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The Belgian Teacher Who Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children during World War II

(New York Times) Joseph Berger - Andree Geulen was a young Belgian teacher at an all-girls boarding school in Brussels in the 1940s when her Jewish students were told that they had to wear uniforms with yellow stars sewn onto them - an anti-Semitic decree by the occupying Germans. A few weeks later, she noticed that some of the Jewish students were no longer showing up for school. They and their families had been rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to Mechelen, northeast of Brussels, a way station on the road to Auschwitz. Feeling a need to take action, Geulen volunteered to help a clandestine group, the Committee for the Defense of Jews, spirit Jewish children to convents, monasteries, boarding schools, farms and families around the country. "I saw it as a race between myself and the Gestapo - who would get to the family first," she recalled. She estimated that she found hiding places for 300-400 Jewish children. For that, she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations and was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Geulen died at 100 on May 31 in Brussels, the last survivor of a cadre of 12 women who together rescued 3,000 Jewish children.
2022-06-09 00:00:00
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