'Madonna of War': how a brave nun saved dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis - ForumDaily
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'Madonna of War': how a brave nun saved dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis

80 years ago, when the Nazis occupied France, two Jewish girls from Alsace were under grave threat. But they survived, like dozens of others, thanks to a brave nun from a monastery near Toulouse, writes Air force.

Photo: Shutterstock

Twelve-year-old Helene Bach was playing in the garden with her younger sister Ida when they saw an approaching military truck ...

After the German invasion in May 1940, the girls and their mother fled their home in Lorraine in northeastern France to try to reach the “free [occupation] zone” in the south of the country.

To prevent the whole family from being captured at once, it was decided that their father Aaron and the eldest daughter Annie would go separately. When they were arrested and sent to a camp near Tours, their mother rented a house nearby. There she was with the younger girls and stayed for a year, but the Nazis got there too.

Helene and eight-year-old Ida ran into the kitchen and shouted to their mother that German soldiers were coming.

“Mom told us to run and hide in the forest,” Helen recalls. “I held my sister’s hand, but she resisted and wanted to go back to her mother. The voices of the Germans were already heard. I released Ida’s hand and she ran away.”

Helen hid in the forest until the extraneous sounds disappeared. Then she carefully made her way into the house and found some money on the table that her mother had left: “She understood that I would return.”

Helen spent some time with friends in the neighborhood. The girl never saw her mother and younger sister again.

The story of an older sister

Annie had her own story of salvation. After spending a year in a camp near Tours, she managed to climb over the fence and escape. 16-year-old Annie made it to her aunt's home in Toulouse, southern France, on her own. The aunt's family did not register as Jews and pretended to be Catholics. But even there Annie could not feel safe.

One day in the fall of 1942, the police knocked on the door: “Give me your house book and show all the children. We have to check everything!”

“The greatest luck in my life is that my sister Ida went out then to buy bread. And the aunt said: here is Estella, Henri, Helen and, pointing at me, Ida. Since then I believed in miracles,” says Annie.

Soon after Annie arrived in Toulouse, her aunt received a letter from Helene, who was hiding under Tours, and began to think how to help her out of there.

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And then one night a young woman from the French Resistance (they were called “Maquis”) knocked on the door of Helen’s friends’ house. “She said she had come for me and would help me cross the demarcation line [between occupied and unoccupied parts of France],” Hélène recalls. “And as a sign that she could be trusted, she showed me my photograph, which her aunt had provided her with.”

The journey turned out to be difficult. The girl had false documents with her that stated that she and Helen were students, although the 12-year-old girl clearly did not look like a student. They were stopped and interrogated several times.

The “free zone” in the south of France was such only in name. The government of Marshal Petain passed anti-Jewish laws and confiscated Jewish assets.

Bishop's letter

On August 23, 1942, the Archbishop of Toulouse Jules-Géraud Salier sent a letter to his priest and instructed it to be read to the flock.

“Outrageous things are happening in our diocese,” the message said. “Children, women and men, fathers and mothers are treated like animals. Family members are separated from each other and taken to an unknown location. Jews are men; Jews are women. They are part of the human race, like everyone else. A Christian has no right to forget this.”

He protested to the Vichy authorities when most of his colleagues were silent. Of the XNUMX French Catholic bishops, only six, including Salier, raised their voices against the Nazi regime.

The archbishop's appeal resonated with Sister Denise Bergon, the young abbess of the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Massipes in Capdanac, 150 kilometers northeast of Toulouse. “This call touched us deeply. How we respond to it was to be a test of the strength of our faith, which stands above all parties and races. It was also an act of patriotism. By defending the persecuted, we challenged the persecutors,” she wrote after the war, in 1946.

There was a boarding school for girls at the monastery, and Denise Bergon knew that it was possible to hide Jews among the Catholic students. But she was concerned about the risk to the nuns and the need to deceive. Her own bishop supported Petain, so the abbess turned to Archbishop Saliege for advice. She wrote down his answer in her diary: “We will lie, my daughter, we will lie if it saves people’s lives!”

In December 1942, Sister Denise began to gather Jewish children hiding in the wooded valleys and mountains of the Aveyron department in southern France.

As the raids on Jews became more frequent, in which, in addition to German troops, the French fascist militia took part since 1943, the number of Jewish children who took refuge in the monastery gradually increased to 83.

Among them was Annie Bach - her aunt decided that the monastery was safer than Toulouse. Soon she was joined by her younger sister Helen, a member of the Resistance, who took her out of Tours and brought the girl straight there.

Helen finally found herself in a safe place, although she was overwhelmed with emotion after her arrival.

“Madame Bergon immediately took me into the room and talked to me like a mother, did everything to make me feel at home,” she recalls.

But the fate of Ida's younger sister was a heavy burden on the girl's soul.

