They looked frightened. One had visible sores and the other had a facial tick that regularly contorted her little face. Both girls, recalls Richard Attenborough, looked thin and unhealthy.

Earlier that sunny afternoon in August 1939, 10-year-old Helga and Irene, aged 12, had been picked up by his mother Mary at a train station in London to start the last leg of their three-day journey from Berlin.

Their Jewish father, the medical officer of health for Berlin, was facing internment and would later be killed at Auschwitz; their mother had already died of consumption. The plan was for the girls to stay with a family in the UK before continuing their journey to America, where they had relatives.

Attenborough, then aged 15, had been playing in the garden when they arrived at the family home in Leicester. He remembers noticing that they looked sad and ill – after weeks of privations in Nazi Berlin. “They were also nervous wrecks. Their house in Germany had been smashed by Nazis with guns and their father taken away.”

The girls’ presence in the household was accepted as a matter of course. It was not the first time that Richard’s warm-hearted mother had offered a temporary home to refugee children: several Basque boys and girls had stayed for a few weeks two years before, in flight from the Spanish civil war.

However, three weeks after the girls’ arrival, Richard and his brothers David, 13 (now best known for his BBC natural history programmes), and John, 11, were summoned into the study by their father Frederick – always called “the governor” both because of his rather strict demeanour and his post as principal of a college of education. Mary did most of the talking.

Seventy years on, Richard remembers exactly what she said to them: “We absolutely love you boys, but we will have to show even more love to these girls because they are here on their own and without their parents. It is entirely up to you, darlings, if they stay.”

There was no question of objecting. “We realised,” says Richard, “though we boys were all quite young ourselves, how very shocked and frightened the girls were.”

Thus, two waifs from what was known as the Kindertransport programme became part of the Attenborough family.

In all, 10,000 children, nearly all of them Jewish and most from Germany or Austria, came to Britain over a nine-month period from early December 1938 until the start of September 1939. The majority came by train via Holland and then on the boat to Harwich, Essex, before another train journey to Liverpool Street station in London.

Helga and Irene Bejach ended up living with the Attenboroughs for nearly seven years, going to the local girls’ grammar school and becoming much-loved “sisters” to the boys.

For Richard, who went on to make films about oppression in India and South Africa, the relationship was particularly formative.

“It gave me an understanding of what it was to be Jewish, and taught me to loathe prejudice and persecution,” he says. “Frankly, I would never have been interested in making both Gandhi and Cry Freedom without that experience of the girls.”

“They were just like our sisters,” remembers David Attenborough. “They simply became part of the family. We had some tensions, of course, but that’s family life for you. They ate their meals with us and went on holidays with us to Skegness and north Wales .”

When they had arrived, Helga spoke a tiny bit of English, while Irene had just a smattering of French. Both cried a great deal in the early days, and wet their beds. “We were boys whose interests were football and cricket, though Dave was much more studious and already into his natural history – and here were a couple of initially very reclusive and quiet girls in our midst,” says Richard. Yet there was never any antagonism or resentment towards them – even from the girls at school.

As time went on, David gravitated towards Irene, who was academic, while Richard formed a close bond with Helga, who loved ballet and other forms of dance.

Was there any question of a romance? “Absolutely not, though once they got better, they were both attractive young women,” says Richard. “We really did see them as sisters virtually from the time we were told by the governor and Ma that they were going to live with us.”

As the war continued, the girls became increasingly anxious for news of their father. In fact, he had been taken first to Theresienstadt internment camp, and then to Auschwitz. “But it was only after the war, when the girls were still with us, that letters came to tell them that their father had died there,” recalls David.

In 1946 the sisters left to join their relatives in the United States, where they both settled and eventually married. Until they died – Helga three years ago and Irene in 1992 – they remained close to their “brothers”. In Helga’s one published interview – in the magazine Jewish Renaissance in 2002 – she fondly recalled how “Richard was always acting, while John helped sew sequins on [her] dance dresses”.

The sisters had also grown to love the boys’ parents (whom they called “Uncle” and “Auntie”.) “I would talk on the phone to both of them – at least once a month, certainly for the first 20 years after the war,” says Richard. “We would regularly send letters and cards for birthdays and Christmas,” recalls David.

All three brothers made regular trips to the States to visit them; and Richard saw them more frequently because his career as an actor and director often took him to America. Naturally, too, they attended many of his premieres.

Helga and Irene returned occasionally to England, though not quite as often. One incident in late 1959 sums up just how close they were to “Uncle” and “Auntie”. Samuel Goudsmit, who had become one of America’s most distinguished scientists since leaving his native Holland in 1927 for the US, had fallen in love with Irene and asked her to be his wife. Before agreeing, however, she insisted that he fly to England to ask Frederick for his permission to marry her. “It was as if the governor was her father,” recalls David.

Later, when Mary Attenborough was tragically killed in a road accident in her sixties, both Irene and Helga came over for the funeral.

Although they had spent a crucial part of their childhood in the Attenboroughs’ secular household, the sisters rediscovered their Jewish faith in America, and Helga devoted much time to working for the Florida Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg. At her funeral, mourners were asked for donations to the museum, rather than flowers.

This Tuesday will be the 70th anniversary of the first Kindertransport arrivals – an event to be commemorated by an hour-long play, which tells some of the children’s stories. It will be performed three times during the day on the concourse at Liverpool Street station.

The title of the play is Suitcase – and it would be hard to find a more appropriate and evocative name. “I will never forget when Helga and Irene first arrived at our home,” says Richard Attenborough. “Two pale waifs with their pathetic little suitcases.”

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