Mary Shaffer, Goldern, Switzerland

My father was a pilot for Pan American, and we moved around a lot. People used to ask, where do you live? And I'd think, hmm, where's my mom now? That's how I knew where my home was, wherever my mom happened to be. So, I don't have a childhood home that I can talk about in great depth, because there're so many of them. When we lived in Bogotá, Columbia, we had a courtyard with a fountain in the middle, and that's all I really remember. I was three, four maybe, and this was around 1946. Then we lived in Walnut Creek, California, then moved to Palo Alto. After that we moved to Frankfurt, Germany.

First we lived in a fancy hotel because everything was bombed out. After we’d been there several days, my mother found out it was a high-class house of ill repute. She had four young daughters. So, in the middle of the night, we're all in our jammies, she walks in and says, “Get your clothes on, we're leaving!” She had a tiny dictionary and a baby in her arms, we get to the train station with her furiously flipping pages of her dictionary. We end up in Salzburg, Austria, to see Mozart’s birthplace just before Christmas. It was so decorated! Images everywhere of St. Nicholas dragging Grumpus—a hairy beast that kidnaps naughty children. Then we went to Kitzbühel and stayed first in a pension, then in Haus Bossin.* The next year my parents rented a house on the Sonnenweg (Sun Street). We lived in five different places in Kitzbühel.

The Sonnenweg house I remember with great fondness. It was an old-fashioned wooden Austrian house. My bedroom had really old-fashion bunk beds that were built into the wall with curtains to keep the sleeper warm. The living room had a Kachelofen, a freestanding tiled stove that heats the house. It’s large so you can sit on it, and in the indented tiles, you can put your socks and underwear to warm them before you put them on. It was very cold in the house, and I remember that we slept in our long underwear under our jammies and hardly ever changed them.

It snowed so much and was so deep that our cook, Frau Anna, would go out every hour and sweep the sidewalks, but the snow on the sidewalks would just keep getting higher and higher. At Christmas, her son chopped down a tree for us, it had sparklers and candles on it. Christmas Eve was when the Christkind (Christ child) would come and give us presents. My sisters and I had a few Austrian toys. We had a little magnetic stage where we would put on plays.

I remember when I got my first compliment. I was about seven or eight and was sewing cloth around a little doll bed and Frau Anna said, “You’re doing such a good job, look how even your stitches are!” It shocked and touched me very deeply. Frau Anna stayed with us for years and we loved her. It was fun growing up and spending winters in Kitzbühel.

My father was stationed in Frankfurt. After he found an apartment for us to live in, we returned to Frankfurt from Kitzbühel. We lived across from a church that was bombed out on Beethovenplatz. The whole block had been bombed out, we played on the bombed rubble hills around us. Our rented apartment was the only newly-constructed building on the block, it was maybe six stories. There were no elevators. We had the top floor, and I watched the brick layers reconstructing apartment houses around us. We went to a German school; we left in the dark to get a tram and then walk to school because children did that then.

I had a friend whose family lived under the rubble of their house. You entered the basement through a blanket. The whole family, parents, uncles, and aunts lived in a very tiny room. They sold flowers, her mother gave me a rose to give to mine. I felt so bad taking a rose from such a poor family.

After a year of school, my older sister said, “Hey, we can go to the Bahnhof Kino, (a movie theater at a train station) for ½ our tram money.” We then start playing hooky. We could sit there all day watching the newsreels, which were thirty minutes long, so we learned a lot of German. I saw newsreels of concentration camps being opened, probably because of the Nuremberg Trials.

When we were discovered, my sister was sent to the only boarding school that would take her mid-semester, The Ecole d’Humanité, the School of Humanity, a boarding school in Goldern, Switzerland. My sister wrote to our mother, “I’m homesick, send me my sister.”

From the Frankfurt apartment, I was sent to boarding school at age nine. That is where I really grew up, the Ecole was my childhood home. It was a progressive boarding school with a total population of about 100. That included the teachers and the helpers.

The school was wonderful. It had two houses. One was the four-storey Turmhaus, the tower house, because it had a tower that probably used to have a bell. The second, a three-storey house was called the Haupthaus (the main house). A gong woke you up at six in the morning and the person striking the gong would go to all the floors—Gong, Gong, Gong, Gong!! Sometimes when you woke up in the morning, the ink in your fountain pen would be frozen. I think my first room there might have been with my best friend now, Mona Meyerhof. It was a small, narrow room. We were so little then, our beds felt very long. We would take turns running across the room, then jump really high to get into bed so the monsters wouldn't get us. Then we would just cuddle, you know, and spend the night. That was sweet.

When we were first there, they had no centralized heating. A small wood burning stove on each floor sent heat up, then it went out in the afternoons. After waking up we’d take a cold shower, because that's what you did, even in the winter. We ran across to another building in the snow to take showers, very refreshing, we loved it. After our showers we'd have breakfast, which would just be bread and jam and butter, and porridge. You sat at the same table with your “family.” The school was divided into families: two family heads and brothers and sisters ranging in age from very young to the second year of college, because that's when Germans go to the university.

