Château de la Hille

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Meeting of employees of children's aid in 1941 at La Hille Castle
Locations of internment camps and SAK / SRK colonies (selection)

The Château de la Hille in Montégut-Plantaurel near Toulouse in the Ariège department is a French castle built at the beginning of the 16th century that was rented by the Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross (SRK) for four years as a colony of La Hille for refugee children during the Second World War has been.

prehistory

From 1933 onwards, Jewish parents gave their children into foreign care in order to at least be able to save them from National Socialist persecution. The 100 Jewish children of La Hille came from Germany, Austria and Poland, were previously housed in two homes in Belgium and had to flee to southern France after the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in May 1940, where they lived in an old, crumbling house in Seyre in the canton Nailloux were housed.

Second World War

The last twenty years uninhabited castle was founded in September 1940 by the Swiss Association for war-affected children (SAK) (from January 1, 1942 Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross SRC rented) and using the older Jewish youth as child and adolescent home colony La Hille set . In June 1941 the Jewish children were able to move into the castle. Later war-damaged children from Spain and France were also admitted.

In May 1941, Rösli Näf was appointed as the new director by SAK director Rodolfo Olgiati . Her job required great independence, because the instructions of the SAK delegate for southern France, Maurice Dubois , were kept to a minimum. In the first phase, the Swiss staff of the SAK waived the modest wages and only claimed board and lodging.

The castle was almost without water, heating and electricity, which was especially tough in winter. Näf had to organize the household and food, the laundry had to be washed and mended, and Mrs. Schlesinger, who had fled Vienna, helped in the kitchen. The kitchen was supplied with things, some of which came from Switzerland. The daily routine was very structured: housework, field work and handicrafts for self-sufficiency and school lessons. Under the guidance of Swiss supervisors and teachers, the children and young people helped to prepare the castle and received training, for example in the carpenter's workshop. The older youth were also teachers for the younger ones. 17-year-old Edward Nussbaum wired the electricity in the castle and taught math. For almost all children sponsorships could be made possible in Switzerland, as many could not receive messages from their parents. Before August 1942, 22 children were brought to America by a Quaker aid organization .

In the summer of 1942, at the request of Nazi Germany, the Vichy regime approved the deportation of 10,000 foreign Jews, thus starting the deportations from the southern zone. On August 26, 1942, 45 Jewish youths over the age of 16 and employees from La Hille (as well as some from Saint-Cergues-les-Voirons ) were taken by the French police to the Le Vernet internment camp, from where they were to be deported. When Näf found out where her protégés were, she drove to Le Vernet and obtained permission to enter the camp so that she could be with them. With the help of the Swiss embassy, ​​the SRC delegate Maurice Dubois was able to obtain the consent of the general secretary of the police of the Vichy regime, René Bousquet , that all arrested persons should return to La Hille (and Saint-Cergues-les-Voirons) from the government in Vichy were allowed to. They had to stay in the camp until September 2nd and witness how 400 people were deported from Le Vernet. A few days later, Näf traveled to Bern, where she asked the head of the SRK children's aid , Hugo Remund , to bring the endangered Jewish children to safety in Switzerland. The SRK Children's Aid Committee had repeatedly intervened with the federal authorities to bring all 168 Jewish residents or at least 80 over 16-year-olds in the SRK homes to Switzerland. However, the invasion of the French southern zone on November 11, 1942, after the Allies landed in North Africa on November 8, 1942, nullified this plan.

Escape assistance

After the complete German occupation of France, legal emigration was no longer possible. When the Jewish population was asked to report to the authorities in December 1942, several older youths decided to go abroad on their own. Because Näf couldn't stop them, she gave them money and food.

Some young people had chosen the route via Haute-Savoie , where Germaine Hommel and Renée Farny from the colony of Saint-Cergues- les-Voirons , who had previously been asked by Rösli Näf, helped them across the Swiss border. The last group of five young people got lost 50 m from the Swiss border and was picked up by German and French border guards on the night of January 1st, 1943. One girl was able to escape, one was allowed to return to the castle and three were deported were. Four young people who paid an escape helper to flee to Spain were betrayed by him, picked up by the police and deported to Auschwitz . One of them survived the concentration camp.

On behalf of the SRK Children's Aid Committee, Näf, Hommel and Farny had violated the Red Cross' principle of neutrality with their illegal escape assistance and thus endangered the entire work of the SRC in France and he decided to transfer them. Näf returned to Switzerland in May 1943, where in November 1943 she was appointed deputy head of the Center Henri-Dunant in Geneva, which was taken over by the SRK Children's Aid .

In February 1943, when the number of deportations increased again, four Jewish youths were arrested by La Hille, two were allowed back to the castle and two were deported. The two deportees had been turned back during an earlier attempt to escape to Switzerland. After the intervention of the SRC and the Swiss embassy in Vichy and the release of the young people from La Hille and other SRK homes in September 1942, the Jewish children in the SRK homes, with the exception of these two youths, were left unmolested. The young people at risk had a hiding place in the castle, which they sought out beforehand when there were police checks in the castle, others were placed outside the castle with farmers or as domestic servants. Some SRK homes were able to take in Jewish children from other homes that they had hidden until 1944.

