Trogen,
Unknown photographer – © Newspapers.com, reproduced with permission
The village lies in a sheltered fold of the mountains, 3,000 feet above sea level. On a fine day you can see clear across to Lake Constance, a bit of burnished silver under the strong spring sun.
On the other side of the lake is Germany, and to the east rise the snow-capped peaks of Austria. A day’s journey due south lies Italy. And all the way down below you, scattered as a child’s playthings, are the toy villages of Switzerland.
You come to the village by way of Zurich and St. Gall until finally you find yourself in Trogen.
It is in Trogen that on the last Sunday in April in alternate years there is held the ancient ceremony of the Landsgemeinde, when every male citizen goes to the village square to vote on new laws and to elect his local government.
For in this small canton of Appenzell there is no parliament. Citizens with the right to vote — that is all men of the canton who are of age, for the women of Switzerland have no vote — must wear a sword on that day to show that they are free men.
They were waiting for me at the top of the long hill, under a huge red-and-white Swiss flag that flapped lazily from its tall pole: two little girls, dressed identically — print frocks, bare legs, and blonde hair braided in pigtails. They could have been young Germans or Swiss or Austrians — or just as easily Poles or Finns or Italians from the plain of Lombardy.
We stared at each other solemnly for a moment.
Then — “Gruezi!” (“Good morning!”) said the one with the freckles and the wire round her teeth.
“Gruezi,” said I. There followed an awkward (and, on my part, embarrassed) pause as I grappled with my scanty German.
Could they show me the way, I stumbled, to the house of Herr Director Bill…
It was the other one — the plump one with the snub nose and the merry eyes — who finally put me out of my misery.
“You don’t have to speak German with us,” says she, pointing to Freckles, “she comes from Birmingham but I’m from Hull. And where are you from?”
I said I came from Manchester.
“I got an auntie lives in Manchester.” said Freckles, as if it was quite the most remarkable thing in the world.
So we were all friends and linked arms and went swinging down the main street of Pestalozzi, which is really no more than a field-path that runs between a number of honey-coloured wooden houses in a green meadow.
Then suddenly they were gone. They had set me on my way and they had business of their own to attend to. I was left alone in a deserted village that was full of vital, happy, unseen life. The place was humming with it.
Now it is only too easy when writing about children — particularly distressed, under-privileged children — to be swept away on a tide of generous emotion.
I want to avoid that if I can. Because this experiment which is going on so quietly here in this Pestalozzi Children’s Village seems to me to be the most hopeful thing I have seen on this European journey.
This International Children’s Village is just seven years old. In this village 180 children between the age of five and 16 from eight countries — France, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — live, learn, and play together.
Each nationality has its own national house or houses in which the children are brought up by houseparents and teachers of their own nationality.
Here they speak their mother tongue, follow the school curriculum of their country of origin, and grow up in the faith of their fathers.
Part of each day is spent in communal activities, when the children of all nationalities— speaking German now as a common tongue — come together for handicrafts, sports, excursions, music, and other activities in the village secondary school. And the whole thing is severely non-political. These youngsters have suffered enough from politics.
It began — as so many great experiments have begun — as a generous impulse in the mind of a sick man.
Lying in his mountain-top sanatorium. Walter Robert Corti, eminent brain specialist stricken by tuberculosis, found himself tormented by the thought of Europe’s war orphans (U.N.E.S.C.O. has put their total at approximately 13 million). What was to become of this tragic flotsam?
As he lay there, with nothing to do but think, the answer came to him. Why should there not be built in this neutral, sheltered Switzerland a village where the orphaned children of Europe — or some of them at least — could find a new home: where the wounds inflicted on young bodies and minds could be healed; where they could be brought up and educated until, as he wrote later in a now-famous article in the Swiss magazine “Du,” “until they are old enough and strong enough to help themselves”; and from whence they could return to their home countries filled with that spirit of international tolerance and understanding which is Switzerland’s own most precious gift to the world?
Thank goodness Corti is a practical idealist. Right at the beginning he insisted that this was to be no Utopian educational idea; it was not required to produce an abstract super-human being.
On the contrary, he wrote, “it affirms national inheritances, differences, and peculiarities. But through living together in a supra-national community the children from various nations will learn to understand the common denominator of their existence. Their European outlook, their world citizenship, is not a lifeless theory but becomes, through daily comradeship, a natural reality.”
His idea, coming as it did near the end of a terrible war, caught the imagination — and perhaps the conscience, too — of the generous Swiss. The people of Trogen presented the land, private enterprise built and paid for the village and the children of Switzerland adopted it as their own responsibility.
