The story of Geulen is inspirational and incredible. Photo: Jackson David/Unsplash
Andree Geulen was a 20-year-old teacher in Nazi-occupied Belgium when she noticed that Jewish students at her all-girls school were coming to class wearing yellow stars, or just not showing up at all. She told all her students, including those who weren't Jewish, to wear an apron to school to cover the hateful symbol.
That was just the beginning.
Geulen would go on to save at least 300 Jewish children herself and more than 2,000 with her group of resistance operators during the Holocaust.She died on May 31 in Belgium. She was 100 years old.
Her grandson Nicolas Burniat and granddaughter Julie Hellenbosch, spoke with USA Today about her remarkable story of courage, compassion and humility. (Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity).
Nicolas: My grandmother didn't wait for the war to be politically engaged. When she was 15 the Spanish Civil War started, and she opposed her father. She immediately started to contribute to supporting the Republican refugees and challenging her father in the process. He was bourgeois. She convinced him to donate funds for Spanish kids, so she was the rebellious one in her family of conservative people. She was already politically aware.
When (World War II) started she was 20 and working as a teacher. In 1942, her students had to wear the star and the roundups started. She worked in a Jewish neighbourhood and realised her students were disappearing; she realized they were being taken by the Nazis and not coming back.
She immediately decided to take action, and the word spread. The head of the school, Odile Ovart, was in the resistance and introduced her to Ida Sterno, a member of the "Comite de Defense des Juifs" (Jewish Defense Committee) in 1942. She said to my grandma that there was a section devoted to saving kids and asked if she would want to help. She said yes with no hesitation. That's when her underground work started.
There were three divisions in the children's section, and they were all run by women, mostly social workers, before underground work. One was in charge of finances: food stamps and money for families who would host kids. Another was responsible for finding the host families, or the monasteries, and convents, because many of the kids were hidden in religious institutions.
The third section, which my grandma was in, was responsible for taking the kids from their parents and moving them to the host family or to the institutions. She was chosen for the third section because she was blond, spoke German and wasn't Jewish. It would have been too risky for a Jewish woman to do that work.
The Jewish parents would go to the committee for help, saying "We see our neighbours being taken away by Germans," and the committee would say, "Someone will come. Be ready."
My grandma would then come to see the Jewish families and tell them, "I am coming back in one to two days: Have a suitcase ready." She would explain what would happen and that their child would get a new name. She also would tell them that they won't be able to know his or her new address.
Then, she would come back after one to two days. She said she was always afraid roundups would happen before she came back, so she had to be quick. Then, she would bring the kids to the hiding place, which could be in Brussels or outside the city. She went all over Belgium.
Tell me about the notebooks she used to keep track of the children.
Nicolas: What is really interesting is how they encoded the children in notebooks. They had a very clever system because they had to make sure that nobody could find the children if they came across some of the books while ensuring that they could retrace the kids and their families after the war.
So, in one notebook in one office there would be real names with codes. In another notebook there would be fake names and codes. And in another notebook with codes with the original address. Then in another notebook there would be codes with the new address. The books were kept in difference places for security reasons. It was so well done that no kids were arrested.
All the kids that were hidden survived.
After the war she helped reunite hidden children with their parents for those that survived. She worked first with the "Aide aux Israelites Victimes de la Guerre," and then with the American Army as part of the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She learned to drive with the American Army on a US jeep. She did that for years after the war and helped kids who didn't have parents, because very few kids were reunited with parents. Many were orphans.
It was extremely dangerous work. There is a famous black and white photograph of her walking in the streets with a Gestapo officer in uniform, just steps behind her. Someone took a picture and at that moment, in her shoe, she had a paper slip with the name of two kids she was about to pick up.
There was a story she told us that once she was with a child and she had just told the kid, "This is your new name." Someone next to them turned and said, "You're such a cute child, what's your name?" And the child turned to her and said, "which name should I give: the real one or the fake one?"
She could have been caught at any time.
What was she like, as a person?
Julie: For us she was a grandmother. She loved people. We have stories of her in hotels volunteering to translate German and Italian, even though she didn't speak a word of Italian. We saw people coming from her house a lot, friends from the war and postwar, people whom we found out later were children she had hidden.
She was also very loving and very strict. When we went into primary school she retired early and focused on our education. We could not leave the table until we finished our lessons. It was her way or the highway.
She had the certitude that she knew what was right and what was wrong, and this helped her during the war.
What did she say about her experience during that time?
Nicolas: When we were kids she didn't talk about it. The kids she'd hidden didn't talk about it, either. Some of the hidden children discovered later in life that they had been hidden, and then they discovered they'd been hidden by her.
The first time I was told about the war was about 10. My grandfather, her husband, was Jewish. His whole family was killed in Auschwitz apart from his two brothers. One of them was an Auschwitz survivor. I remember I saw his tattoo and then that was when we had the first conversation.
My grandfather never talked about it. The loss of his parents was too traumatic.
At about the same time in the mid-1980s, the hidden children started speaking up. People were coming to our house and calling her "mum." That was how the conversation started.
She told a story of one mother who had three kids whom she had come to take and hide: The oldest were seven and 10; the youngest was five. The mother refused to let the five-year-old leave her side and told her, "What happens to me happens to him." Five days later they were taken and killed.
She told us that she would not have been able to do what she did if she had been a mother herself. She talked about how difficult it was to take kids away from their parents. – USA Today/Tribune News Service
