Andrée Geulen-Herscovici, a Belgian Resistance fighter who was named Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jewish children during the Holocaust, has died at the age of 100, La Dernière Heure news site reported.
Geulen-Herscovici, who was born in 1921, was a young teacher in Brussels during World War II. After learning of the plight of the Jews, especially Jewish children, she joined the CDJ (Committee for the Defence of Jews) resistance underground with 11 other women, where she focused on saving children.
Using fake identities, she personally placed more than 300 Jewish children in foster care where they were able to hide. The network she worked with saved 3,000 Jewish children from perishing in the Holocaust.
“When fetching the children, we would never tell the parents where we would hide them. I am aware of how cruel this must have been for the parents to hand their children over to an unknown person (naturally we couldn’t tell them who we were and only introduced ourselves as members of the resistance) and who wouldn’t even tell them where they were taking their child. But this was an indispensable security measure. Actually, we had learned from experience that even if we gave the parents the addresses on condition that they promise not to go see their children, they couldn’t keep from going to visit them, thus compromising their security,” Geulen-Herscovici told Yad Vashem.
“Often when we went to see the Jewish families we would find ourselves in the middle of a roundup: blocked roads, soldiers at all corners and trucks for the transport of the people caught in the hunt. Fortunately we almost always managed to save some children… we would pass the roadblocks with one child in a pram, holding the hands of two others. The soldiers would shy away from a mother with many children. Thus the children were saved, but the parents…”
After the war ended, Geulen-Herscovici studied to become a social worker and helped to reunite as many of the children as possible with their families.
In 2012, she was honored by the EJC for her heroic acts at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event.
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