“Every evening, after finishing preparing our homework, we went to play. And every time I thought: if I hadn’t let my sister pull out her hand, she would be with me now.”

Safe fortress

Another fugitive from Alsace-Lorraine, a boy named Albert Seifer, was the same age as Helene.

“Behind the high walls we lived like in a fortress,” he recalls. - And they felt happy. We did not feel the war, although the daily danger, in fact, did not disappear anywhere.”

Parents and guardians sent money and jewelry with their children to support them. Denise's sister was careful to record expenses.

“From the beginning of 1944, round-ups of Jews became more frequent and harsh,” she wrote in 1946. “Requests came from all sides. We accepted 15 more girls, some of whom escaped the Gestapo literally by miracle. They became our children, and we promised ourselves to endure anything, but to return them to their parents safe and sound.”

In addition to Sister Denise, the school director Marguerite Rock, the chaplain and two other nuns were initiated into the secret. The remaining 11 sisters considered the girls refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, but did not know about their Jewishness - like the officials from whom Sister Denise had to ask for additional food cards.

The girls might have been betrayed by their ignorance of Catholic rites, but Denise's sister found an explanation.

“We came from the east of France, where there was a lot of industry and many of the workers were communists,” says Annie Bach. “So we were passed off as children of communists whose parents did not teach religion.”

The longer the occupation lasted, the more dangerous life became. Sister Denise began to seriously fear that they would come to the monastery with a search.

“Although the girls’ documents and jewelry were hidden in secluded places in the building. One night, when everyone was sleeping, we dug a hole in the garden and buried in it everything that could compromise us,” she recalled in her notes.

In May 1944, the battle-hardened elite SS division Das Reich arrived in the region from the Eastern Front.

Annie recalls how a member of the Resistance came to the monastery to deliver the disturbing news:

“One day the doorbell rang. Since the nurse on duty had gone somewhere, I unlocked it myself. A young man stood on the threshold. "Fast! - he said. - I need to see your director. This is very urgent!” This person said that someone had betrayed us. People say all around that Jewish children are being sheltered in the monastery.”

Sister Denise agreed with the partisans that they would warn them with shots about the approach of enemies.

“The children were put to bed in pairs, the oldest child with the youngest. When the alarm sounded, they had to quietly and quickly go into the forest,” we read in those notes from 1946.

Then she decided to hide the children without waiting for them to come. Seven, including Annie Bach, were taken to the chapel.

“The chaplain was a strong man. He lifted the heavy benches and a hatch opened in the floor. We slid down,” she recalls.

The children spent five days and nights in a hiding place measuring 2,5 x 2,5 meters and a height of less than one and a half meters. It was impossible to stand up, straighten up or lie down at full height - there was not enough space. The air entered through a pipe leading into the yard. They were allowed out briefly before dawn to eat, lightly stretch, and go to the toilet.

“Besides, every minute we thought that the nuns had already been arrested. After five days, it seemed to me that it was impossible to endure any longer,” says Annie.

The imprisonment in the hiding place left a mark for the rest of her life - since then Annie has not been able to sleep without light.

Helen was luckier - she was sent to a local family.

The SS men never came to the monastery, but left their mark not far from the entrance to it - they threw the bodies of the killed “Poppies” on the road. Annie helped Sister Denise take the flowers to them.

In June 1944, the Das Reich division was transferred to Normandy, where the Allies landed, and finally the SS carried out two massacres of the population to avenge the actions of the partisans. In Normandy, it was soon surrounded and defeated by the American 2nd Armored Division, losing five thousand personnel and over 200 tanks and armored vehicles.

After the liberation of southern France in August 1944, Jewish children gradually left the monastery.

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Albert Seifer met his father, who survived in Auschwitz.

Annie and Helene were less fortunate. Their aunt survived, but their parents and younger sister Ida died in the same Auschwitz.

The sisters are now 94 and 90 years old. The eldest, Annie, remained in Toulouse, started a family, and recently became a great-grandmother. Helene also married, gave birth to a son, lives in Richmond, west London. They see each other as often as health permits.

90-year-old Albert is also in Toulouse. She and Annie see each other often.

All three call Sister Denise the “Madonna of War.” Until her death, they visited her, and Annie took her children with her - so that they would know and remember.

Sister Denise remained at the monastery and continued to work until her death in 2006 at the age of 94. Subsequently, she helped disabled children and immigrants from North Africa.

In 1980, the Israeli Yad Vashem Museum included her in the List of Righteous Among the Nations. It contains the names of 27712 people of 51 nationalities who saved Jews from the Holocaust at great risk.

A street in Kapdanak is named after her.

On April 5, 1992, a memorial sign was erected and a Lebanese cedar was planted in the monastery garden, on the site of the pit where Sister Denise hid the valuables and documents of Jewish children, after the war she returned intact to their families.

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