Elsbeth Kasser

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Elsbeth Kasser (left), Gurs, 1942
Camp Gurs around 1939
Children in the Spanish Civil War before evacuation

Elsbeth Kasser (born May 11, 1910 in Niederscherli ; † May 15, 1992 in Steffisburg ) was a Swiss nurse .

life and work

Elsbeth Kasser grew up as the middle of five children of the Protestant Bernese country pastor Friedrich Kasser and his wife Anna von Greyerz in Niederscherli and Rohrbach . Helping others was taken for granted in the rectory. Her father was involved in the Blue Cross Association. Her aunt Pauline von Greyerz was a pioneer of the label movement (social buyers league). Elsbeth Kasser and her sister had founded a kindergarten for working-class children who had been left to fend for themselves. After secondary school, she completed language stays in French-speaking Switzerland and England , trained as a nurse in Thun and Bern and completed additional training in caring for people with typhus.

Through her aunt, she became acquainted with Regina Kägi-Fuchsmann and came into contact with the religious and social movement and socialist women's groups, which in autumn 1936 organized money collections and food shipments for Madrid , which was besieged during the Spanish Civil War .

She committed to a mission in Spain, where she first cared for typhus sufferers in a sanatorium for refugees in Puigcerdà , which was supported by the socialist women of Switzerland. Since she was troubled by the rigid political fronts, she joined the evacuation group of the Swiss Working Group for Spanish Children (SAS) (Ayuda Suiza) in Madrid, where committed community service workers - such as their secretary Rodolfo Olgiati - were active. She helped distribute food to children, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly, and ran the canteen in Madrid, which had been set up to cater for 400 people over 75 years of age. After the end of the civil war, she returned to Switzerland in the winter of 1939.

In February 1940 she flew with the surgical group of the Swiss Red Cross to Finland, which was attacked by the Red Army, and helped in the hospitals in Helsinki and at the front.

In the summer of 1940 she reported to the central secretary of the Swiss Working Group for War Damaged Children (SAK) (from 1942 Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross ) Rodolfo Olgiati in Bern to help in the internment camps in southern France. Maurice Dubois at the headquarters in Toulouse sent her to the Gurs internment camp , where she worked from 1940–1943. Around 15,000 Spanish refugees from the civil war were housed in the Gurs camp in 1939.

When people from half of Europe fled the Nazis in the spring of 1940, over 6,000 Jewish deportees from Germany came to the Gurs camp in October 1940 as a result of the Wagner-Bürckel campaign . With the establishment of the first Swiss barrack in the internment camps, Kasser brought new hope to Gurs, which was marked by hunger, disease and death. In addition to the distribution of food and physical care, it helped to create new life and day-to-day structures and also promoted education and cultural events with the interned artists. The artists supervised and supported by Kasser in Gurs include Leo Bauer , Max Lingner , Julius Collen Turner and Horst Rosenthal .

In June 1942 Elsbeth Kasser had to return to Switzerland because of an illness and Emma Ott took over her position. When she returned in early autumn, the deportations of Jews to the extermination camps in Germany had already started.

In 1943 Elsbeth Kasser returned to Switzerland to live with her seriously ill father. After his death, she worked as an inspector in Swiss refugee camps and helped with the evacuation in autumn 1944 to bring children from France across the border near Delle at risk of death . In June 1945, as part of the “Buchenwaldkinder” campaign run by the Swiss Donation Agency , she brought around 370 children from the Buchenwald concentration camp that had just been liberated to Switzerland, including Jan Krugier .

At the beginning of 1945 she was appointed to the executive committee (working committee) of SRK Kinderhilfe as a representative of the Swiss Red Cross . At the end of 1945 she went to Vienna and Hungary to set up aid projects for children and to organize children's trains to Switzerland. From 1947 to 1948 she was a delegate for the Swiss donation in Finland and provided relief supplies, hospital facilities and medication to help people help themselves.

