Andrée Geulen-herscovici
Rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Holocaust
ANDRÉE GEULEN-HERSCOVICI, who has died aged 100, was a Belgian schoolteacher who helped to save hundreds of Jewish children from the death camps during the war.
Andrée Geulen was born in Brussels on September 6 1921 and brought up a Roman Catholic, though she lost her faith aged 12. Two years after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 she became a teacher in a Brussels primary school.
When some of her Jewish pupils arrived in school one day wearing the yellow star, she was outraged and told her whole class to wear aprons to school, to cover the stars so that the Jewish children were not singled out.
When deportations began in early 1943, through Ida Sterno, a Jewish social worker, she became involved with the Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ) as one of its few non-jewish members. Her role was to contact Jewish families and quietly suggest they hand their children into the care of CDJ, who would place them under false identities with Catholic families, schools and religious institutions.
Andrée Geulen moved to teach at the Athénée royal Isabelle Gatti de Gamond boarding school, whose headmistress, Odile Ovart, had agreed to host 12 “hidden children”.
On the Feast of Pentecost in May 1943, probably as the result of a tip-off, the school was raided in the middle of the night by German soldiers. The Jewish children were arrested and the teachers interrogated.
When asked by one of the Germans if she was not ashamed to teach Jews, Andrée Geulen replied: “Aren’t you ashamed to make war on children?”
She managed to escape to warn other Jewish pupils not to return. Meanwhile Odile Ovart and her husband were deported to the camps, where they perished.
After the raid Andrée Geulen went underground, adopted the name Claude Fournier and rented an apartment which she shared with Ida Sterno. For more than two years she collected children and moved them to Christian families, monasteries and convents.
It was heartbreaking work: “We told the parents to prepare a suitcase, and that we would return in a day or two… I still weep when I think of the times when I had to take children from their parents, especially children aged two to three, without being able to tell the parents where I was taking them.”
She maintained coded records of the children, including their birth names and places of shelter, so that they could be reunited with their families after the war.
In May 1944 Ida Sterno was arrested and imprisoned in Malines/ Mechelen camp, but Andrée Geulen continued her work until the liberation of Belgium. According to later testimonies, she personally managed to save about 300 Jewish children and teenagers.
After the war she worked to try to reunite the children with their families or surviving relatives, although too often there was no trace of either.
She also became involved with the relief organisation Aide aux Israélites Victimes de la Guerre, which supported Jewish survivors of the concentration camps in Belgium.
In 1948 she married Charles Herscovici, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, with whom she had two children. She kept in touch with many of the children she had saved and never forgot the details of their time in hiding.
In 1989, Andrée Geulen-herscovici was recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre as Righteous Among the Nations, and during a visit in 2007 to Israel she was granted honorary citizenship.
Last year a crèche in Brussels was renamed in her honour. “What I did was merely my duty,” she told an interviewer. “Disobeying the laws of the time was just the normal thing to do.”