Obit & Tears to Eyes - Andrée Geulen, Savior of Jewish Children in Wartime, Dies at 100
Posted 06-08-2022 at 12:51 PM by jbgusa
This obituary, Andrée Geulen, Savior of Jewish Children in Wartime, Dies at 100 (link), literally brought tears to my eyes, three or four times while reading. A few excerpts:
Sadly, the world suffers these events repeatedly. All too often, they focus on the Jews, who hold a minuscule place in the world, population-wise. The "civilized world" shrugged their collective shoulders, and finger-pointed, during the years that people could have been rescued. See, for example, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the Holocaust,by Rafael Medoff. All I can say is "wow." Medoff's tour d' force is of a similar vein to While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy by Arthur D. Morse. About two years ago I read 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik. Where was the virtue, as opposed to virtue-signalling, back then?
Quote:
For that, she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and research center in Jerusalem, as a Righteous Among the Nations, a recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. She was made an honorary citizen of Israel.....
Describing the separations in her testimony recounted in the Queens College exhibition, Ms. Geulen spoke of how hard it was “to tear a child away from his mother and not tell her where we were taking him, and to have her cry and cry, ‘Tell me at least, only tell me, where you’re going to take him?’”
“If I’d had children then, I don’t know that I could have done it,” she said.
Each child was given a new name: Sarah became Suzanne, Moses became Marcel. But young children often didn’t understand what was wrong with their real names, or why they couldn’t tell strangers that they were Jewish. One time, Ms. Geulen recalled, she was on a train with a girl she was smuggling to safety when another passenger asked the girl her name. The girl turned to Ms. Geulen and asked, “Should I tell her my new name or my real name?” Luckily, the passenger was not sympathetic to the Nazis....
When a German officer told her that she should be ashamed of teaching Jewish children, she responded, “Aren’t you ashamed to make war on Jewish children!”....
Describing the separations in her testimony recounted in the Queens College exhibition, Ms. Geulen spoke of how hard it was “to tear a child away from his mother and not tell her where we were taking him, and to have her cry and cry, ‘Tell me at least, only tell me, where you’re going to take him?’”
“If I’d had children then, I don’t know that I could have done it,” she said.
Each child was given a new name: Sarah became Suzanne, Moses became Marcel. But young children often didn’t understand what was wrong with their real names, or why they couldn’t tell strangers that they were Jewish. One time, Ms. Geulen recalled, she was on a train with a girl she was smuggling to safety when another passenger asked the girl her name. The girl turned to Ms. Geulen and asked, “Should I tell her my new name or my real name?” Luckily, the passenger was not sympathetic to the Nazis....
When a German officer told her that she should be ashamed of teaching Jewish children, she responded, “Aren’t you ashamed to make war on Jewish children!”....
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