Heidi and Peter Zuber

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heidi Zuber (* 1942 ) and Peter Zuber (* 1939 ; † 1999 ) were a married couple from the Swiss town of Ostermundigen , who became known beyond the national borders in the 1980s and 1990s for their work for refugees .

Peter Zuber was a doctor in Ostermundigen. During the wave of refugees as a result of the civil war in Sri Lanka, he and his wife organized the hidden reception of around 36,000 refugees who should have been repatriated, both at home and at around 7,000 like-minded people in Switzerland and abroad. As the founder of the joint venture “Action for rejected asylum seekers”, which Heidi Zuber continued after the death of her husband until 2001, they led the civil society's resistance to the increasingly strict Swiss refugee policy of the 1980s.

After Heidi and Peter Zuber first took in and hid 300 refugees in 1984, when asylum seekers were to be expelled from Switzerland for the first time , they sent a letter to Federal Councilor Elisabeth Kopp demanding that the cases be re-examined. The Tamils were actually able to stay in Switzerland afterwards, but after media reports and advertisements with which they were looking for further helpers, the couple Zuber were reported by National Councilor Markus Ruf and in 1987 sentenced to two months in prison. Nevertheless, their activities were tolerated by the local authorities, and they met regularly in secret with the Federal Refugee Commissioner Peter Arbenz to find solutions to individual cases.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported on the case, and Heidi and Peter Zuber received thousands of death threats over the years. Among other things, they received an award from the theological faculty of the University of Bern and in 1995 the “Humanity Prize” from the Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism . In 2016 Ostermundigen named a street after Peter Zuber.

swell