Olga Fierz
Olga Fierz was a Swiss teacher and translator. After 1926 she teamed up with Přemysl Pitter to undertake welfare work for disadvantaged children in Prague. In 1933 they opened their “Milíč House”, a flexibly oriented part-residential children's home with playrooms, clubrooms, together with library and gymnastics hall, a workshop and outdoor sports facilities. There were also educators on hand to help children with school work issues. After 1938 the focus changed. The “Milíč House” attracted suspicion from the security services: it became unacceptably dangerous to accommodate orphaned Jewish children in it. Fierz was nevertheless able to concentrate on arranging deliveries of food and other basic essentials to the hiding places in the city of Jewish children suffering persecution and, increasingly, to Jewish orphans. After 1945 Pitter and Fierz were able to take over four abandoned chateaux in the countryside south of Prague and convert these into temporary orphanages. In addition to Jewish children, the slaughter of war and the Soviet mandated ethnic cleansing of the middle 1940s meant there were large numbers of abandoned and destitute children of German ethnicity to be cared for, and the two groups, hitherto racially segregated by the authorities, were treated as one. However, a new form of externally imposed one-party dictatorship was taking hold in Czechoslovakia, and in December 1950 Fierz was refused re-admission to the country when returning from her sister's funeral, which she had attended in Switzerland. The next year Přemysl Pitter was also expelled, and for ten years their welfare work was concentrated on a refugee camp near Nuremberg in the part of Germany that had been relaunched, in 1949, as the U.S.-sponsored German Federal Republic. Here the focus was again on children, caught up in the refugee tide created by the imposition of Soviet one-party rule over much of Eastern and central Europe.
Olga Fierz received various marks of official recognition during her life-time, and the accumulation of awards continued after she died. In 1966, acting on behalf of the State of Israel, Yad Vashem, honoured her as a Righteous Among the Nations. On 21 May 1985 a tree was planted in her honour along the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem. Some years after she died in 1990 a recently discovered “Main-belt Asteroid” was named in her honour.
Life
Provenance and early years
Olga Fierz was born into a Protestant family in Baden, a small town with a mixed economy in the hill country west of Zürich. This is where, in conditions of reasonable prosperity, she spent her early childhood till 1910. That year the manufacturing business her father had acquired was bankrupted. Fierz later wrote that her father, while an excellent technician, was never able to adapt to the pragmatic requirements needed to run a business. For the rest of her childhood, family finances were precarious and relations between her father and her mother were strained. The Fierz family relocated in 1911 to Brussels where her father had accepted work with a Swiss-owned company, and where he remained for six years. Olga stayed on in Brussels with her mother and sister for longer, obtaining by 1918 a higher-level teaching qualification from the teachers’ training seminary incorporated into the city's oldest secondary school for girls, the “Ecole normale Emile André”. She was able to return to Switzerland in 1918 following the conclusion of the war. She returned with her sister and mother to live with her father who had returned in search of a job in 1916 and settled in Zug. It turned out, however, that Olga's wartime Belgian teaching qualification enjoyed no formal recognition in Switzerland.Geneva
Fierz had become a huge admirer of the Swiss educationist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, whose pioneering reforms had acquired widespread backing among progressive teaching circles in Europe, especially in the German speaking countries. During or before 1920 she enrolled at the innovative “Académie De Genève or Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau” / “Pädagogische Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau” in Geneva on a “Gasthörerin” basis. The education psychologist Jean Piaget had recently joined the staff as a director of studies in psychology, despite being only four tears older than Fierz. At this stage he had not yet undertaken and published the pedagogical research with which he has subsequently become associated, however.Great Missenden
Keen to avoid being a financial burden on her parents for any longer, during her time in Geneva Fierz tried to work her way through her studies by applying for and accepting a post she found advertised in a newspaper to work as a live-in nanny-tutor with a family in the city who had two school-age children. After a year, however, she concluded that it was impossible to combine a career as a fulltime nanny-tutor with fulltime study at the institute. It was based on recommendations from the Rousseau Pedagogical Institute that during 1921 she therefore relocated to England, where for the next five years she was employed as a teacher of French at the “Garden School”, a boarding school for girls at Ballinger, then about an hour by train from London. She was given a class of forty girls to teach, ranging in age from 5 to 17. It was a condition of her employment that she should speak only in French. She employed various devices including games, dances, songs and dialogues, resorting to tales from the French classics when she found herself running short of ideas. Her teaching methods were popular with her pupils, especially the older ones, while her obviously deep innate affection for children also ensured that she was a great success as a teacher in England. While Olga was working as a teacher in England, her younger sister Claire dropped out of a course at the Music Conservatory in Zug and Olga was able to secure her a position at the English school as an “au pair”, accepted by the head mistress so as to be able to help the children improve their conversational French. During the middle 1920s things turned sour at the school for Olga. She was deeply religious and had become increasingly politicised through her childhood experiences and through some of the friends she acquired beyond the school gates. She became concerned that she was devoting her teaching skills exclusively to children from the middle and upper classes: she developeda gnawing concern that she should, perhaps, find a way to help children from less privileged backgrounds as well. During the build up to the General Strike in England she found herself unable to stay silent one lunch-time when the head teacher, whom she was sitting next to, launched herself into a bitter attack against the irresponsible position taken by striking print workers who were refusing to print political material with which they disagreed. As the woman complained that the workers were failing to attend to their duties, Olga Fierz asserted that if she were to find herself called upon to teach the children something with which she disagreed, she too would go on strike. The head teacher became very angry, and noisily condemned Fierz in front of fellow staff members and children. The time had come to move on. During 1926 she resigned her position.Politicisation and the Christian Peace Movement
