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Andrée Geulen, Brussels, 1940s

Andrée Geulen

Video Gebärdensprache

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Andrée Geulen, gazing out at us determinedly from this photo, was a teacher in Belgium during the war. When the Gestapo asked her if she was not ashamed to be teaching Jews, she replied:

‘Aren’t you ashamed to be waging war on Jewish children?’

Andrée Geulen was interrogated in Brussels in 1943. When the Gestapo discovered that Jewish children were hidden in the boarding school where the young teacher was working, the school’s headmistress and her husband were taken to a concentration camp and murdered. But Andrée Geulen escaped arrest and continued to help save Jewish children. She established contact to a Jewish resistance group and was involved in many of the actions to save children – a story told, among other things, by the reproduction of her open notebook directly to the right of the photo. In this notebook and others like it, Andrée Geulen wrote down the names and addresses of hundreds of children from Jewish families. At their parents’ request, she collected the children and took them into safe hiding in Christian families or in convents and monasteries. Most of them survived the war there living under false names, safe from the Nazis.
Compared to Belgium, the network of persecution in neighbouring Holland or in Germany itself was very much tighter – not least due to the number of informers. But just a few of the people persecuted were helped by those around them – for instance, by an ID passed to them.