Elisabeth Eidenbenz

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Elisabeth Eidenbenz (2nd row: 2nd from left) SAK staff meeting, Château de la Hille , 1941

Elisabeth Eidenbenz (born June 12, 1913 in Wila ; † May 23, 2011 in Zurich ; resident in Zurich) was a Swiss teacher . She was honored as Righteous Among the Nations .

The Maternité Suisse in Elne after its restoration
Evacuation of Spanish children by Ayuda Suiza in Madrid in 1937

Life

Elisabeth Eidenbenz grew up as the third oldest of six children of the Protestant pastor Johann Albrecht and his wife Marie Eidenbenz-Hess in Wila and Stäfa and attended elementary school there. Her grandfather, Hermann Eidenbenz, who immigrated from Germany, was Federal President of the Youth Association and in 1877 co-founder of the Blue Cross .

After training from 1929–1933 as a primary school teacher in the teacher’s seminar at the Zurich Daughter’s School, she graduated from the housekeeping school in Neukirch an der Thur in 1934 . She taught difficult-to-educate people in Winterthur and a class of fifty children in the industrial district in Zurich. She was enthusiastic about the Danish elementary school system and in 1937 attended a summer course at the Danebod private school in Fynshav , Denmark , from where she traveled directly to Spain at the request of Willi Begert from community service .

From January 1938, during the Spanish Civil War , she helped the Swiss Working Group for Spanish Children (SAS) ( Asociación de Ayuda Suiza a los niños de la guerra ) with the care of refugees and those in need. In the Ayuda Suiza headquarters in Burjassot , she took care of the staff household and later set up a canteen in Valencia where children could pick up soup and milk twice a day. She distributed clothes and shoes from the large camp. In December 1938 she returned to Switzerland.

After the defeat of the Republicans by the Franco troops, Karl Ketterer persuaded her to travel from Zurich to France at the end of January 1939 and to set up a maternity clinic in Brouilla near Perpignan , to which he could, with official permission, the pregnant women from the internment camps, where hundreds of thousands Spanish refugees lived in terrible conditions. From March to September 20, 1939, when it was closed, 33 children were born there.

In Elne , south of Perpignan, Elisabeth Eidenbenz found a replacement for Brouilla in the dilapidated Château d'Elne . The Swiss Working Group for Children in Spain (Ayuda Suiza, SAS) (from 1940 the Swiss Working Group for War Damaged Children SAK) financed the affordable purchase of the building and the two-month restoration work. She was able to set up the new Swiss maternity hospital, the Maternité suisse d'Elne , and from the beginning of December 1939 again took in pregnant women and malnourished children, regardless of nationality or regulations. In 1942, the Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross , as the successor to the SAK, took over maternity leave. The neutral Red Cross was prohibited from helping Jews who were “politically” persecuted in France. This had to be done covertly.

Rodolfo Olgiati organized Swiss midwives who came to help from the nursing school in Zurich for a few months. From December 1939 until it was closed, 603 children were born there, including around 200 to Jewish mothers, and many more were nursed to health. In April 1944, the castle was confiscated by the German military because the Allied invasion was expected. Within four days, everything had to be packed and moved to the Montagnac homestead near Saint-Côme-d'Olt ( Aveyron département ) inland, where fighting between the Resistance and the Wehrmacht was taking place. Elisabeth Eidenbenz returned to Switzerland in October 1944.

In Zurich she did an internship at the social women's school. Instead of going to school, she registered with the Swiss donation department and moved to Vienna in 1946 , where she looked after refugee children of displaced persons from German-speaking areas in Eastern Europe. She found a spacious villa in the Hadersdorf suburb of Vienna , where she set up a children's home for the youngest. The children's home was taken over in 1948 by the Swiss Protestant Churches (HEKS) and expanded with a home and child care school, where the unemployed refugee girls received training. After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Hungarian mothers were taken in with their children. Elisabeth Eidenbenz worked there until she retired in 1975 and then moved to Rekawinkel in the Vienna Woods.

From 2009 until her death in 2011 she lived in a retirement home in Zurich. She passed away at the age of 97. On May 27, 2011, her urn was buried in the Witikon Kirchhof cemetery.

The estate is in the Archives for Contemporary History in Zurich.

