Burger Hélène

Burger, Hélène File 1925 After the German annexation of Alsace, Hélène Burger, a native of the Alsatian town of Mulhouse, escaped with her son in an ambulance to Agen, the capital of Lot-et-Garonne. She joined the Red Cross as a volunteer nurse and was assigned to escort refugee children from the occupied zone to the southern zone, where they would be reunited with their families. On one trip in May 1942, Burger was assigned to escort two young Jewish girls to the Madeleine Square in Paris and pass them on to another Red Cross nurse, who would accompany them to their destination. She waited for about an hour. The second nurse did not arrive. A French policeman noticed her and brought her to a German officer who interrogated her. Burger, who spoke fluent German, explained that, she was returning children to their parents in the Alsace region, through the Red Cross. The German, unaware that some of the children were Jewish, was favorably impressed and offered Burger a special permit for the trip. Burger was also given a one-year laissez-passer for Agen-Paris, which she used on several missions. After the mass deportation of Parisian Jews, many Jewish children remained hidden with neighbors and friends. Burger was charged with locating them and taking them to Brive-la-Gaillarde, a town in the département of Corrèze, where a Jewish aid organization took charge of them. She was only allowed to escort eight children at a time and therefore made many trips. To avert suspicion, the Jewish children were given aliases. Burger also helped two Jewish families, each with two children, slip across the border into Switzerland in January 1943. The Muller family lived in the southern unoccupied zone. Max Muller had met Burger, in nurse’s uniform, in a train compartment in the southern zone, while she was transferring children from the occupied zone. He requested her help in bringing over his fifteen-year-old son who was in Versailles. Burger agreed and the family was soonreunited. When the Mullers heard that the deportation of Jews was imminent, Max Muller again asked Burger for help. Mme Muller, disguised as a nurse, joined Hélène, and they escorted the children on the train. They were disguised as patients and were ostensibly on the way to an institution in St.-Julien-en-Genevois, near the Swiss border. When the opportunity arose, they slipped out of the train, with the complicity of the railway workers, and crossed the border. On November 20, 1980, Yad Vashem recognized Hélène Burger as Righteous Among the Nations.