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(JTA) — The toughest half, Andrée Geulen stated, was not hiding from the Nazis, and even confronting them; it was separating Jewish kids from their dad and mom.
Geulen, a Belgian girl who rescued a whole bunch of Jewish kids as a part of the Belgian underground, died in Brussels on Might 31 at 100. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, acknowledged her as a Righteous Among the many Nations in 1989.
In later years she stated her most agonizing reminiscences had been wrenching kids, some as younger as 5 days, from their dad and mom.
“Taking kids that approach, from a mom who has simply given start, is horrible,” The Washington Submit quoted Geulen as telling Anne Griffin, a historian of the Belgian resistance. “Getting onto a practice with Jewish kids, realizing that the Germans might additionally get on, that didn’t frighten me. However to tear a toddler away from his mom, and never inform her the place we had been taking him, and to have her cry and cry, ‘Inform me, not less than, solely inform me the place you’re going to take him!’”
Geulen, a placing blonde, recalled to Yad Vashem how she would casually stroll her prices by Nazi roadblocks.
“Typically after we went to see the Jewish households we might discover ourselves in the midst of a roundup: blocked roads, troopers in any respect corners and vans for the transport of the folks caught within the hunt,” she stated in oral testimony to the memorial. “Thankfully we nearly all the time managed to avoid wasting kids… we might move the roadblocks with one baby in a pram, holding the arms of two others. The troopers would shrink back from a mom with many kids.”
Geulen was a instructor at a women’ college, in her late teenagers herself when she seen a few of her college students come to highschool in the future clutching their notebooks tightly to their chests; they had been attempting to hide newly bestowed yellow stars figuring out them as Jews. She had all her college students put on aprons so there can be no distinctions inside the college partitions.
Just a few weeks later, some kids began not exhibiting up in any respect. She discovered they’d been deported. She joined the Committee for the Protection of Jews and labored with one other 11 girls who collectively saved the lives of three,000 Jewish kids. She was the final survivor of the group.
Geulen was instructing at a faculty concealing 12 Jewish kids in 1943 when the German occupiers, performing on a tip, raided. They deported and murdered 12 kids and the headmistress, Odile Ovart, and her husband (whom Yad Vashem additionally named Righteous Among the many Nations).
A German interrogated Geulen and requested her if she was not ashamed to hide Jewish kids. “Aren’t you ashamed to make conflict on Jewish kids?” she retorted.
She was launched, and instantly set about warning the college’s different Jewish kids not to return.
Geulen’s work didn’t finish with the conflict. The committee stored books monitoring the place the kids had been hidden, and he or she used a posh code, in case the notebooks fell into the incorrect arms, to trace down the kids, reunite them with their dad and mom when she might and information them in different instances by the struggling of realizing they might by no means once more see their dad and mom.
She married Charles Herscovici, a Jewish man whose dad and mom perished within the Holocaust. He died in 2005. She is survived by two daughters, 5 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren.
She can be survived by a dwindling variety of the kids she rescued. Even many years after the horrors she saved them from, she wouldn’t spare them her love.
“You positioned your little hand in mine (the opposite hand-held on to the big suitcase with all of the treasures ready with tears by your moms), and we left on our journey,” she stated at a Yad Vashem reunion with the kids in 1998. “I cherished you then a lot; I nonetheless love you as a lot right this moment.”
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