Awards and honors

  • Their commitment was forgotten. Only when a young Belgian diplomat of Jewish descent, Guy Eckstein, researched his birth certificate in 1991 and read the name of the responsible Swiss woman on the certificate of the office of Elne, did he research her and make her deeds known.
  • In 2002, around sixty of those who were once looked after by Eidenbenz returned to Elne to honor La Señorita , as survivors still call her today. Among them were Spaniards, Jews and Roma, some of whom owe their lives to Elisabeth Eidenbenz. For her courage and her extraordinary determination she was awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations by the hand of the Israeli Consul General in "her" castle . The castle was bought by the town of Elne and a museum on maternity was set up in it.
  • In 2005 she received an honorary doctorate from the Acadèmia de Ciències Mèdiques i de la Salut de Catalunya i de Balears , Barcelona.
  • In 2006 she was awarded the Golden Cross of Honor of the Civil Order of Queen Sofia De la Solidaridad in the Spanish Embassy in Vienna .
  • She received the Saint George's Cross from Catalonia .
  • She is an honorary citizen of the city of Elne.
  • In 2007 the French government made her a Knight (Chevalier) of the Legion of Honor .
  • In 2009 she was honored by the Wila City Council with the “Prize for Special Merit” and with the exhibition “Children of Elne” in the Museum of the Swiss Red Cross in Geneva.

Reports and brochures from the Swiss Association for Children in Spain (SAS)

  • Report by Elisabeth Eidenbenz about the milk distribution of the SAS in Burjasot-Valencia, December 1938, 2 pages
  • From the work for the Spanish refugee children in France. Letters from our Swiss employees, Zurich May 1939, 4 pages
  • Secretariat report, Zurich, May 3, 1939, 4 pages
  • Ruth von Wild: Report No. 1 of the Colonie Suisse LE LAC près Sigean, July 22, 1939, 5 pages
  • SAS (Ed.): "Ayuda Suiza", Zurich, 14 pages
  • SAS (Hrsg.): "Trikolore und Schweizerkreuz", Basel, 20 pages

Literature (selection)

  • Hélène Legrais: Les Enfants d'Élisabeth. Presses de la Cité, 2006, ISBN 978-2-258-07169-8 .
  • Assumpta Montellà: La maternidad de Elna: la historia de la mujer que salvó la vida a 597 niños . Now books, 2007, ISBN 978-84-96201-43-9
  • Tristan Castanier i Palau: Femmes en exile, mères des camps. Elisabeth Eidenbenz et la Maternité Suisse d'Elne (1939-1944 ). Trabucaire Editions 2008, ISBN 2-84974-074-8 .
  • Tristan Castanier i Palau: Elisabeth Eidenbenz i la maternitat suïssa d'Elna . Trabucaire Editions 2009, ISBN 2-84974-095-0 .
  • Helena Kanyar Becker: Elisabeth Eidenbenz. Founder of Maternité Suisse . In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women. Humanitarian aid to children and official refugee policy 1917–1948. Schwabe, Basel 2010, ISBN 978-3-7965-2695-4 .
  • Assumpta Montellà: Elisabeth Eidenbenz. Més enllà de la Maternitat d'Elna . Ara Llibres, 2011.

documentation

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of birth according to the municipality of Wila
  2. ↑ Eidenbenz, Elisabeth in: Archive for Contemporary History Zurich, accessed on May 29, 2011
  3. ^ Elisabeth Eidenbenz n'est plus. ( Memento of December 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: L'Indépendant . May 24, 2011, accessed June 1, 2011.
  4. ↑ Burials and burials. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 26, 2011, p. 18.
  5. ^ Vita on the page Anonymes, Justes et Persécutés durant la période Nazie dans les communes de France
  6. ^ Obituary and Vita , accessed on June 4, 2011 (French)
  7. ↑ helped 600 children into the world. in: Zürcher Oberländer from April 24, 2009 (PDF, page 7); Archive copy ( memento from June 2, 2011 on WebCite )
  8. ↑ Burials and burials on Friday, May 27, 2011: Eidenbenz, Elisabeth, born 1913, from Zurich, 8032 Zurich, Freiestrasse 65. 2 pm urn burial in the Witikon Kirchhof cemetery, followed by abdication in the Alte ref. Witikon Church. In: kirche-zh.ch from May 2011
  9. ↑ see: 600 children
  10. ↑ Lukas Leuzinger: Two women honored for merit ( Memento of the original from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Tages-Anzeiger from January 4, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tagesanzeiger.ch
personal data
SURNAME Eidenbenz, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss teacher
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Wila
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 2011
Place of death Zurich