One summer day in 1942, when some students at a Brussels elementary school arrived with yellow stars sewn onto their clothes, their twenty-one-year-old teacher made a decision that would define her entire life. Andrée Geulen could not bear to see the stigmatized children — so she ordered everyone, without exception, to wear aprons that covered their chests. This act of defiance against the occupation’s regulations was only the beginning.
From Classroom to Resistance
Andrée Geulen came from a liberal family of the Brussels bourgeoisie and grew up in Schaerbeek, one of the capital’s districts. The German invasion in May 1940 found her on the threshold of a teaching career.
Two years later, when she took a job in an elementary school in central Brussels, Belgium was already under full control of the occupiers, and anti-Jewish regulations were tightening like a noose.
In the spring of 1943, through her friend Ida Sterno, Geulen joined the Committee for the Defense of Jews — a small organization where Jews and non-Jews worked together to save children from deportation. She was one of the few non-Jewish members, which paradoxically made her invaluable to the resistance. She could move around the city without arousing suspicion, visit families, and persuade terrified parents to entrust their children to strangers.
The hardest part of the task was convincing the parents. Geulen had to ask mothers and fathers to pack a suitcase for a two- or three-year-old and let her take the child to an unknown place, with no contact, no guarantee of reunion. She later admitted that remembering these farewells still brought her to tears.
Night at the Gatti de Gamond School
Geulen taught and lived at the Athénée royal Isabelle Gatti de Gamond boarding school, where the headmistress Odile Ovart-Henri agreed to hide twelve Jewish children. In May 1943, the Germans conducted a nighttime raid. Children were brutally dragged from their beds for identity checks.
When one of the Germans asked Geulen if she was ashamed to teach Jewish children, she retorted: wasn’t he ashamed to wage war on Jewish children? This bold reply could have cost her life, but her interrogator let her go. The school leadership — Odile and her husband Remy — were not as fortunate. Both were deported to a concentration camp and did not survive the war.
After the raid, Geulen went further underground. She assumed a false identity as Claude Fournier and continued her work until the liberation of Brussels in September 1944. When a year earlier Ida Sterno was arrested and sent to the transit camp in Malines, Geulen risked her life by visiting her friend under her assumed name.
Three Hundred Children
In over two years of clandestine work, Andrée Geulen personally took responsibility for the fate of three hundred Jewish children. She collected them from families, accompanied them on journeys to Catholic schools, convents, and private homes, and then visited regularly to check their welfare and provide for their needs.
Officially, she kept no records — she memorized all names and addresses. Secretly, however, she made notes linking the children’s real names to their new identities.
These notes proved invaluable after the war, when it was necessary to find the surviving children and reunite them with their families or relatives who survived. Geulen became just as involved in this postwar work as she had been in organizing the hiding. For decades, she kept in touch with „her” children, amazing them with her memory of details from their wartime childhoods.
In 1989, the Israeli Yad Vashem institute honored her as Righteous Among the Nations. Eighteen years later, she received honorary citizenship of Israel. She died in May 2022, at the age of one hundred, as one of the last living witnesses of the organized rescue of Jewish children in occupied Europe.
Margot Cleverly
Margot's journey into women's history began with a box of forgotten letters in a Cambridge archive – suffragettes whose voices had been silenced for over a century. Since then, she's been on a mission to uncover the stories history overlooked.
What she writes about: Queens who ruled from the shadows. Scientists whose male colleagues took credit. Revolutionaries who risked everything. But also ordinary women – those who survived wars, raised families through upheaval, and shaped their communities in ways no one bothered to record.
Margot turns historical figures into real people. She writes with warmth and detail, making centuries-old stories feel surprisingly relevant. Rigorous research meets accessible storytelling – no dusty academic jargon, just compelling narratives backed by solid facts.
When she's not writing, you'll find her in regional archives, collecting oral histories, or visiting sites connected to the women she writes about.