She said: 'You know, don’t ever be afraid of your religion.
If I was not Catholic, I would have liked to be Jewish'.
Hélène Ullrich grew up in France...
in a time of terror in World War Two…
when being Jewish meant persecution and possible death.
But Hélène's life was saved by an extraordinary woman.
I didn't have a very nice life
just before the war in Nancy [France]
because they were very anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism became official policy...
when France collapsed under Nazi attack.
There were around 350,000 Jews living in France.
Authorities began rounding them up.
I was playing with my sister [Ida] in our garden.
We heard the van, they came always with a van, the Germans.
And then we said to my mother:
'The Germans are coming'.
That's when she pushed us out through the back door
and said: 'Go and hide yourself in the woods'.
But my [younger] sister didn't want to leave my mother.
She dropped my hand, she went back.
Oh it was horrible.
For years and years, I couldn't get it out of my head.
I felt guilty that I let her go.
That was the last time Hélène saw her mother and sister Ida.
Aged 12, she went on the run, hiding first with a friend then...
an aunt in Toulouse, where her other sister Annie had been earlier.
But in Toulouse, after a while the Germans came.
All of France was occupied.
And my aunt had three children
so she didn't know what to do with me and my sister, really.
Meanwhile, a nun north of Toulouse heard a message.
While the Catholic hierarchy...
had been largely silent on the treatment of Jews...
the Archbishop of Toulouse spoke up.
In our diocese, moving scenes have occurred.
Children, women, men, fathers and mothers
are treated like a lowly herd.
The Jews are men, the Jewesses are women.
They are our brothers like so many others.
Sister Denise Bergon ran a boarding school...
at the Convent of Notre-Dame de Massip.
This call deeply moved us,
and such emotion grabbed our heart
in front of this human misery.
She made a dangerous decision to hide Jewish children in her school...
83 in total.
Only four other nuns shared her secret.
Madame Bergon, she came to pick me up in Toulouse.
She brought me to the convent.
And she warned us straight away that
nobody knows who is who.
Between all the children that were Jewish,
we didn't know which was Jewish and who wasn't,
and we behaved exactly like all the Catholic children.
We went to Mass, we were everywhere.
The Jewish children faced mortal danger every day.
But Sister Denise Bergon helped them forget the world outside.
And she used her contacts to sneak in food for the extra children.
We got up, we washed with cold water!
There was a lady that gave us the bread and
she measured exactly one little slice
that you can see through, each one!
We had our breakfast, then we went to school.
We had a lot of schooling,
because we all passed our exams there.
Sister Denise Bergon pretended to outsiders...
that all her children were Catholic.
But as the Nazi grip on France tightened…
some of the Jewish children had to hide under the floorboards.
We were warned when the Germans were coming
by the Maquis [French Resistance].
My sister, she was hidden in this hole.
All the children survived.
When the war ended, Hélène discovered…
her mother, father and sister Ida had died in Auschwitz.
It was horrible
because the Red Cross told us
that my parents were dead and so on.
We didn’t know anything about Auschwitz, nothing, nothing.
Hélène went on to stay with relatives, before moving to Israel...
and eventually to the UK.
And Sister Denise Bergon lived to the age of 94...
helping the oppressed until the end of her life.
If only people were more like her.
She was somebody special, she's a saint,
really a saint.
And she should be made a saint, really,
because she risked her life to save 83 children.
And she was fantastic with every one of us.