EUROPE	JANUARY 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Heartless Haven Switzerland's World War II record is further tarnished as Jews tell of ill treatment after fleeing from Germany By SIMON REEVE /LONDON tumbling across the border into Switzerland after escaping from a German extermination camp in Minsk, Fred Alexander felt a huge sense of relief. It was early 1942, and the young Berlin Jew had eluded Gestapo agents hunting him across half of Europe to enter the Alpine "safe haven" with his girlfriend Helen and her mother. But far from welcoming Alexander, Swiss border guards first warned him he could be handed back to the Germans, then arrested him. Several months in a windowless cell in the bleak local jail were followed by a series of labor camps where Alexander and fellow refugees were forced to work in gangs removing tree stumps from farmland and other backbreaking jobs. "It was very tough work," recalls Alexander, now 77, a retired building contractor and real estate agent living in New York. "The conditions were very primitive, so was the food, so was the living; everything was just the bare minimum to survive." More than 50 years after the end of the war, it is now being disclosed that Alexander and thousands of other Jews escaped the Nazis only to spend years in a network of Swiss forced-labor camps. Refugees as young as 16 were held against their will, often behind barbed wire. They broke rocks, built roads, dug ditches and felled trees. If they complained, guards punished them and threatened deportation to the Nazis--and certain death. Some died from disease or overwork. Walter Fischer, a retired plumber now 82 and living in France, spent three years in camps and remembers accidents, hunger and threats: "I have not spoken of this for 50 years, but the Swiss are guilty of terrible crimes," he says. "They exploited us, and they have blood on their hands." Just as Switzerland thought it was recovering from revelations that it was a willing conduit for Nazi gold and that Swiss businessmen profited from the war by trading with the Third Reich, these new allegations are dragging the nation into another bout of soul-searching. Edward Fagan, a New York lawyer who is suing the Swiss government on behalf of 22,000 clients over Nazi gold, will in the next 30 days file another lawsuit on behalf of the victims of labor camps. "It is now clear there was a forced-labor machine in Switzerland," he says. "Jews were victims of an inhuman and immoral policy." Switzerland's reputation will take a further battering later this year with the release of a report on refugee policy by an international Independent Commission of Experts established by the Swiss government to investigate their wartime record. Besides the issue of forced labor, the Commission will look into the fact that Switzerland in 1938 insisted Germany should mark Jewish passports with a "J" stamp. Because of that policy, Swiss border authorities were able to identify Jews easily. At least 30,000 refugees were turned away, and most perished in Nazi death camps. As Jewish leaders become aware of the new claims they are demanding restitution, citing the example of the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II who received compensation of up to $20,000 and a public apology from the U.S. government. "These camps could be a greater embarrassment to the Swiss than the issue of Nazi gold," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "Now we know it was not just about money, it was the mistreatment of individuals. The Swiss have always thought of themselves as humanitarians, as being the home of the Red Cross. Yet in their own backyard they treated Jewish refugees as unwanted guests." Adds Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress: "This was a neutral state, yet we now know there was forced labor, slave labor, and the kind of incarceration that can only be compared to a prison. It is an absolute outrage." Last week the Simon Wiesenthal Center released a report on the Swiss camps which claimed that anti-Semitism was rife in wartime Switzerland and that a special "Jew-tax" was levied on wealthy Jewish refugees but not on those of other faiths. Many families were separated, including young babies from their mothers, according to the report's author, Alan Schom, an American historian living in France. "The Swiss were really sadistic," says Schom. "They wanted to hurt the Jews." It was not only refugees who suffered in Switzerland. The authorities also sent legal Jewish residents to work camps. Bad Schauenburg is now a luxury business resort near Basel, but New Yorker Michael Roth remembers it as a hotel stripped bare and used to house up to 200 Jews. "There were 130 of us sleeping in one room on straw and wooden boards," said Roth, whose family moved to Switzerland in 1930 and lived there legally for nine years before 1941 when he and scores of other resident Jews were told to report to the camp. Roth worked on mountain roads until a cartload of stones tipped over and smashed his legs. He says he still suffers pain from the accident but has never received compensation. Another ex-inmate of Bad Schauenburg is Arnold Marque, who entered Switzerland from Germany in July 1937 to begin an apprenticeship as a baker. "I know we were singled out as Jews for this because Jews were the only ones there," says Marque, 76 and now living in California. "The pay was slave wages, and violations resulted in threats of being sent back to Germany. We had no civil rights." Jews who were paid claim they received as little as 75 centimes a day, while the going rate for Swiss citizens doing manual labor was several francs an hour. Official Swiss reaction to these allegations has been furious. "Why should a person who survived the war thanks to Switzerland sue its (sic) savior 53 years later? These allegations have no legal or moral basis. Switzerland never ran any forced-labour camps," says a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. Ambassador Thomas Borer, head of the government Task Force on issues concerning Switzerland's