Providing children temporary relief in Switzerland
During the Second World War, Switzerland was a neutral country located in the centre of warring Europe. It was also a humanitarian nation, which had founded the Red Cross in the 19th century and helped to provide relief to POWs during the First World War. In the interwar years, Geneva became the headquarters of dozens of major international organisations that wanted to prevent warfare through international law and to standardise relief practices across the world.
Today, the child evacuations are mostly remembered as being organised by the Swiss Red Cross. However, they were actually started in 1940 by a coalition of seventeen Swiss charities called the ‘Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kriegsgeschädigte Kinder’, or ‘Le cartel Suisse de secours aux enfants victimes de la guerre’.
These charities organised thousands of Swiss families to voluntarily host children from western Europe, particularly from southern France. Funded chiefly by donations from Swiss citizens and organisations, these popular child evacuations became part of a recognised national effort to provide humanitarian assistance to Europe’s youngest suffering citizens. when the first evacuations from unoccupied France began, the number of families volunteering to host children actually outnumbered the children selected for evacuation. Thousands of families offered spots for French children; over 2,000 were offered in Geneva alone.
In February 1941, child evacuations from German-occupied northern France began, and the Swiss Coalition was the first foreign agency allowed into blocked areas, such as Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. The Nazi authorities agreed to the Swiss-led evacuations because they believed that it would pacify parents and, therefore, better exploit the local labour force to work in German war industries. Also, the evacuations cost nothing to the Nazi occupiers.
Thousands of children were welcomed to Switzerland for three months only. This clever method bypassed Switzerland’s strict immigration controls because these ‘holidaying children’ were not a perpetual national burden; the project also appeared more attractive to Swiss hosts, as the children were not a permanent family commitment.
‘Holidaying children’ spent time in Swiss homes, eating nourishing meals, and playing in sunny gardens across the countryside. The goal of the project was to rebuild the health and resilience of the children, many who were malnourished and indigent due to the wartime conditions. Children were medically screened upon arrival at Swiss train stations, and were deloused and washed if necessary. Host families collected the children from the train stations. French children were often sent to French-speaking regions in Switzerland, mostly along the region of Lake Geneva. Belgian Flemish-speaking children were sent to German-speaking regions in Switzerland. After three months, the return of children was strictly monitored, and they returned to their homelands on trains provided by the Red Cross.
But by 1942, the Swiss Coalition’s operations had become so large, so popular and so successful, that the Swiss government became worried. How would its neighbours view these evacuations, given Switzerland’s neutrality? Worried about appeasing both its Axis neighbours and the Allied governments, Swiss authorities decided to intervene in the evacuations.
In January 1942, the Swiss government invited the Swiss Red Cross to take over the evacuations while simultaneously appointing a government liaison named Edouard de Haller to keep a watchful eye over the operations. However, the Swiss Red Cross carried a strong reputation, better infrastructure and even more resources. Evacuations now included Belgian and Serbian children who suffered under Nazi rule, and, for a brief moment, it seemed like everything was working.
The International Appeal of 1942
In the Spring of 1942, Swiss Federal Councillor Reinhard announced to the parliament that Switzerland would provide assistance to European children affected by war. Although this speech had a limited audience, Switzerland’s political leader, Federal Councillor Marcel Pilet-Golaz, was fearful that belligerents would condemn Switzerland’s interference in Nazi-occupied countries.
In order to appear as neutral as possible, Pilet-Golaz gave a new landmark speech that moderated the previous announcement. But the outcome had far-reaching consequences. Extracts of this speech were sent all over the world; it was used in Swiss Red Cross pamphlets and leaflets, national and international radio broadcasts, and international press. However, the task to edit, modify and translate Pilet-Golaz’s announcement to these various audiences in multiple languages rested upon three actors: the professional translation services of the Swiss government, the informal translators in the Swiss Red Cross, and the multilingualism of the government’s chief liaison, Edouard de Haller.
This international appeal was a key moment both in terms of the Swiss child evacuations, but also the use of language and translation in war. While attempting to walk the delicate line of strict neutrality, the Swiss authorities manipulated its own translation of a speech. But for the Swiss Red Cross, this was a perfect opportunity to garner international support (and donations!) for a major humanitarian operation for vulnerable children. But how was the content modified for particular audiences/languages? How did this speech manipulate and convey Switzerland’s humanitarian actions so that they appeared neutral? What translations did the newspapers and radio broadcasts use, and why? What was/is the legacy of this appeal within Swiss translation and language practises today?
Our project seeks to answer these questions, and many many others. By clarifying how non-governmental (Swiss Red Cross) and governmental (Swiss authorities) mobilised and modified translation and multilingual practices, this will reveal how differing and even opposing political agendas shaped translation policies within an international humanitarian project. We hope that this will help contribute to understanding how translation policies can be used strategically within today’s multilingual conflict zones.
Serbian children were often evacuated to Swiss homes in Italian-speaking Ticino, in southern Switzerland. Terminating the Evacuations
Despite the impressive humanitarian enterprise, and the huge international support for the evacuations, the child evacuations to Switzerland ended in 1942.
The Germans terminated the evacuations from Belgium in May 1942 and from France in October 1942. Their justification was based upon the belief that children in Switzerland would become politically incited with anti-German sentiments.
In the summer of 1942, the Nazi persecution of Jews increased to new levels. This forced many Jews to flee to Swiss borders in urgent need of asylum. However, the Swiss authorities were terrified of being overrun by refugees and, in August 1942, they closed the Swiss borders to all incoming refugees, including child evacuees. Although some children’s trains were able to get through some cantons’ borders, the majority of the child evacuations from France and Belgian were finished. To this day, this border closure has been a source of significant post-war scrutiny by scholars and activists, and is still hotly contested.
Soon after the Allied invasion of continental Europe, the Swiss opened their borders in the summer of 1944. The child evacuations resumed but now included children from various other European nations:
- Serbia (654 children)
- Holland (9789 children)
- Italy (5693 children)
- Austria (32791 children)
- Hungary (6075 children)
- England (1716 children)
- Germany (29053 children)
- Luxembourg (481 children)
- Czechoslovakia (796 children)
- Poland (836 children)
By 1945, the Swiss had hosted 60,000 French and Belgian children and by 1949, the Swiss hosted an additional 100,000 European children.
Humanitarian Action and Translation 