Andrée Geulen-Herscovici

Andrée Geulen-Herscovici (* 1921 in Brussels , Belgium ) is a Belgian teacher, savior of Jews and Righteous Among the Nations . She helped save the lives of nearly 3,000 Jewish children and young people. Her work was only recognized in old age.

Life

She was born in Brussels in 1921. Considered rebellious and maladjusted as a teenager, she passionately discussed politics and organized food rations for Spain fighters. She came from a non-Jewish family. As a young, 20-year-old teacher, she was - as they say today - employed as an assistant teacher or trainee teacher. She taught at the Gaty de Gamond School in Brussels. One day she noticed that many of her students had to show up for class wearing the yellow star . Before she hadn't dealt much with the problem of the Jews, but now she was confronted directly. She thought about how she could help and came into contact with Ida Sterno , a helper of the secret and underground organization “ Comite de Defense des Juifs ”. After an attack by the Gestapo on the school in May 1943, where Jewish children and young people were initially kept safe during the holidays, she noticed how brutal the Gestapo were against the youngest. She was asked by a Gestapo employee why she was teaching Jewish children at all, and answered fearlessly with the legendary sentence: “ And why are you waging war against Jewish children? ". The headmistress and her husband were deported and later murdered; she managed to jump underground. Under the pseudonym " Claude Fournier " she rented an apartment with her colleague Ida Sterno and was able to work on her work from there. She tried to take children and young people from their parents with them and to place them safely with Christian families or in monasteries. When her colleague Ida Sterno came to the concentration camp in 1944 and was murdered there, she went on all by herself. She made a list of real names and addresses, which she kept in up to five different safes. It was a constant cat-and-mouse game with the Gestapo. The parents did not know where the children were going. The children were given pseudonyms or changed names so that it actually worked, and the Christian families kept silent about the Gestapo, which saved the children's lives. In the end it is said to have been the unbelievable number of 3,000 children over two and a half years who saved them.

After the end of the Second World War and the Third Reich, she began, together with surviving parents and aid organizations, to find the parents of the children or the corresponding children. Most of the children were orphans by now. She herself married a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Herscovici and had two children. Many surviving children met her again and again and saw her as their second mother. The honors did not start until the end of the 1980s, and she never got a name like Oskar Schindler , although she is sometimes called the “female Oskar Schindler”. She lives in Brussels today.

Awards (selection)

• Righteous Among the Nations, since 1989.
• Honorary Citizen of the State of Israel since 2007.

swell

• Yad Vashem - The Righteous Among the Nations
• Andree Geulen-Herscovici granted honorary Israeli citizenship