III.2. La Croix-Rouge suisse, Secours aux enfants. Les grandes figures de Justes et le sauvetage

Abstract

By recommendation of the government, the Swiss Red Cross merged with the volunteer organisation Secours aux enfants (Children’s Aid Society) at the end of 1941, even though it had been involved in this issue since 1917. Between 1933 and 1939, Mathilde Paravicini, on behalf of the Comite suisse d’aide aux enfants d’emigres (Swiss Emigrant Children’s Assistance Committee), gave approximately 5,000 children of emigrants safe haven in Switzerland. Young Swiss men and women sided with the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War alongside the Comite neutre de secours aux enfants d’Espagne (Neutral Assistance Committee for Spanish Children), a popular organisation known as Ayuda suiza. During the winter of 1939, they took care of Catalan, Spanish, French, and later Jewish children in southern France. By January 1940, they oversaw, as part of the Cartel suisse de secours aux enfants victimes de la guerre (Swiss Aid Association for Child War Victims), ten children’s homes, two infant care centres, and a nursery for mothers and young children. In the 1940s, nurses started setting up temporary health clinics in prison camps, where they took care of children and the elderly. The directors of the Swiss Red Cross, specifically the top officers in Bern, tried to stop young activists from saving Jews. Until the summer of 1944, Switzerland’s official policy did not accept refugees “solely for racial reasons”. The result was the tragic conflicts that occurred in southern France. The Red Cross and Children’s Aid Society failed to fulfill their humanitarian mission. The officers even refused to save 500 Jewish children from deportation to extermination camps. The organisation’s workers, however, stepped in to usher them to safety.The founder of the nursery in Elne, Elisabeth Eidenbenz, was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, alongside the nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter, who saved Jewish children and adults at the Rivesaltes Camps, and her eventual husband, August Bohny, who protected Jewish refugees in the children’s homes in Chambon-sur-Lignon. Rosa Naf, Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet, Gret Tobler, and Sebastian Steiger, who saved adults and children in the La Hille children’s home, were also honoured at Yad Vashem, as well as Maurice Dubois, the director of the Swiss Aid Association for Child War Victims in southern France. The administrators of Yad Vashem declined to recognise the children’s home directors Ruth von Wild, Elsa Ruth, and Emma Ott, even though they also saved Jewish children and adults. In honour of her efforts to protect French refugees and children and bring them to safety in Switzerland, Mathilde Paravicini was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government after the end of WWII.