role during and after World War II, was more contrite: "I am shocked at these allegations, but I believe these experiences are not representative of the majority of refugees in Switzerland. Jews were not prisoners, they were not slaves, and there were no concentration camps in Switzerland." According to Borer, the wartime Swiss government often had a "cowardly" refugee policy: "There were failings by the government, and we have apologized for this, but Jewish refugees were not exploited." Former refugees believe otherwise. Charles Pick, 77, a Viennese Jew living on the south coast of England, says he spent the war in 10 different camps and claims that when he complained about the treatment of Jews to Dr. Eduard von Steiger, a prominent Swiss politician visiting his refugee camp, Steiger ordered him to be placed in solitary confinement in the camp. "All I had was bread and water," he says. After continued protests he was imprisoned. "When they let me out, officials said if I complained again I would be given to the Germans. I knew that meant death, so I kept a low profile and did as I was told." Although many documents from the era have been destroyed, Swiss Federal Archives still contain evidence of the camps. One document lists more than 100 refugee camps of which 58 are specifically identified as Arbeitslager fur Fluchtlinge--work camps for refugees. Bad Schauenburg and 11 others are listed as work camps for immigrants, those who entered the country legally before the war. One camp, Granges-Lens, is described ominously as being a Disziplinarlager, or punishment camp. Guido Koller, a Swiss government historian investigating his nation's World War II archives, says that a political decree of March 12, 1940 provided the authority for establishing "hundreds" of camps mainly for Jews, but also for Russians, Poles and Hungarians. "The legal status of refugees meant the government could send them to places they didn't want to go," says Koller. "They had to do work they didn't want to do--it was compulsory." Koller says "Sanctions were applied" to any refugee refusing to work, and that some Jews were expelled into German-occupied territory because of "misbehavior." According to Jacques Picard, a historian and research director for the Independent Commission of Experts now investigating Swiss refugee policy, the harshness of the camp regime was up to the camp commandants, many of whom ran them in "a militaristic or fascist way." Concedes Alfred Hasler, a historian who has studied refugees in Switzerland: "We Swiss had our own SS characters." Not all commandants were cruel, however. The Central Directorate for Work Camps of the Federal Justice and Police Department dismissed Charlotte Weber as head of the Bienenberg camp for being "too kind" to Jews. "I was astonished when I discovered conditions in other camps," says Weber, now 85 and living in Zurich. "The vast majority were terrible. The authorities were very inhuman...for them these refugees were just third-class citizens. It made me ashamed." Margot, a former Bienenberg inmate who now lives in west London and who agreed to speak under conditions of anonymity, arrived in Switzerland from a secret hideout in Berlin in November 1943 and says she met many good, caring Swiss people such as Charlotte Weber. Still, she says, "Others suffered terribly. My mother was nearly starved and frozen to death. The men were sent out to work without proper shoes and clothing, and many died." One who died was operatic tenor Joseph Schmidt who sang in Carnegie Hall before the war and appeared in a number of films. He was held in a labor camp in the quiet village of Gyrenbad, southeast of Zurich. According to local villagers and fellow inmates Schmidt was forced to dig ditches until he suffered a heart attack. Swiss doctors said he was malingering and sent him back to work. He suffered another heart attack the next day and died in November 1942 at the age of 38. Although angry with their treatment at Swiss hands, former refugees are the first to reject comparisons between Swiss camps and the German camps they managed to avoid. Conditions for Jews in Swiss camps were certainly tough, but they gradually improved as the war turned in the favor of the Allies and some commandants occasionally allowed inmates out on leave. Indeed many refugees would agree with David Cesarani, a leading British scholar of modern Jewish history, who cautions that dwelling too closely on Swiss behavior diverts attention from the far more heinous activities of the Nazis. "Holding people in camps and forcing them to work is a mere peccadillo compared to the crimes of the Nazis," he argues. "The work in Switzerland was clearly hard and unpleasant, but the Swiss themselves were suffering from food and fuel shortages. Certainly there are many questions the Swiss must answer, but by concentrating on the Swiss we run the risk of letting the Germans off the hook." That danger clearly exists, but in the coming weeks and months it will not stop a growing band of refugees from complaining about their treatment in Switzerland. One will be Betty Bloom who, in September 1943, aged just 13, escaped across the border from a home for Jewish refugee children in France. "I spent six months in various camps without proper food, medical attention or even a change of underwear," she says. "There was not enough food and there were armed guards. We were treated like criminals." Bloom says she contracted tuberculosis in the camps, leaving her unable to have children. "Yet I still think of myself as one of the luckier victims of Swiss refugee policy," says Bloom, who lives in London. "Ten other children from my French home, including my best friend Inge, successfully crossed the border but were sent back by the Swiss border guards, straight into the arms of the Germans. They perished in Auschwitz." Those innocent lives--as well as the network of work camps that taxed the youth and vitality of thousands of others--now lie heavily upon the conscience of modern Switzerland.
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