Ruth von Wild

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Evacuation of Spanish children in 1937
Evacuation of Spanish children by the Ayuda Suiza 1937
Ruth von Wild, Pringy Colony

Ruth von Wild (born August 3, 1912 in Barcelona , † 1983 in Thun ) was a Swiss teacher who did a great job looking after refugee children.

Live and act

Ruth von Wild grew up as a Swiss abroad in Barcelona. Her parents came from Glockenthal in the canton of Bern . She obtained her diploma as a French teacher at the University of Neuchâtel and taught at the Swiss school in Barcelona from 1933 to 1936 . After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the school was closed and von Wild traveled to England to obtain an English diploma.

In August 1938 she returned to Barcelona to join the Swiss Working Group for Spanish Children (SAS) ( Comité neutre de secours aux enfants d'Espagne ). She was responsible for the entire relief effort in Catalonia .

In 1939, given the advance of the Francoist troops , the committee was forced to relocate its activities to southern France . In January 1939 Ruth von Wild, Karl and Rodolfo Olgiati left Barcelona with the children of the colonies and their two trucks "Dufour" and "Dunant" in the middle of the bombardment. At the end of January, the convoy arrived safely in Perpignan, France .

In June 1939 the committee founded the Swiss colony Le Lac in an abandoned castle in Hameau-du-Lac near Sigean . Ruth von Wild furnished the castle and was appointed director of around 150 refugee children. Little by little, 25 children from the Pasionaria colony in Barcelona, ​​47 children from the “ Rosa Luxemburg ” colonies from Barcelona and “ Pau Casals ” from Bagur , Catalonia , 12 children from the Saint-Jean hospital in Perpignan and others from the Saint-Cergues colony met - les-Voirons a.

The war disaster in Finland , Poland and now in France made it necessary to reorganize Switzerland's humanitarian aid. In January 1940, 17 organizations joined together to form the Swiss Working Group for War Damaged Children (SAK) (Cartel suisse de secours aux enfants victimes de la guerre) , and from 1942 onwards, Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross . In the summer of 1940 von Wild took over the management of the SAK colony Talloires , which was financed by American Quakers , and from November 1940 until its closure in June 1946, the Pringy colony (Haute-Savoie) . The vast majority of the children in Pringy were from France, with the exception of a few children from Poland, Russia and Spain. In addition, three Jewish families were kept in hiding, including Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild , who came with her mother and sister from the Camp de Gurs and Camp de Rivesaltes internment camps and was saved there by Friedel Bohny-Reiter .

After the end of the war, from 1946 to 1959, Ruth von Wild headed the Brüngsberg children's home in Germany for the aid organization of the Evangelical Churches in Switzerland (HEKS) , which took in more than 5,000 children from the Ruhr area and from large German cities. Back in Switzerland, she was in charge of the Pelikan refugee home in Weesen for HEKS from 1961 to 1974 .

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

Publications

  • The celebrations in the home are illustrated using the example of the “Pringy” Red Cross colony in France 1940–1946. 1948.

literature

  • José Jornet (Ed.): Républicains espagnols en Midi-Pyrénées: exil, histoire et mémoire. Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2005, ISBN 2-85816-809-1 .
  • August Bohny: Unforgotten Stories, Community Service, Swiss Children's Aid and the Red Cross in Southern France 1941–1945. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2009, ISBN 3-86628-278-8 . (About the colonies of Talloires and Pringy).
  • Michel Puéchavy: Ruth von Wild. L'expérience de la guerre civile espangnole. In: Helena Kanyar Becker (ed.): Forgotten women. Humanitarian aid to children and official refugee policy 1917–1948. Verlag Schwabe, Basel 2010, ISBN 3-7965-2695-0 .
  • Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild, Hannelore Wicki-Schwarzschild: Escaped Auschwitz as children, our deportation from Kaiserslautern to the French camps Gurs and Rivesaltes in 1940/42 and life afterwards in Germany and Switzerland. Anthology with texts, photos and documents. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2011, ISBN 3-86628-339-3 .
  • Maria Ojuel: Ruth von Wild i l'ajuda suïssa as infants de la guerra. In: L'Avenç. No. 366, March 2011 ( lavenc.cat ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The National-Zeitung of November 27, 1938 mentioned four young Swiss women who, at constant risk of death and at great personal sacrifice, were responsible for the work of the Spanish Aid: Elisabeth Eidenbenz , Elsbeth Kasser , Irma Schneider and Ruth von Wild
  2. ↑ Karl Ketterer (1911–1977), who was born in Belfort, was a great help. He was a member of the Service Civil International and assistant to the committee in southern France, city ​​councilor in Winterthur and national councilor (Switzerland) . Ketterer Karl, City Councilor, 1911–1977 in the Winterthur Glossary.
  3. ^ As a child after the war, the Parisian lawyer for international law went to Switzerland to relax
personal data
SURNAME Wild, Ruth von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss teacher
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona
DATE OF DEATH 1983
Place of death Tuna