Rescuer · 1921-2022
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici
A schoolteacher's authority is knowing which child belongs in which seat. She put that power to work for children who were never on her roster.
A teacher's register
Andrée Geulen was born in Schaerbeek, Brussels, on 6 September 1921. At about fifteen a teacher's account of the Spanish Civil War led her to send care packages to Republican refugee children. She began teaching in Brussels in 1942, after German troops had occupied Belgium in May 1940.
Recruited
Her friend and colleague Ida Sterno recruited her into the Comité de Défense des Juifs (CDJ), Belgium's main clandestine Jewish rescue organisation, in spring 1943. She became one of the few non-Jewish members of its children's section, took the alias Claude Fournier and moved to the Institut Gatti de Gamond, whose headmistress, Odile Ovart, was already sheltering Jewish children. Of the roughly three thousand children the CDJ placed, more than three hundred were hers.
What the roll call required
She found families willing to take a child with false papers and a new name, and escorted children by train and on foot to convents, farms, boarding schools and private homes. The hardest part, in her own account, was asking parents to hand over a child to a stranger without being told where the child was going.
The Pentecost raid and the ledger
In May 1943 the occupation authorities raided the Gatti de Gamond school. Interrogated, she reportedly asked, "Aren't you ashamed to make war on Jewish children?" and evaded arrest. She helped maintain the CDJ's coded registry of real and false names, and for a time hid part of it in a notebook under the floorboards of her lodging. In May 1944 Ida Sterno was arrested and tortured at Malines and betrayed no one. She died in 1964.
After the war
Brussels was liberated in September 1944. Geulen used the coded records to reunite hidden children with surviving relatives and later worked as a social worker. She married Charles Herscovici in September 1948. Yad Vashem recognised her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1989, and she received honorary Israeli citizenship on 18 April 2007. She died in Brussels on 31 May 2022, aged 100, the last surviving member of the CDJ children's section's original team of women.
Further reading
- Yad Vashem: Righteous Among the Nations, Andrée Geulen-Herscovici.
- Belgian State War Heritage Institute (CegeSoma): biographical entry, Andrée Geulen-Herscovici.
- Irish Times. "Andrée Geulen obituary: Saviour of Jewish children in wartime." 11 June 2022.
- Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "Andrée Geulen, Belgian woman who rescued hundreds of Jewish children, dies at 100." 17 June 2022.
- Wikipedia: Andrée Geulen
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In the book
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici is one of the 36 women whose documented stories are told in Women Without Fear, a book and documentary project of The Legacy Project. The book is being prepared for publication. You can read one full sample chapter now, on Róża Robota.