Kurt Bigler

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Kurt Bigler , born Kurt Bergheimer , (born December 13, 1925 in Mannheim , † July 18, 2007 in Lausanne ) was a German-Swiss educator.

Life

Kurt Bergheimer lived with his parents Josef and Emilie Bergheimer-Bloch in Mannheim, where he attended the secondary school until he was banned from attending public school after the Nazis came to power with the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1937. From then on he attended the school set up for the children of the Jewish community. In October 1940, the Jews of southwest Germany were deported to the Gurs concentration camp in southern France as part of the Wagner-Bürckel campaign . The camp was transferred to the Rivesaltes concentration camp in March 1941 , from which it was transferred to Chaumont Castle on the Loire in October 1941 with the help of the French resistance and the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) . His parents were deported to the Drancy assembly camp on August 8, 1942, and then to the Auschwitz extermination camp , where they were murdered.

After walking across France, Bergheimer reached Switzerland in October 1942 near Geneva over the green border . He initially lived in the labor camp for young refugees in Davesco in Ticino and from there came to the Hasenberg labor camp in the canton of Aargau . After the war he was able to attend a business school in Zurich with the help of the Association of Swiss Jewish Welfare Services (VSJF) .

The orphaned Kurt Bergheimer fell seriously ill and was adopted in 1954 by the teacher Berta Bigler from Wabern near Bern . He made up his Matura at the Humboldtianum in Bern and studied history and German at the University of Bern . He received his doctorate in 1954 under Werner Näf and after his teaching examination he worked as a secondary teacher in Ins in the canton of Bern . He was involved as a local council representative for the Social Democratic Party and also worked as a lay judge at the Erlach Office.

Bigler received after two start-up thanks to the efforts of friends and the Bundesrat Max Weber , the Swiss citizenship .

In 1959 he married the lawyer Margrith Eggenberger . In 1965 he was elected to the Rorschach teacher training college , where he taught German, history and French until his retirement in 1990. He was again a lay judge at the Rorschach District Court . He then worked as a volunteer journalist for the Swiss Central Office for Alcohol and Other Drug Issues (SFA / ISPA) in Lausanne until 2002 .

In his will, Bigler ordered the establishment of a fund from which the Dr. Kurt Bigler Prize is financed. The prize, which is intended to promote work and projects that deal with the causes of the Holocaust and its consequences, anti-Semitism or racism, has since been awarded by TAMACH, the psychosocial counseling center for Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and will be awarded by the Pedagogical Department from 2014 Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Fonts

literature

  • Christof Dejung, Thomas Gull, Tanja Wirz: Landigeist and Jewish stamp. Memories of a Generation 1930–1945 . Limmat, Zurich 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claudia Schoch: Living on after the persecution by the Nazis. In: NZZ , December 28, 2013, p. 30
personal data
SURNAME Bigler, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bergheimer, Kurt (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Swiss pedagogue
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH July 18, 2007
Place of death Lausanne