When Emma Ott took over the management of the Château de La Hille children's colony in October 1943 , most of the young people had already fled. Despite the SRK's ban, it was not possible to prevent further escapes. From May 1943 until her last rescue trip in May 1944, Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet worked in the castle. She was able to save twelve Jewish children by organizing and sometimes accompanying the illegal escape across the Swiss border. The escape route led from La Hille via Toulouse , Lyon , Montluel children's colony , Champagnole , where the escape helpers ("Passeusen") and Resistance members Victoria and Madeleine Cordier lived, to Chappelle-des-Bois. From Chapelle-des-Bois, where the mother of the two Cordier sisters was, via the Gy de l'Echelle path carved into the rock on Mont Risoux to the meeting point on the Swiss side in the logger's hut Hôtel d'Italie . There the Jewish refugee children were picked up by Im Hof-Piguet's father, the forest inspector Henri-Joseph Piguet, who lived in nearby Le Sentier , to be taken to the refugee pastor Vogt in Zurich .

In May 1944 Emma Ott accompanied four Jewish girls to Pamiers , where they were hidden in an orphanage of the Franciscan monastery before they were brought to Palestine via Spain. Ott left La Hille in March 1945 because she was needed as head of maternity leave in Montagnac .

Of the older Jewish youths who left La Hille , 12 managed to flee across the Pyrenees and 24 to Switzerland - partly with the help of the American-Jewish aid organization Joint - 19 found shelter with French farmers as domestic workers, 7 in monasteries and one couple joined the Resistance . The eight young people who were turned back in an earlier attempt to flee to Switzerland included two of those who were deported after the betrayed attempt to escape and the two who were arrested and deported in the castle. Some managed to get to Switzerland in safety despite being rejected several times at the border.

In autumn 1944, nine of the older Jewish youths were still in the castle. In 1945 La Hille was abolished, children were sent home with a home and the rest were distributed to other SRK colonies.

literature

  • Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet : La filière en France occupée, 1942–1944 . Editions de la Thièle, Yverdon-les-Bains 1985, ISBN 2-8283-0019-6 .
    • German: escape route through the back door. A Red Cross helper in occupied France 1942–1944 . Verlag im Waldgut, Frauenfeld 1985, ISBN 3-7294-0045-2 .
  • Sebastian Steiger: The children of La Hille Castle . Brunnen-Verlag, Basel 1992, ISBN 3-7655-1540-X .
  • Antonia Schmidlin: Another Switzerland. Helpers, children of war and humanitarian policy 1933–1942. Chronos Verlag, Zurich 1999, ISBN 3-905313-04-9 .
  • Meir Wagner, Moshe Meisels: The Righteous of Switzerland: Heroes of the Holocaust . KTAV Publishing House, Hoboken NJ 2001, ISBN 0-88125-698-6 .
  • Odile Munos-du Peloux: Passer en Suisse, les passages clandestins entre la Haute-Savoie et la Suisse, 1940–1944 . Press Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble 2002, ISBN 2-7061-1073-2 .
  • Vera Friedländer: The children of La Hille. Escape and rescue from deportation . Construction Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-7466-8106-5 .
  • Yagil Limore: Chrétiens et Juifs sous Vichy (1940-1944). Sauvetage et désobéissance civile. Foreword by Yehuda Bauer. 2005, ISBN 2-204-07585-X .
  • Tristan Castanier i Palau: Femmes en exil, Mères des camps, Élisabeth Eidenbenz et la Maternité suisse d'Elne (1939–1944). Editions Trabucaire, 2008, ISBN 978-2-84974-074-3 .
  • Antonia Schmidlin: The children's home in La Hille: Rösli Näf. One of the brave, heroic women our homeland looks up to with pride. In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women. Humanitarian aid to children and official refugee policy 1917–1948. Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2010, ISBN 978-3-7965-2695-4 .
  • Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942–1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare. Karolinger, Vienna / Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-85418-147-7 .
  • Franziska Greising: Alive. Novel. Zytglogge Verlag, Basel 2016, ISBN 978-3-7296-0913-6 . (Historical novel about the work of Rösli Näf as Directrice of La Hille.)

documentation

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antonia Schmidlin: The children's home in La Hille: Rösli Näf. One of the brave, heroic women our homeland looks up to with pride. In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women. Humanitarian aid to children and official refugee policy 1917–1948.
  2. ↑ Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942-1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare . Karolinger Verlag, Vienna Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-85418-147-7 , p. 221.
  3. ↑ Helena Kanyar Becker: La Hille Castle: Emma Ott. Woman in the background. In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women. Humanitarian aid to children and official refugee policy 1917–1948.
  4. ^ Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet: Juste parmis les nations at artfilm.ch .

Coordinates: 43 ° 4 ′ 43.9 "  N , 1 ° 28 ′ 17.4"  E