The first of the new inhabitants — orphans from Southern France — moved in towards the end of 1946. They were followed by a group of Poles found by the Allies in Merano.
Before the village was two years old there were orphans from Warsaw and Hamburg, and Vienna and Athens, and Budapest and Helsinki working and playing together in the village.
There were disappointments and setbacks, of course.
In 1950 the Polish children, who had gone home on holiday, were not allowed to return. And after two happy years in Trogen the Hungarians, too, were recalled by their government.
But in September, 1950, the first British children arrived, many of them from distressed homes in the North.
The description of that welcome, which you can read in Mary Buchanan’s fascinating little book, “The Children’s Village,” is typical of the way things are done in Pestalozzi.
“Inside the farmhouse the stage was gaily decorated, and a child from each nation stood by the foot-lights bearing its national flag, while speeches of welcome from the adults and songs from the children expressed the happiness felt by all that Britain was now taking part in this great international scheme
“And it was in this old farmhouse, a building so glowing with warmth and kindness, that very early next morning all the inhabitants of the Children’s Village met again.
“The children and the teachers sang the village song, and then the director, Mr. Bill, reminded his young listeners that in the village everyone should help each other.
“Now he wanted the children in the village to help the British children feel at home, on leaving the farmhouse he wanted each British child to be taken by the hand by two children of other nationalities, who would run with him to one of the British houses.
“As they did so they should tell each other their names. A simple device, but successful in breaking down what shyness still remained. It was grand to hear them laughing with delight as they skeltered down the hill.”
Well, the first fine flush is over. The village is seven years old. It is no longer an experiment. The first intake has grown up and returned home. And in the outside world they are beginning to take Pestalozzi for granted
“With all this care and attention the children will become hopelessly spoiled,” was one criticism I heard widely expressed.
“They’ll be restless and unable to settle down when they get back home,” was another.
Well, I’m not so sure about that. Certainly these young villagers are jealously guarded from the merely curious, who come to look at them as interesting human guinea pigs.
“We want them to enjoy a healthy, normal childhood,” is the village’s reply to that.
They’ll never be able to settle down when they get back? Well, they can go home on holiday if they want to. And few of them refuse the chance.
As Freckles, the little girl from Hull, put it to me: “I miss my mum. It’s lovely here. But after all it’s not your real home, is it?”
Or there’s the opposite school of thought — “Once they’re back home again they’ll forget everything they’ve learned here.”
Will they? More than a year ago the first batch of 16-year-olds left Pestalozzi for good.
But before they left they promised to meet for Christmas in the village. And 23 out of 25 kept that promise. Hitch-hiking over all the roads of Europe, they were back in time for Christmas.”
But when all’s said and done, is it really doing any good? Can you really change human nature as easily as that?” The sensible adult world carping again. Well, let the children of Pestalozzi answer that themselves.
Here’s Juliana, a 12-year-old from Italy:
“When I was told there were German children in the village I got furious. I thought of those terrible men in Verona with rifles over their shoulders. During the first days it was not easy, but gradually we began to understand. We spoke with one another and gradually became friends.”
And here’s Erasmo, a 14-year-old and also from Italy:
“During the first weeks we came home angry in the evenings because someone had angered us. But now we always come home happy and gay. Perhaps sometime, who knows, we will be good friends in all Europe and then there won’t be any more wars.”
One thing does disturb me, though. This Children’s Village is an expensive project. It is costing half a million Swiss francs a year, and 95 per cent of that is still being paid for by the people of Switzerland.
The annual upkeep of the two British houses accounts for £6,000. But only half of it is coming from Britain. Surely we can do better than that?
And one thing more. If Walter Corti’s heaven-inspired experiment is to have any practical results, this pioneer village here in Switzerland must only be regarded as the beginning.
I hope I may live long enough to see a Pestalozzi established in every country in Europe.
“And where” — as Corti asks himself — “where could there be a more benign soil for such a branching-out of the ideas for which the Pestalozzi Village stands than in Britain?”
“For there live the people who have perhaps travelled farthest on the road towards a society of ordered freedom, ruled by tolerance.”
I said I didn’t want to get sentimental about all this. But be indulgent for a moment.
When each child leaves the village for the last time he receives from the hands of the director a scroll which makes him a freeman of the village so long as he may live.
I like to think that he also takes away with him the Freedom of the World…
Reproduced with permission
© 2023 Newspapers.com
Jerry F 2024
