Finding sanctuary in Geneva
During World War II, hundreds of Jews fled from France into Switzerland via Geneva. After the border was closed in August 1942 this escape route became more difficult to navigate, but not impossible, as the stories of Lilian Blumenstein and Lili Reckendorf show.
Gabriel Heim
Gabriel Heim is a book and film author and exhibition organiser. He is principally concerned with research into topics of modern and contemporary history and lives in Basel.
The Blumensteins, who had spent two years in Marseilles waiting in vain for their visa for the United States, managed to escape largely unchallenged to the Swiss border a few days before the German occupation of southern France. Just a month later, this journey became life-threatening for Jewish people, as the systematic persecution and deportation of Jews intensified dramatically under German occupation of the entire territory of France. The number of admissions to Geneva’s internment camps also gives an indication of how much the pressure ramped up. From October to December 1942, 4,463 people seeking protection were registered in the Camp des Charmilles. Switzerland did not accept all of them.
The efforts of the city’s Conseil œcuménique, the forerunner of the World Council of Churches, show how help was given in the Calvinist-influenced Rhone city. After the border was closed, the Conseil had sought ways to legally bring to Switzerland persecuted people – Jews and Christians – who were in hiding in France. With the help of church networks, lists of names were compiled which were presented to Heinrich Rothmund, the head of the Eidgenössische Fremdenpolizei, Switzerland’s Federal Police for Foreigners, in autumn 1942. In tough negotiations, a quota of “non-refoulables” was set. This was the term used for people who, even without valid documents, were not to be turned away at the border crossings. This arrangement saved the lives of about 450 people by the end of the war. Fifty-four years old Lilli Reckendorf, who was stateless at the time, figured on one of these lists. Lilli had managed to escape from the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees and had been living in hiding ever since. Her account of her perilous journey to the Swiss border has survived.
In Annemasse nobody got out of the station without having their papers scrupulously checked. You just had to go along with it – there was no choice. And never speak a word. We walked through the town to a small restaurant where a “passeur” [smuggler] was to meet us. A “dubious” party of tourists was still socialising in the restaurant. A younger woman came with her husband and son and desperately sought help from the proprietor to find a hole to get across. We took the omnibus towards Thonon. We got off at Loisin and walked in twos along a dirt track.
Our escort now had to lead us to a farm at the border. Our sketch of the route was badly drawn. As we set foot on the farm territory, our escort babbled: “C’est bien ici, tout est réglé, déchirez vos papiers.” She jumped on to her bike and was gone. Now our route went this way and that through marshland and woods, across pastureland and along tracks. There were no sentries to be seen. The man next to me pointed to the barbed wire. The triple-layer entanglement of wires suddenly opened up, so wide that a hay cart could have driven through it, and we stepped into no man’s land. We were given brief directions on which way to go to find the tram line. Quick farewells. We were standing on farmland.
Since 2016, a plaque in Geneva has commemorated the canton’s former internment camps. Not everyone who found their way to Switzerland back then was allowed to stay. The fact that this expulsion and rejection was tantamount to a death sentence is also remembered.