In Switzerland she was the director of Fritz Wartenweiler's Volksbildungsheim Herzberg and director of the integration courses for physically handicapped young people in Gwatt from 1950–1951 . In the Zurich Waidspital she developed what was then a new type of therapy, occupational therapy , and was a co-founder of the new occupational therapy school. After her retirement in 1973, she founded a school for activation therapy in Zurich and in the Bärau home in Emmental and worked as a specialist teacher with the chronically ill.

She dealt with the traumatization caused by the deportations from the summer of 1942 in the Gurs camp by examining pictures and drawings by the artists from the camp. Her collection is now looked after by the Elsbeth Kasser Foundation , which she initiated and founded in 1994, and is publicly accessible in the Archives of Contemporary History at ETH Zurich . In 2016 the collection was exhibited in the museum in the warehouse in St. Gallen .

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

Honors

Literature and film

  • Heinrich Rusterholz and Theres Schmid-Ackeret: Committed to conscience without ifs or buts: Refugee Pastor Paul Vogt (1900–1984) and Red Cross Sister Elsbeth Kasser (1910–1992). KID Church Information Service, Zurich 2000.
  • GURS - an internment camp: Southern France 1939–1943, watercolors, drawings and photographs, Elsbeth Kasser collection. Published by the Elsbeth Kasser Foundation. With contributions by Reinhard Bek, Thomas Bullinger, Claude Laharie, Walter Schmid, Therese Schmid-Ackeret. Schwabe, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-7965-2573-5 .
  • August Bohny : Unforgotten Stories. Community service, Swiss Children's Aid and the Red Cross in southern France 1941–1945 . Preface by Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild . Edited and introduced by Helena Kanyar Becker. Edited by Erhard Roy Wiehn. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2009, ISBN 3-86628-278-8 .
  • Therese Schmid-Ackeret: Elsbeth Kasser (1910–1992). Commitment to the persecuted and the suffering. In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women: Humanitarian child aid and official refugee policy 1917–1948. Schwabe-Verlag, Basel 2010, ISBN 978-3-7965-2695-4 .
  • Erhard Roy Wiehn (Ed.): Camp de Gurs. On the deportation of the Jews from southwest Germany in 1940 . With a foreword by Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Constance. Extended new edition 2010, 200 pages, ISBN 3-86628-304-0 .
  • Margot and Hannelore Wicki-Schwarzschild: Escaped Auschwitz as children. Our deportation from Kaiserslautern to the French internment camps Gurs and Rivesaltes in 1940/42 and life afterwards in Germany and Switzerland . An anthology with texts, photos and documents. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2011, ISBN 978-3-86628-339-8 .
  • Jürgen Enders (director): After the dark comes the light. Reports of life and survival in the southern French camps of Gurs and Rivesaltes. Three fates. Three portraits of Hannelore and Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild, Paul Niedermann . Documentary, 84 min, format 16: 9, language German, PAL 2, DVD-Video, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2011, ISBN 978-3-86628-394-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So far there is only one article on him in the Dutch WIKIPEDIA: Julius Collen Turner
  2. ^ Pnina Rosenberg: Mickey orphelin: la courte vie de Horst Rosenthal / The orphan Micky Mouse, or: the short life of Horst Rosenthal ', in: Anne Grynberg; Johanna Linsler (ed.): L 'irréparable: itinéraires d'artistes et d'amateurs d'art juifs, réfugiés du “Troisième Reich” en France / Irreparable: life paths of Jewish artists and art connoisseurs on the run from the “Third Reich “In France, publications of the Magdeburg coordination office, Magdeburg, 2013, ISBN 978-3-9811367-6-0 , p. 379
  3. ↑ Madeleine Lerf: Buchenwald children - a Swiss relief operation. Publications of the Archives for Contemporary History of the ETH Zurich, Volume 5. Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-0340-0987-4 .
  4. ^ "Die von Gurs" - Art from the internment camp in the Elsbeth Kasser Collection. January 26th - April 10th 2016
  5. ↑ Ludwig Mann: Martyrdom and heroism in Gurs. In: Erhard Roy Wiehn (Ed.): Camp de Gurs. On the deportation of the Jews from southwest Germany in 1940.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kasser, Elsbeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss nurse
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Niedererli
DATE OF DEATH May 15, 1992
Place of death Steffisburg