Saliège for advice. She
records his response in her journal: "Let's lie, let's lie, my daughter,
as long as we are saving human lives."
By the
winter of 1942, Sister Denise Bergon was collecting Jewish children who had
been hiding in the wooded valleys and gorges of the region around Capdenac,
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 number of Jewish children taking refuge in
the convent would eventually swell to 83.
Among them was Annie Beck, whose aunt realized she would be safer there than in Toulouse, shortly followed by Hélène, taken directly to the convent by her guide from the Resistance.
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
Hélène
finally felt safe, though was overwhelmed with emotion on her arrival.
"At
the beginning, Madame Bergon took me into a room and she tried to make me feel
as if my parents were here, and so she was like a mother really," she
says.
At the
same time, the fate of her younger sister, Ida, weighed heavily on her.
"Every
evening, we had to first do our homework. And then when we finished we could go
out and play. I always thought if my sister had not let go of my hand, she
would have been in the convent with me," she says.
Another
Jewish refugee from Alsace Lorraine was a boy called Albert Seifer, who was a
few years younger than the sisters.
"Surrounded by big walls, we were like in a fortress," he says. "We were very happy." We did not really feel the war despite the fact that we were surrounded by danger."
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
Parents
and guardians would send their children with money, jewelry, or other
valuables in order to pay for the children's upkeep before they did their best
to escape from France. Sister Denise kept careful records.
"From
the beginning of 1944, the round-ups of Jews were becoming tighter and
numerous," she recalled in 1946. "Requests come from all sides and we
received around 15 little girls, some of whom have just escaped in a miraculous
way from the pursuit of the Gestapo."
She added:
"They had simply become our children, and we had committed ourselves to
suffer everything so as to return them safely to their families."
Other than
Sister Denise, only the school's director, Marguerite Rocques, its chaplain, and
two other sisters knew the truth about the children's origins. The other 11
nuns were aware that a number of the children were refugees from
Alsace-Lorraine, but did not know they were Jewish - and nor did the officials
whom Sister Denise pressed for more and more ration books.
The
children's lack of familiarity with Catholic rituals threatened to expose them,
but an explanation was found.
"We
came from the east of France, a place with many industrial cities and a lot of
workers who were communists," says Annie. "So we posed as communist
children who knew nothing of religion!"
The longer
the war continued, the more dangerous the children's position became and Sister
Denise began to worry about possible searches.
"Even though all compromising papers and the jewelry from the children's families had already been hidden in the most secret corners of the house, we did not feel safe," she wrote in her 1946 journal. "So, late at night, when everyone was asleep in the house, we dug a hole for the hidden things in the convent's garden and we buried as deep as possible anything that could be compromising."
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
In May
1944 a battle-hardened elite SS Division known as Das Reich arrived in the area
from the Eastern front.
About this
time, Annie remembers that a member of the Resistance arrived with an alarming
warning.
"One
day the doorbell rang. Since the sister in charge of the door was a bit far, I
opened it myself," she says.
"A
young man was standing there. He said: 'Quick! I must speak to your director!
It is very, very urgent!'
"The
man told us that we had been denounced. News had spread that the convent was
hiding Jewish children."
Sister
Denise hatched a plan with the Resistance, who agreed to fire warning shots if
the enemy was approaching.
"The
children would go to sleep, the older ones paired up with the younger ones and,
at the first detonation heard in the night, in silence but in haste, they must
get to the woods and leave the house to the invaders," she wrote in 1946.
But soon
she decided to hide the children without waiting for the invaders to arrive.
One group, including Annie, was taken to the chapel.
"The
chaplain was strong and could lift the benches. He opened a trap door. We slid
down in there," she says.
The tiny underground space was 2.5m long and less than 1.5m high.
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
Seven
children huddled together there for five days. They could not stand up or lie
down to sleep during the long nights and were only allowed out for short
periods in the early hours of the morning, to exercise, eat, drink, and go to
the toilet.
Air came
through a small vent that opened onto the courtyard.
"After
five days there it was no longer possible to endure," Annie says.
"Imagine
if the nuns had been arrested," she adds.
Those days
hidden underground marked Annie for life - she has slept with a nightlight
ever since. Hélène was fortunate enough to be housed instead with a local
family.
Though
they didn't enter the convent, the SS did leave a trail of destruction right 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 example so that others did
not resist," Annie says.
Sister
Denise wanted to pay her respects to the dead and asked Annie to help her place
flowers on each of the dead bodies.
In June
1944, Das Reich was ordered north to join the effort to repel the Allied
landings in Normandy. On the way, it took part in two massacres designed to
punish locals for Maquis activity in the area. Then, on arrival in Normandy, it
was encircled by the US 2nd Armoured Division and crushed, losing 5,000 men and
more than 200 tanks and other combat vehicles.
After
southern France was liberated, in August 1944, the Jewish children slowly left
the convent. Albert Seifer was reunited with his family, including his father,
who returned alive from Auschwitz.
Annie and
Hélène weren't so fortunate.
Although
their aunt survived, their parents and younger sister, Ida, were murdered in
Auschwitz.
Annie
settled in Toulouse, married, had children, and recently became a
great-grandmother. She still regularly meets Albert, now 90.
Hélène married and had a son, settling in Richmond, west London. Aged 94 and 90, the sisters travel between London and Toulouse to see each other as often as they can.
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
They refer
to Sister Denise as "Notre Dame de la Guerre" - our lady of the war.
They were
sad to say goodbye to her and regularly visited her for the rest of her life.
When
Annie's children were young she often took them with her, in order to keep this
period of history alive for them - a constant reminder of what the Jewish
people endured.
Sister
Denise remained at the convent and continued working until her death in 2006 at
the age of 94. Later in life, she helped disadvantaged children, and then
immigrants from North Africa.
In 1980, she was honored by the Holocaust Memorial Center, Yad Vashem, as Righteous Among the Nations. A street is named after her in Capdenac, but apart from that the only memorial is in the grounds of the convent.
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| The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children |
It says:
"This cedar tree was planted on 5 April 1992 in memory of the saving of 83
Jewish children (from December 1942 to July 1944) by Denise Bergon… at the
request of Monsignor Jules-Geraud Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse."
It stands
close to the spot where Sister Denise buried the jewelry, money, and valuable
items their parents left behind - and which she gave back, untouched, after the war
to help the families start again.
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