Switzerland's dark secret: the 'earning children' sold for slavery

SUBDUED schoolchildren clatter down the stairs of an old Zurich schoolhouse, relieved to be back in the present.

They've just spent the morning in the grim past of Switzerland's verdingkinder: the countless "earning children" sold into legal slavery by the Swiss authorities for more than a century until 1950.

Through the exhibition and a feature film, Der Verdingbub(The Earning Boy), the Swiss are now listening to the stories of the 10,000 former verdingkinder still alive, grappling with the physical and psychological scars of childhood slavery.

“We find people from the last generation are only now coming forward because they’ve retired, their foster parents are dead and they have nothing to lose,” says Jacqueline Häusler of the private initiative behind the Zürich exhibition.

The history of Switzerland's verdingkinderstretches back to the start of the 19th century, when authorities intervened arbitrarily in family life to take custody of children after a parent's death or the breakdown of the family home. The most common justification for taking children was a ruling of "neglect", an elastic term applied to children with abusive parents but also to children of single mothers or living in any other family model deemed inferior to the Swiss middle-class ideal.

To prevent the children becoming a burden on the public purse, local authorities auctioned off as many as 10,000 annually to work as unpaid labourers.

Rural Switzerland was, until the middle of the last century, a poor place with limited mechanisation, where every extra pair of hands, however young, could make the difference between a subsisting or a failed farm. Records from the Berne region in 1929 show that a fifth of all farm labourers were aged 15 and under.

Verdingkinderwere sold off in reverse auctions, with farming families underbidding each other to make the lowest child-support demands on the authorities. The children were removed from their homes, often without warning or a chance to say goodbye, and deposited far from home with new, often loveless families. Ageing ledgers on display in the exhibition list this child trade in neat columns. But nowhere are recorded the long working days, the physical and sexual abuse, and the permanent hunger, fear and exhaustion – not even the stolen Christmas presents.

“I got my food in a windowless shed, never at the table,” says Johann in exhibition testimony. Another person, Walter, recalls: “We had to stand at the back step and eat with our back to the table.” Dora remembers her foster mother telling her: “You eat too much. You’re not giving a good return.”

If welfare inspectors called around, they spoke to the foster parents but never to the children. If they were thorough, the inspectors were shown the comfortable bedroom of the "regular" children, never the hay shed or outhouse where the verdingkinderslept. One image shows an inspector examining a young girl's teeth like a heifer at market.

The fate of Switzerland's remaining verdingkinderis a divisive issue today, particularly over the issue of compensation. Some survivors draw comparisons with the experience of forced labourers in Nazi Germany, who kept the wartime industrial machine rolling and were compensated only a decade ago.

The Swiss newspaper Sonntagsblickasked economists to make a rough calculation of the lost earnings and economic benefit of the unpaid child labour over the 150 years; the lowest estimate was 20 billion Swiss francs (€16.6 billion).

Swiss authorities have issued an apology, but demands for compensation have yet to be met. Campaigners want the estimated 10,000 verdingkinderstill alive to be allowed a share of a €1 billion compensation fund.

But not everyone agrees. The right-wing Weltwochemagazine accused the exhibition and feature film of "sitting in judgment from a moral high chair". The populist politician Christoph Blocher has suggested that the verdingkindersystem was "social and caring", part of the social consensus of another era, and had many positive sides.

Plinio Bachmann, the screenwriter of Der Verdingbub, agrees that, for some children, life on a farm spared them a worse fate in a home. "We can't forget either that the abusers on farms were themselves under huge existential pressure," he said. "But it is perverse and a monstrous belittlement of the suffering to ignore the many terrible stories."

Back at the Zurich schoolhouse, exhibition organisers say they are less interested in judging the motives of the perpetrators than in providing a context for survivors’ testimony.

The verdingkinderdescribe themselves as prisoners of a stiff conservative social code in rural Switzerland, where families, the pastor and village teacher were all anxious to keep the peace with their neighbours – at the expense of the children. There are striking parallels between the Swiss victims of helplessness, hopelessness and apathy and those locked up in Ireland's industrial schools and Magdalen laundries. As one student visiting the Zurich exhibition puts it: "Nobody saw anything, because they would have had to change something."

Watching the school class leaving, the exhibition’s organiser, Barbara Wenk, says: “You can tell you’re reaching the children when they become quiet, particularly children who are themselves from a difficult background or who are beaten at home.”

Besides students, the exhibition has attracted considerable attention from social workers and child protection officials. “Most show a professional disposition, but sometimes you see people distancing themselves from the story we’re trying to tell,” says Jacqueline Häusler. “After all, what are we doing today with our children, and how will we be judged in 30 years’ time?”

Verdingkinder Reden

(Earning Children Speak) runs until April 1st at the Kern Schoolin Zurich. See

[ verdingkinderreden.ch ]

All work and no play

Werner"In winter they sewed my trouser pockets up. They said, if you work, [your hands] will stay warm."

Heidy"I wasn't allowed talk at the table. They talked about me but never to me."

Alice"I was so happy when I could go to school, because no one hit me there."

Dora"At Christmas they stole our presents. They took everything they could use."