Naef Rosa

Naëf, Rosa In late 1940, Rosa Naëf, a Swiss woman in her mid-twenties, was appointed headmistress of the Château-de-la-Hille orphanage in Ariège, France, an institution established and run by Secours Suisse aux Enfants, a branch of the Swiss Red Cross. This organization was established to care for undernourished French children. Naëf’s orphanage was unique in that 120 of its inhabitants were Jewish children who had fled from Germany to Belgium before the war, and then to France when Belgium was occupied. In France, they had the status of stateless aliens. Until the summer of 1942, these youngsters lived in Naëf’s orphanage under the patronage of the Swiss Red Cross and, under the headmistress’s devoted tutelage. They received devoted care: food, regular studies, sympathy, and psychological support. However, their situation worsened all at once. On the evening of August 27, 1942, French police raided the orphanage, arrested all the Jewish children over the age of 16, and took them to the concentration camp at Le Vernet, whence transports were sent to death camps. Instead of abandoning her charges, Naëf equipped them for the trip as best she could and then reported the event to her superior, Maurice Dubois*. To accompany her pupils, Naëf called a taxi and drove to Le Vernet, and thanks to the immediate and vigorous intervention of the Red Cross director in southern France the children were released and sent back to the orphanage, along with Naëf. When the southern zone was occupied in November 1942, the older Jewish children in the orphanage were in greater danger. The orphanage staff, headed by Naëf, successfully smuggled them into Switzerland in groups of three or four. Naëf equipped the youngsters with cash and forged papers, with which they traveled by train to St.-Cergues, not far from Annemasse, where the Swiss Red Cross had another orphanage. Naëf referred them to a border runner on the orphanage staff, who showed them how to slip across. In thisfashion, many members of the group that set out from La Hille in December 1942 survived by reaching Switzerland. These included Margot Kern, Jacques Roth, Peter Salz, and Regina Rosenblatt. Naëf’s superiors did not appreciate her actions; she was initially reprimanded and later punished, dismissed, and forced to return to Switzerland for having endangered the work of the Swiss organization in France. On May 7, 1989, Yad Vashem recognized Rosa Naef as Righteous Among the Nations.