Wednesday, June 08, 2022
Belgian Teacher Who Rescued Hundreds of Jewish Children Dead at 100
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici, a Belgian teacher and member of the resistance during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II who rescued close to 400 Jewish children from the Gestapo, died on May 31 in Ixelles, outside Brussels.
According to yad Vashem, Andrée Geulen was a 20-year-old teacher in a Brussels school when one day some of her students came to school with yellow stars on their clothes. She responded by ordering all her students to wear aprons to school, so the Jewish kids could cover the humiliating tags.
Geulen volunteered to accompany Jewish children to hiding places in cooperation with the Gaty de Gamont boarding school that harbored twelve Jewish children on its premises. In May 1943, the school was raided by the Germans in the middle of the night. The date coincided with the Pentecost when all the non-Jewish students had left for home, and the Germans were able to pick out the Jewish children who were arrested, and their teachers, including Geulen, were interrogated. That night, Geulen went to tell all the Jewish students she knew of the raid and warned them not to come back to school.
She rented an apartment under her false name and kept contact with the rescue underground using a post office box in an antique shop. For more than two years, Andrée collected children and moved them to Christian families and monasteries, making sure the families were able to take in the children and visiting them to look after their needs.
After liberation by the allies, Geulen labored to retrieve the children from their Christian hosts and return them to their relatives. She kept in touch with "her" children for many years, sharing with them the details of their childhood in hiding.
Geulen was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1989. She was granted honorary Israeli citizenship at Yad Vashem in 2007, as part of the "Children Hidden in Belgium during the Shoah" International Conference. She said, "What I did was merely my duty. Disobeying the laws of the time was just the normal thing to do."
She also received honorary citizenship from her home town of Ixelles. Her 100th birthday on September 6, 2021, was celebrated by the Belgian media.
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