Describing the cleavage of her testimony recounted in the Queens University exposition, Ms Geulen said of “ripping a child away from his mother and not telling her where we had taken it. , and let it cry and cry”. At least tell me, just tell me, where are you taking him? ‘”
“If I had had children then, I don’t know I would have been able to do it,” she said.
Each child is given a new name: Sarah becomes Suzanne, Moses becomes Marcel. But young children often don’t understand what’s wrong with their real names or why they can’t tell strangers they’re Jewish. One time, Ms. Geulen recounted, she was on a train with a girl she was carrying to safety when another passenger asked the girl’s name. The girl turned to Miss Geulen and asked, “Should I tell her my new name or my real name?” Fortunately, the passengers had no sympathy for the Nazis.
Ms. Geulen, code-named Claude Fournier, often had to walk long distances to her refuge in the countryside, carrying a suitcase in one hand and the child slung across her hip. She told Professor Griffin: “I would have to stop every 30 feet, put the suitcase down and switch the child to the other side.
Ms. Geulen was loved for her fluency in German and her blue eyes and shoulder-length blonde hair, giving her the image of the so-called Aryan women that the Nazis idealized. Once, she was walking alone on the sidewalks of Brussels on her way to pick up two children and write their names on a piece of paper hidden under the insole of one of her shoes. A street photographer snapped her shot at the moment a German officer happened to be striding a few steps behind her. Not knowing if she was staged, Ms. Geulen called her people in charge of the committee and was told to find someone to take the photo and deny it. Perhaps because he was disarmed by her beauty, he gave it to her, Professor Griffin said.
In May 1943, German troops raided Madame Geulen’s boarding school (today known as Isabelle Gatti de Gamond Royal Atheneum), where dozens of Jewish children were kept. The principal of the school, Odile Ovart, and her husband were sent to concentration camps, and they did not survive. Ms. Geulen was questioned but released. When a German officer told her she should be ashamed to teach Jewish children, she replied, “You are not ashamed to go to war with Jewish children!”
