You can read the previous part of Olga’s story here “Olga Samuels. Life in Weiningen: 1944 – 1946″
My happy life in Weiningen could not last forever. My foster parents had decided to retire and to move to the south of Switzerland, to the Italian speaking part of it, the Ticino, where it would have been much warmer than in Canton Zurich. They looked and soon found a large farm to buy on a sloping hill above Agno, not far from Lugano and informed my parents that it would not have been suitable for me to join them there. The Red Cross soon found room for me in a Kinderheim in Canton Appenzell, above Lake Constance, in a village called Heiden. By the time I arrived at Kinderheim Ratheim in Heiden I was nine years old and the 2nd World War had ended already some months earlier.
Most refugees had by then returned either to their respective countries, or immigrated to Palestine; some people, who had nowhere to go back to, remained in Switzerland. Sometime before these events, my father, due to a bicycle fall, had broken his hip near Lugano where he and my mother had been moved. This apparently insignificant fall was the beginning for my father of many months in various hospitals, first in Lugano, then in nearby Stabio and then another new operation took place in Zurich, in order to put right what had been very badly done previously in Lugano. This meant that we had to stay on longer in Switzerland, that my father was away in hospitals for a long time and that my mother was often alone.
But she was allowed to come and visit me once in Heiden, when I had caught mumps and was put in isolation in a room by myself. This happened just before the Jewish festival of Purim, when all children dress up in fancy clothes and enact the biblical story of Queen Esther, so that my mother came to cheer me up in my untimely illness. Even with my swollen face I was allowed to go to collect her at the station, which was a long way up the hill in the centre of Heiden. I, therefore, thought that, if I brought a sledge with me, I would make the trip back easier for my mother and myself. But my mother did not think that it was a good idea at all…so that partly I sledged and partly I walked down the steep hill with her.
The life in the Kinderheim was very different from that in Weiningen. I was sharing a room with three girls of similar age to me. There were quite a number of Jewish children there; some of them were survivors of German concentration camps. Their long crying fits and their concentration camp number tattooed on their wrists recalled their ordeals, but they never ever talked about what they had lived through. There were prayers before and after meals and some older children read the prayers aloud. The languages spoken were French and German; there were classes in French in the building, but they were full, so that I had to go to a local school in German down the hill.
Every Friday night after the Sabbath meal, there was dancing; since I could play one or two dancing tunes on the piano, I was always in great demand and asked to play. On the whole, the atmosphere was quite happy and relaxed there, in spite of all that had happened previously to some of the children there. Most of us were allocated tasks to help running the Kinderheim, one of my tasks was to look after a French toddler and try to put him to sleep in the afternoons. Once we were taken to the local cinema to see Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves. When summer came and the school year ended we had to vacate the Kinderheim, probably to leave it for summer camps. I probably spent only four months there, but was very sorry to have to leave it and start on my wanderings yet again.
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