Olga Fierz's five years in England turned out to be a time of self-discovery. The English boarding school provided hands-on access to Montessorian precepts which would guide her approach to child development throughout her life. She converted to vegetarianism, believing that this was good for problems with her hair and, more importantly, would help develop the refinement and sensitivity of her mental development, opening the way for ethical criteria to direct her decisions. She became actively involved in a number of international societies and organisations that had emerged during the aftermath of the First World War in order to ensure that nothing like it should ever happen again. These included the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and ”Již nikdy válku!”. It was while participating in a “workcamp” organised by this last grouping near Paris that she came across the ideas of Pierre Cérésole. She also became associated with the circle of Christian pacifists around Leonhard Ragaz. In 1924 or 1925 she took part in a “workcamp” in England at which, for the first time since the war, German delegates were to be invited. Many of the participants were relatively young, and representative of a generation among which German teaching had not been available in British schools and English teaching had not been accessible in German schools. As an experienced languages teacher from Switzerland, a country with an established polyglot tradition and a reputation, in recent centuries, for political neutrality, Fierz was much in demand at the workcamp as a translator between pacifist activists of different nations. The rare extent of her mastery of several mainstream European languages quickly became widely known, and freelance translation would in future provide a useful supplementary income stream when the necessity arose.Přemysl Pitter
In the early summer of 1926 Fierz was persuaded the interrupt the job searching in which she was engaged at the time in order to attend an IFOR “Summer Peace School-Conference” at Oberammergau, where, following a by now familiar pattern, she found herself much in demand as a simultaneous translator. The main conference lasted three days, but was followed by a three-week training session for IFOR leaders in which it appears she also participated as a translator. The “White Horse Inn” in which she was accommodated was set aside for vegetarian delegates of whom there were many. Sitting down for the first evening meal she found herself sitting opposite a man whom she remembered from a pacifist conference she had attended a year earlier. He was memorable because she recalled that he had talked at length about the way in which wider adoption of Esperanto would soon remove the international language difficulties with which the world struggled. They quickly found that pacifism was not the only topic on which they agreed. There was, most importantly, a meeting of minds on the important subject of God. Přemysl Pitter already had his life plan mapped out before him, and according to his own later recollection he shared it with his dinner companion at the Oberammergau hotel: “I have accepted that my life does not belong to me …. I would never marry and start a family, but must work in the place that God has appointed for me …. bringing up children according to the Gospel”. Commentators assert that Pitter's vision was not instantly compatible with 26 year old Olga Fierz's own life plans, but any doubts she may have entertained were swept away. On a traditional reading, Fierz and Pitter fell in love almost at once. During the three weeks that remained to them in Oberammergau Pitter introduced her to his pacifist friends, such as the Anglo-Irish Quaker Lilian Stevenson, the Russian writer Valentin Bulgakov and his erudite friend from Prague, the writer-translator Pavla Moudrá. Notwithstanding the absence of a conventional marriage between them, during the next couple of years they teamed up, after which they presented to the world a formidably effective partnership in respect of their shared vision of God's will until Pitter's death in 1976.During the first part of 1927 Pitter's urgings that Fierz should visit him in Prague intensified. She arrived on 15 April which that year coincided with Good Friday, and was introduced to Pitter's friends in the city and their shared ambition to create a home for the city's destitute children in Prague- Žižkov. Pitter had been openly dismissive when asked how the necessary funding should be obtained and it is not clear how far advanced the project had advanced in practical terms, but its name had already been chosen: it was to be called the Milíč-House to celebrate a respect fourteenth century preacher seem by admirers as a prophet of the Protestant reformation on account of his uncompromising calls for moral renewal. Fierz hesitated while Pitter continued to press her to join him in his dream. During 1927 they were sometimes together and sometimes apart, but in 1928 or 1929 she returned to Prague, taking a permanent teaching position in the city and thereby confirming she was back for the long term. The determination with which she set about mastering the unfamiliar intricacies of the Czechoslovak language, a newly derived concatenation of two closely related West Slavic languages, confirmed her commitment to making Prague her new home. Increasingly, the focus of her life became the Milíč-House project. Prague remained a multi-ethnic city at this stage, and through a combination of her well-honed language teaching skills and her mother-tongue level German, Fierz found it easy to obtain work as a languages teacher when funds ran short. Friends who joined them in the project included a well-regarded young functionalist architect called Erwin Katona who by 1933 had drawn up the necessary plans. Funding to the tune of approximately half a million Krone remained a challenge however. Pitter was confident that the Lord would provide when He was read, and early in 1933 the Fierz gave him a nudge, drawing Pitter's attention to an article she had read about a property developer and builder called Karel Skorkovský who had recently built several residential homes for unemployed workers. It turned out that Skorkovský was a committed member of the Evangelical Church. Skorkovský agreed to construct the Milíč-House in two stages, starting with the ground floor and completing the upper storeys a little later. As regards the funding short-fall, he would himself provide sufficient credit to cover the deficit, confident that he would be repaid as further funds became available. As matters turned out, the money would be fully paid back by the end of 1941. Meanwhile, on 24 December 1933 Milíč-House opened, at this stage in a single-storey building as a multi-faceted support facility for destitute children and their families. A second floor was added in 1936.