Andrée Geulen-Herscovici

Andrée Geulen-Herscovici (6 September 1921 – 31 May 2022) was a Belgian teacher and member of the resistance during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. After becoming aware of the persecution of Belgian Jews through her employment, she became involved in the Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ; Joods Verdedigingscomité, JVC) in 1943 and actively assisted with the organisation and protection of "hidden children" amid the Holocaust in Belgium. In the aftermath of the war, she was recognised as Righteous among the Nations by the Israeli institute Yad Vashem and received several other honours in Belgium and Israel.

Biography

Career and resistance activities Andrée Geulen was born in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, on 6 September 1921 into a liberal family of the urban bourgeoisie. After the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, the country was placed under military occupation and Geulen became a schoolteacher and received a job in a primary school in central Brussels in 1942.

Through an introduction by Ida Sterno, another teacher in the same school, Geulen became involved with the small Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ; Joods Verdedigingscomité, JVC) in the spring of 1943 and became one of its few non-Jewish members.

Geulen taught and lived at the Athénée royal Isabelle Gatti de Gamond, a boarding school in the Brussels suburb of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, whose headmistress, , had already agreed to host 12 hidden children at the school. Sterno was arrested in May 1944. Upon accepting the honor, Geulen-Herscovici said, "What I did was merely my duty. Disobeying the laws of the time was just the normal thing to do." She received honorary citizenship of the municipality of Ixelles.

Geulen's 100th birthday on 6 September 2021 was covered in the press in Belgium. The same year, a creche in Brussels was renamed in her honour. She died on 31 May 2022 in Ixelles.