From Niamh Hughes BBC
Two Jewish girls from Alsace found themselves in great danger when Germany invaded France 80 years ago. But while their parents and younger sister were caught and murdered, they survived – with dozens of other Jewish children – thanks to the bravery of a nun in a convent near Toulouse.
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 travelling 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.”
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.” Read more from BBC
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