This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
—Winston Churchill, Harrow School, 29 October 1941
Throughout the time that the CDJ began hiding children in Belgium, it is estimated that nearly three thousand children were successfully hidden. Their work continued after the war, reuniting as many families as possible. They were particularly successful, thanks to the ingenious methods set up by Esta Heiber in her series of notebooks detailing which child was living where and under which assumed name.
In some instances where parents had perished, children stayed with their host families, went to existing family members, or were sent to Israel through the Youth Aliyah program, which specifically sought to locate child survivors in displaced persons camps.
Many attempts were made by resistance members to capture Fat Jacques, whose real name was Icek Glogowski, but none were successful. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1947 but was never found to fulfill his sentence.
In the case of both Nicole and Rivka/Rose, other CDJ operatives were sent to pick them up after the Gestapo had left, and they were taken to safe locations for the remainder of the war.
Odile Ovart and her husband Remy died in the concentration camps. Their daughter, Dédée, went on to start a foundation in their name that specializes in finding homes for needy children. They were named to the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for their work.
Ida Sterno, 1944, taken shortly after her liberation from Malines.
Ghert Jospa, Maurice Heiber, and Esta Heiber all survived their imprisonment.
Ida Sterno never fully recovered from her time in the Dossin Barracks in Malines. She continued to work as a social worker in aiding Jewish survivors until her death in 1964 at the age of sixty-two.
Andrée Geulen continued her work after the war by becoming actively involved with the Aid for Israelite Victims of the War. She married a Jewish man, Charles Herscovici, whose family perished in the camps, in 1948. They had two daughters.
In 1989, Andrée was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. She continued to meet with some of her “hidden children” for the rest of her life, and she never forgot a single name. She died in 2022 at the age of one hundred.
Andrée Geulen walking in the street in Brussels, 1944, on her way to pick up a Jewish child. German officers walk behind her.