When the Swiss were poor - Guest Post by Kim Hays

Several of us had the pleasure of meeting Kim Hays at Bouchercon in San Diego and hearing about her intriguing series set in Bern, Switzerland. She moved to Bern thirty-five years ago when she married a Swiss; by then, she’d also lived in the US, San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm. Pesticide (2022), her first police procedural featuring Swiss detectives Linder and Donatelli, was shortlisted for a CWA Debut Dagger and a 2023 Silver Falchion for Best Mystery. 

Bestselling author Julia Spencer-Fleming called Sons and Brothers (2023), the second book in the Polizei Bern series, “a must-read”, and Kirkus said it was, "A smart procedural that keeps its mystery ticking." The third book, A Fondness for Truth, will be out next year and already can be pre-ordered. 

In today's guest blog Kim tells us about a less savory part of Swiss history and how it links to the backstory of Sons and Brothers.

I write police procedurals set in Bern, Switzerland, where I’ve lived with my Swiss husband for over 35 years. Our apartment is a ten-minute walk from the bridge across the Aare River that takes us to the city's medieval center. On clear days, I can see the Bernese Alps spread out in a glorious panorama from the other side of the bridge.

 

Bernese Alps

No matter how much I love Bern, it’s an odd place to set murder mysteries. That’s because of Switzerland’s homicide rate. In 2021, only 42 “intentional killings” took place in this country of 8.8 million people, representing a rate of 0.5 cases of homicide per 100,000 residents. The United States, by contrast, had a 6.81 per 100,00 homicide rate, almost 14 times higher than Switzerland’s. The rates in France and the United Kingdom are double Switzerland’s, while Finland's is three times higher.

Bern's old city and the Aare River

Still, what enthusiastic mystery writer would let something like murder statistics stop her? After all, the crime rate in Three Pines, where Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache has investigated so many cases, must by now be higher than that of Jamaica (52.1 per 100,000).

 Despite its low murder rate, Switzerland has its dark side. Think of banks hiding millions for dictators, oligarchs, and tax evaders; pharmaceutical companies overcharging for vital drugs; commodity traders exploiting the world’s resources. Several Swiss cities, particularly Zürich, are among the highest consumers of cocaine in the world. This last statistic has a lot to do with the fact that Switzerland also has the world’s highest average wealth per adult.

Glencore's Hail Creek coal mine
Glencore is a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company
Satellite image 2022 Maxar from Bloomberg

 I would be a bad Swiss citizen if I weren’t familiar with the faults of my adopted country, and I’ve only listed some of them. But what I’ve been most aware of over the past 35 years as a Swiss is how good my life has been. We raised our son in Bern, and I’ve never stopped admiring the quality of the public education and health care he received, the abundance of local sports and other free-time activities he had to choose from, and the easy access he had to these hobbies and also to playgrounds, parks, forests, and other safe places to play out of doors. When he couldn’t reach them on foot or by bike, he could take the tram or, as he grew older, the train.

 

One of Bern's many playgrounds

This is part of what Switzerland’s wealth buys its residents today—excellent schooling, medical care, and public transportation, plus safety.

 But it wasn’t always so. True, the country industrialized early, and its cities were relatively prosperous as far back as the early 1800s. But its mountainous rural cantons were poor for centuries, causing great waves of poverty-stricken Swiss to emigrate to North and South America during the nineteenth century. This rural poverty also created Switzerland’s reputation as an excellent source of soldiers because so many young men left home to earn their living as mercenaries. The Swiss were already hiring themselves out as fighters by the thirteenth century, and there were periods of the country’s history when every tenth man was serving abroad as a mercenary. Known for its neutrality today, Switzerland’s militant past is symbolized by the Pope’s Swiss Guard in their Renaissance-style uniforms.

 

Swiss Papal Guard
Newly Swissed, May 16, 2016

In Sons and Brothers, the second book in my Polizei Bern series, I address another sign of Switzerland’s long years of poverty: the system of contracting young children to work for farmers. For at least a hundred-and-fifty years, children were forcibly removed by local officials from their “unfit” parents and placed on farms as free labor. Many of these parents were single mothers, the children were sometimes as young as five, and the farmers were often neglectful, cruel, and even physically and sexually abusive. That this practice went on until 1970 is a scandal; so is the fact that the terrible plight of these Verdingkinder, as they are called in Switzerland, wasn’t officially acknowledged until early in this century.

 

Farm in Emmental

A similar system of putting children to work on farms existed in the US from approximately 1870 until 1920, although these American children had no parents and tended to work for only one season at a time before being sent back to their city orphanages. By the end of World War I, child labor had come to be seen as wrong, and the practice ended. In Switzerland, it continued for another fifty years.

 The placement of Verdingkinder on farms may have gone on for so long in Switzerland because local officials were on a crusade to improve Swiss society. Their goal wasn’t so much to find better homes for young children as to ensure children weren’t raised by parents the state considered immoral. Unwed mothers, mothers or fathers without a live-in spouse, families who were Yenish (i.e., part of a nomadic group common in parts of Western Europe), and even unconventional people whose neighbors complained about them might all have their children taken away from them, and there was nothing they could do about it. It was considered good for the country if “bad” people were kept from bringing up children who’d follow in their footsteps. That was one goal the officials often succeeded in since many Verdingkinder never saw their parents again.

 

Yenish trailer camp

Most of Sons and Brothers takes place today, not in the past, and only a few characters are former contract children. But parts of the book carry readers back to the early 1960s when youngsters were caught in the system. In Switzerland today, there is widespread awareness of what Verdingkinder endured; it is easy to find published interviews in which surviving adults describe years of cold, hunger, neglect, overwork, and sometimes abuse.

 

Inspecting a contract child's teeth
Paul Senn, 1940. FFV, Kunstmuseum Bern

What comes through most poignantly in these accounts is a terrible loneliness. In some households, the farming families paid by the state to look after these children never once called them by their names—or by any name. They were simply “Boy” or “Girl.” They didn’t eat with the family or sleep in a bedroom, and they were barely spoken to except to be put to work.

 Sons and Brothers shows the toll a life like this can take, even after sixty years.

For more information about Kim, her books, and Bern, take a look at Kim's website, www.kimhaysbern.com.