When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Switzerland

Switzerland's 'Contract Children' - Abused, Exploited, Forgotten

A report turns much-needed attention to a dark and long-ignored chapter in Swiss history.

Until as late as the 1970s, Swiss children born out of wedlock were taken from their mothers.
Until as late as the 1970s, Swiss children born out of wedlock were taken from their mothers.
Irene Caselli

In Switzerland, well into the 1970s, children of unmarried mothers or from poor families were taken away from their parents and sent to live with new ones. They were placed in new homes, especially on farms, where they were made to work.

In many cases, they were exploited, beaten and abused at the hands of those who were meant to look after them. And yet attacks were rarely investigated, not least because foster families were barely controlled by the authorities.

As the years went by, the stories of these verdingkinder (contract children), as they are known, were largely forgotten — until recently. In a special report for Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, journalists Corinna Guthknecht and Josef Wirnshofer talk to some former contract children about their traumatic experiences.

"The authorities deprived them of their parents when they were too poor to get them through," writes Wirnshofer. "At the time, poverty was not a problem of the state, but misconduct of the individual. It was also considered a danger to the common good. Poor mothers and fathers, it was thought, would affect the children negatively. Illegitimate children or children of separated parents were especially affected."

Rita Soltermann was five years old when her stepfather gave her away to the authorities, who then placed her in a foster home. "I was never held or shown any affection," she tells Süddeutsche Zeitung. "You were there only to work."

One afternoon, when she was seven, a man that she called uncle asked her to follow him into the woods. There, he abused her. She kept quiet. When the man came back and forced her to go to the woods again, she ran away. She had the courage to tell her foster parents, but they did nothing to protect her.

We had no home, we couldn't go anywhere.

"When you are abused as a child, the memory stays with you your entire life," Soltermann, now 80, told the journalists.

Government workers visited the home only once a year to check that every foster child had a bed. "We were two in each bed but we weren't allowed to say it," recalls Soltermann. "We had no home, we couldn't go anywhere."

In 1959, when she was 19, she got pregnant, but the child's father did not want to be involved. In the hospital, Soltermann was approached by government workers and told to hand over her child. But she stood firm.

"It was enough that I had been "contracted,"" she says. "I'm happy I kept my child. I would have never been able to forget it."

Wirnshofer explains in the article that there are still no reliable statistics on how many verdingkinder existed in Switzerland. But Loretta Seglias, a historian who has been researching the issue since 2003, thinks that hundreds of thousands of such children were placed in foster care in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"It was only in 1978 that regulations on foster children came into force in Switzerland: for the first time it was put into writing that consent was necessary for minors to be given to foster families," the Süddeutsche Zeitung article explains. "Moreover, foster parents were supervised. The largely uncontrolled handling of foster children, which had been the norm up until then, could finally be prevented.

children_swiss_slavery

The Swiss government hid the truth of the verdingkinder for many years — Photo: Corinna Guthknecht/Sueddeutsche Zeitung

"The history of verdingkinder in Switzerland has long been concealed. It took until 2013 for the Swiss government to apologize to those affected. The then justice minister, Simonetta Sommaruga, said at a commemoration ceremony: "For the suffering that has been done to you, I offer you an apology on behalf of the state government, sincerely and with all your heart.""

"Meanwhile, the Swiss government has set up a solidarity fund for the victims of the scheme: 25,000 francs each (approx $25,000) in compensation. More than 9,000 people have registered with the Federal Office of Justice. But the number of surviving verdingkinder is likely much higher — many of them no longer want to contact authorities."

In 2014, the Swiss government appointed an Independent Expert Commission to investigate the use of administrative detention and other compulsory measures as instruments of social welfare in Switzerland before 1981. The commission will publish the final results of its research by the end of 2019.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

Keep reading...Show less

The latest