Andrée Geulen
Belgian Righteous Among the Nations (1921–2022)
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici (6 September 1921 – 31 May 2022) was a Belgian teacher and member of the resistance during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. After becoming aware of the persecution of Belgian Jews through her employment, she became involved in the Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ; Joods Verdedigingscomité, JVC) in 1943 and actively assisted with the organisation and protection of "hidden children" amid the Holocaust in Belgium. In the aftermath of the war, she was recognised as Righteous among the Nations by the Israeli institute Yad Vashem and received several other honours in Belgium and Israel.
Biography
Career and resistance activities
Andrée Geulen was born in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, on 6 September 1921 into a liberal family of the urban bourgeoisie. After the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, the country was placed under military occupation and Geulen became a schoolteacher and received a job in a primary school in central Brussels in 1942. She became aware of the escalating persecution of Jews through witnessing the introduction of the compulsory yellow badge used to identify Jews in public among the pupils in her class.
Through an introduction by Ida Sterno, another teacher in the same school, Geulen became involved with the small Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ; Joods Verdedigingscomité, JVC) in the spring of 1943 and became one of its few non-Jewish members. Her role was to contact Jewish families in Brussels and to persuade them to give up their children to the care of CDJ/JVC who would place them as "hidden children" in the care of Catholic families, schools, and religious institutions under false identities. Geulen was among a number of women members in its "Children" section.
Geulen taught and lived at the Athénée royal Isabelle Gatti de Gamond, a boarding school in the Brussels suburb of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, whose headmistress, Odile Ovart-Henri, had already agreed to host 12 hidden children at the school. The school on the Rue André Fauchille was raided by the German authorities on Pentecost in May 1943 and some of the children were detained.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Andrée Geulen” is belgian Righteous Among the Nations (1921–2022). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Andrée, Geulen and Belgian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2848953. VIAF identifies the subject as 315085019. The Library of Congress control number is no2015026693. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 2022, 1943 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Andrée Geulen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.