Memoirs of a child of the past century - 4. Chapter 4: away from home

At the end of September 1949, my father took me to Zurich. I thought to have finally freed myself from his loving constraint, but it was without knowing him. He had chosen a room next to the university, in the apartment of an old lady who used to monitor (and spy on) her guests, allowing no female visits. In addition, he even asked her to report to him my every move.

After a few months, my father stopped watching over me. Either he had other things to do, or he became aware that at my age, I was no more the obeying little boy he used to see in me. Concerns to educate our children are a funny thing. Having not been monitored by his own parents as he would have wanted, he turned to me his desire to compensate and exaggerated the other way.

Which is why I have later done the same with my children, allowing them at an early age the liberty which I had been deprived of. It's a fate that has always struck parents ! But I will never regret the way I educated my four children, or I should better say : the way my wife educated our four children (because I was mostly away from home through my years of military service and the cares of my professional life).

During the first months, taking courses in German absorbed all my days. I passed in the hallways, the cafeteria and in the seminars, seeing others Swiss-French students, who had the same difficulties. We soon found ourselves on the same bench and I made some friends.

In the first weeks, my father asked me to return to Geneva every weekend, but I made ​​him understand very quickly that it was a waste of time and money. Apart from the engineering students including myself, the French speaking colony of Zurich included architecture students from another faculty of SFIT, commercial employees and apprentices, as well as several girls 'au pair', working in families in town during their 'sabbatical' to learn German and dealing with young children.

I continued to watch pretty girls and smart boys around me, first for a purely aesthetic pleasure. Zurich city was then very prudish and had the same views about sexuality as some small U.S. cities in the middle of the Corn Belt. Any manifestation of homosexuality was not even imaginable and would be immediately suppressed. ’ Touching’ young men was impossible, even just in thought. So I concentrated my 'hunt sex' on girls, especially those in the Niederdorf, the Red District of Zurich, and I won the first prize ! Noelle was employed in a milliner's shop and posed as a model for women's magazines. One of her large format photos, with her ​​cleavage and her big smile, found its place on my bedside table. But she preferred men over 35 years with big motorbikes and, after a few wild nights at her flat, I was quickly shown the door.

During the weekends, and soon almost every night, after finishing the exercises imposed by the faculty, I just met a small group of friends at a club for boys only (!) to talk and listen to classic and jazz music. But later I was lucky enough to find several second-year students from Geneva that I knew from high school.

I met them first at screenings of the film club university. We formed soon a bunch of friends, boys and girls, who met in groups several times a week, to go out and have fun, to go swimming, partying in night clubs when we had money, and often to help each other. When for example a student had to render an architectural project for a given date and was late, several of us came to his room and worked with him to complete his models and to color his plans.

We formed two distinct groups: engineers and architects, bound by friendship but jealous of each other. The ‘architects’ regarded themselves better than others and looked down on ‘engineers’.

In our two groups of students, despite our different backgrounds, we were growing close to each other. So we decided to live in community. After some research, we found a series of attic rooms in a dilapidated building at the ‘Obstgartenstrasse’ meaning ‘orchard street’ (a funny name, because there were no fruit trees in the middle of the Zurich) not too far from the ‘Poly’ (the name we gave to our school). And soon we were all together, next to each other. We met every evening together for a dinner, which almost always turned at the end of the meal into a friendly party, laughing and singing together.

The meeting with Yvette, my future wife

One of the girls in the group, an au pair caring for two young children in the family of a well known fashion hairdresser, was dating an architect who had the tendency to drop her too frequently. To make him jealous, she looked for a guy; very enterprising (but not too much); hoping to retrieve her friend this way. Her choice fell on me. Of course, I let myself do it. For our first date, I took her to a movie. The movie was ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’, a British film adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's opera ‘Les contes d'Hoffmann’. And 60 years later, when we review this film, the memory of our first meeting together is alive again.

We were actually very close to each other, same character, same attitude to life, almost the same age. She was the president of the local chapter of the Young Christian Workers, a trade union movement fighting for the rights of young workers and her political opinions joined mine. Our contacts became increasingly close and she quickly forgot the architect, the reason for our first meeting.

In spring 1951, I was home for spring break and I received a phone call from Zurich. Yvette was leaving for a few days in Paris with another member of our group who had a motorcycle. I could not stand to see her go without me and I decided immediately to join them in Paris by hitchhiking, because I could not afford to go there by train.

We spent a wonderful five days to visit the Marais and the old Paris. We stayed in a small hotel in the 'Ile St. Louis' in the middle of the river Seine just behind the cathedral, in a room for three guests, as cheap as possible, because we could not afford to pay more.

And for Yvette and me, it was the beginning of a love that lasts to today. The owner of the motorcycle soon realized that his role was reduced to that of a chaperone. He accepted this willingly and he is still today one of our best friends. He has since married an American, spent several years in the United States, divorced and returned to France with his three children to marry a friend of ours. For years now, we regularly spend holidays together.

Meanwhile, several students in our group decided to form a community and live together in an old building in a street in the middle of the old Zurich, at a street called ‘Obstgartenstrasse’ ( a funny name, called ‘orchard street’, funny because there were no fruit trees in this district !). It was the start time of the hippies (they were called then ‘existentialists’), and such communities were beginning to be fashionable. On our return from Paris in late 1951, we decided Yvette and me to join that community, but each with its own bedroom, at least to save appearances vis-à-vis our families. Marry someone of another religion than his family’s was a taboo at the time for both strict Catholics and for Jews after the Holocaust. In addition, Yvette’s great-uncle was Bishop, so we couldn’t imagine the approval of her family for such a marriage.

The first months of 1952 saw the consolidation of our common life. We took our habits slowly. Engaged the day with my studies and the activities of my wife, we met in the evenings, nights and weekends for the life of an ‘old couple’ during the day and ‘young lovers’ during the night.

But the summer of 1952 changed all that dramatically. Every citizen of my country must do at the age of 20 years 4 months of military service. I should have performed it in 1949, but then I obtained a delay of three years for various reasons (studies, obligation to choose between France and Switzerland, etc.). This period ended in May 1952 but I totally forgot this detail.

Incorporated in the signal corps of the Swiss Air Force, I entered on July 21 the training camp on a military airfield in a small village called ‘Dübendorf’, 10 km from Zurich. I had to interrupt my studies and learned to become a mechanic of all kinds of old mobile radio stations, dating back to 1945 and bought from the surplus of the U.S. Army in Germany.

Some evenings and Sundays, I could leave the barracks, take the train to Zurich, return to the ‘Obstgartenstrasse’ and spend a few hours with my ‘wife’. One Sunday evening, I forgot the time, returned too late to the barracks and was stopped by the guards. I was then punished with three days of detention. I spent my time in the jail cell studying the military code to find the best method of revenge.

The funny thing is that this adventure allowed me to become a friend of the commander of the school, and he recognized my technical abilities and found that my leadership skills. Later, due to his recommendation, I became not only one of the first officers of the future Swiss military Radar surveillance, but also one of the very few Jewish Senior officers of the Swiss Army (Even after the defeat of the Nazis and the Holocaust, many conservatives in power in Government and Army had not yet abandoned their anti-Semitic attitudes and their mistrust of Jews).

But my military career is another story and I keep it for later.