Goldern was a tiny village in the Bernese Oberland located between Zürich and Interlaken. It had one store called Lädeli (little store) where you could buy a chocolate bar for 25 cents. Near it was the dairy where the farmers brought their milk. The school was very, very poor and was primarily vegetarian. They didn't give us any meat or milk. We got cheese once a week for our best dinner, so we were pretty hungry a lot of the time. We would take our spending money, which was about one dollar a month, and sometimes go down to the village and buy a glass of milk because we craved it.

Every morning after breakfast, we would peel potatoes. The potatoes would be dumped on the table, and everybody would peel potatoes, we got very good at that. Before lunch started, an older student would read a saying from Goethe or another philosopher, “Freedom is not doing what you want, but doing what you must,” things like that. And you had a minute of silence where you thought about it.

There was a cook, and maybe one assistant, we had to do Putzpause, clean up. After breakfast, we would all have these jobs: cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the hall, sweeping the stairs, chopping wood, or working in the kitchen. And your Putzpause might mean washing the dishes after lunch. We had three big sinks. The first one was a soapy sink, which you put the dishes in. The next one still had a little soap in it, and then the last one was clear water where it got rinsed and hopefully clean. It was always very noisy and lots of fun.

The first room that I remember living in was in the Haupthaus, the main house where the kitchen was and the dining rooms were, after meals, the dining rooms were used as classrooms. Frau Stein was my first family “mother.” Once, probably because I was so young, under her apron she kept a key to the Geschenkschrank (the present closet) and said choose anything you want.

Fräulein Herta Peterson was my second “family mother.” She was an artist, she grew vegetables, she taught us how to sew leather, make gloves, how to make wood block prints, how to paint and draw. She knew I wanted to be a painter and said to me once, “Don’t worry if at times in your life you are unable to paint. Your work will mature and develop as you do.” She was amazing. The third woman at the Ecole who was important to me was Natalie, she was an American, who after the Second World War decided that the world hated each other so much she had to do something. She started international camps in the States and in Europe. Children came from all over the world to these wonderful camps, which later I taught at. She asked me to be a camp counselor when I was 15. I was younger than some of the campers, which was a problem because I had a crush on one.

My favorite place at the Ecole was being in the woods, I had many private fields I visited. The students’ favorite places was the Grossenstein, a big stone that had been left in the middle of the field after the avalanche retreated. We would climb it, sit on top, talk, and dream. Also, the piano room. I loved to play the piano, I would play Mozart over and over again. We tried to play baseball, but no one knew the rules. We ended up with a made-up game that was a combination of cricket and baseball.

I loved to ski. We grew up in Kitzbühel skiing, I was a very good skier. We had a race on the Hasliberg. I was in the girl’s competition, I was in the younger group, but apparently my time was faster than even the older boys. So, when the town got together to give the prizes, they said, Mary gets to come down and pick her present first. On the table were all these presents, like jackets and shoes and books, stuff like that. I got to pick my present first because I was the fastest. And because our food at school was so bad, I picked a can of peaches!

Paulus Geheeb, the founder of the Ecole d’Humanité, had strong ideas about education. He believed in nurturing children with love and security. You provide safety, love, and as much freedom as possible, so a child becomes self-confident and takes responsibility for their actions. His first school was in Germany, during the Second World War, he said the Gestapo came and took away one of his Jewish teachers. He asked why? They answered, “We're doing it because we can”.

He then wrote to all the parents, “Come pick up your children, I'm leaving, the school is closing.” He went with a couple of teachers, I don't remember how many, maybe five teachers and maybe three students, to Switzerland.

Paulus said that if you didn’t want to go to class, it's your teacher's fault, they’ve made it boring. I remember one time I said, “Oh, I don't want to be in the classroom. Let's go out to the woods and find a perfect tree.” So we all went to the forest and had our math class up in a tree.

The school was organized so that there would be a general assembly on Fridays, and all problems were brought to that assembly and everyone had equal vote, even the youngest child. It was brilliant, brilliant. Paulus said the years of 11-12 were gangster years for boys. They were wild and energetic. One time they did something bad, I can't remember what it was, and so it came up in Schulgemeinde(school assembly) that they'd done this bad thing and the teachers said, okay, now what do you want to do about it? One kid stood up and said, “Well, I think we should chop wood for two years.” And the other one would say, “and I think we should clean toilets for three months.” They kept giving themselves more and more punishments. Finally, a teacher said, “Okay, you get to chop wood for a month!”

One day my teacher and family mother, Fräulein Pedersen came into my room, and said, “Mary, I'm really worried. I think that the boys are acting up again. The light in the hall is broken, the window in the bathroom is broken, and the door is crooked.” I looked at her and said, “I did all of those by mistake. I jumped up and accidentally hit the light. I pushed the window and door too hard, and they broke.” We just laughed.

*Houses are named after their owners in small villages.