Swiss Aristocrats and the Second World War
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Books:
Coronets, Butterflies & Roses
Rocky, My Friend
Swiss Aristocrats and the Second World War
My Personal Voyage through History and the War in Italy
This fast-paced voyage through history is a biography of an aristocratic family whose roots start at the end of the fourteenth century and terminate two years after the Second World War.
This story starts in Sumatra, Indonesia, where my grandfather, Dr. Othmar Imhof, and his family lived for several years at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was the physician for the Dutch colony. Life was good, at least for the family. They had a beautiful home, fifteen servants (coolies), and a Chinese chef. Dr. Imhof worked close to eighteen hours every day. He was the head physician, chief of staff, and chief surgeon. He was overloaded with responsibilities. Their two children, Marguerite Luise and Othmar, were born in Sumatra.
Toward the end of the First World War, the Imhofs had to return to Switzerland. My grandmother and the two children went first because Dr. Imhof had to satisfy his contractual duties with the Dutch.
From this point this biography picks up the von Wyttenbach side of the family. It starts with Bertschi Wyttenbach in the thirteenth century and goes directly to Thomas Wyttenbach, the reformer (sixteenth century), and the massacre of the Huguenots in Paris, France, in 1572. You will also read how New Berne in North Carolina was founded in 1710.
Back in Berne, the Imhof family settled in nicely. Maiti (Marguerite Luise) met Baron von Wyttenbach in the early nineteen twenties. They married in 1925 in the cathedral in Berne (the Münster).
Maiti did not like to live in Switzerland. The cold winters and all the mountains seemed to suffocate her. I think that after having lived in Indonesia, this is quite understandable. After their honeymoon, the young couple decided to move to Italy. Tomi was offered a good position as director of a large property in the “Pianura Padana,” Northern Italy. After a few years he was offered an even better position by the duke of Orléans, still in the Pianura Padana.
In 1933, with the Imhofs and some other relatives and friends’ help, Tomi and Maiti were able to purchase a beautiful “gentleman’s farm” near Lake Como. The property was called “La Benedetta” because it was built as a Benedictine convent in the fifteenth century. Our home was added by the previous owners about fifty years before. It was considered “new.”
By this time Tomi and Maiti had three children: I was the second, between two boys. Tomi died when the youngest son was only four months old. Maiti had two choices: give up and go back to Switzerland or stay and fight. And fight she did.
The war had already started all around us. We all endured hunger, cold, bombardments, massacres, Hitler, and Mussolini.
In 1941 Marga (Maiti was her nickname) remarried, and in 1943 we were given the joy of a little brother.
This Aristocrats and the Second World War history ends in the year 1947, two years after the end of the war.
With this book, I am trying to describe how a war influences and deeply hurts the people on whose land the war is fought.
I also wrote this book to show my appreciation to all the Allied soldiers who so valiantly fought for us. So many were wounded, so many died, and so many families were left to grieve their losses. What is so tragic is that the Allied soldiers are still fighting, still dying, and being wounded; will we never learn?
Last but no
About the Author
The author of this fast-paced voyage through history, Bigna A. Francis-von Wyttenbach, was born in Berne, Switzerland, the daughter of Baron and Baroness Thomas A. von Wyttenbach. Bigna grew up in the vicinity of Como, Italy, where her parents had purchased a beautiful “gentleman’s farm” called “La Benedetta.” The main buildings were built in the fifteenth century as a Benedictine monastery. Bigna has two brothers, Peter and Xandi, and later, after her father’s premature death and her mother’s remarriage, Danilo was born. Bigna is a graduate of the Private Swiss School of Milan. She also obtained a diploma for “Commercial English for Foreigners” at the Pitman’s College in London, England. Bigna is fluent in Italian, German, French, English, and of course Swiss-German. She was always an avid reader and by the age of seventeen she could read in four languages and three dialects. In 1959 Bigna arrived at the Idlewild International Airport in New York (now it’s called Kennedy) to visit her cousins for a year. Well, it did not work out quite that way: in March she met Dr. John E. Francis and in July they were married. The author has traveled extensively in Europe, and later, with her husband, in USA and Canada. She also visited the Bahamas Islands a couple of times. From 1967 to 1973, she taught languages at home. She was also a substitute French teacher at the Pleasantville, New York, high school and taught French, Italian, German, English for foreigners, as well as adult education at the Pleasantville high school from 1968 to 1973. In 1973 she was licensed as a real estate agent. She kept teaching for a while but two jobs, three children, and a large house were too much. (She had about twenty-five student every week.) It was going to be a difficult task to let her students go. One elderly couple was quite unsettled and told Bigna: “You will never be as good a real estate agent as you are a teacher.” In 1977 she obtained the New York state real estate broker’s license and opened her own office in Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York She has been the owner and president of three real estate corporations, one of which one was international. Bigna was a member of the FIABCI or the International Real Estate Federation, in Paris, France, for over eight years. When in 1985 her husband, John, was transferred to New Jersey by Ciba-Geigy, Bigna had to give up her businesses: one was sold while the others were dissolved. She had to start all over again. While she was studying for the New Jersey real estate broker’s exam, she bought a gift shop in Basking Ridge and had the opportunity to learn the retail business. The gift shop had a very negative cash flow, but in fifteen months, against everybody’s forecast, Bigna managed to turn it into a profitable business. She sold the store and returned to work full time in the real estate business. Bigna felt that by now she had acquired a good deal of knowledge of the areas she was going to serve as a realtor and do a professional job. Bigna has worked successfully as a real estate broker-associate in New Jersey with several companies. The one she liked best was Re/max. Every time she went to see her family in Italy, Switzerland, and friends in the principality of Monaco, she paid a visit to some real estate offices to make a connection. The director of the Italian Re/max main office near Milan invited her to speak in Milan at the Ramada Inn, and in 2001 she was an invited speaker in Florence, Italy, at the Re/max International Convention at the Sheraton Hotel. Bigna and John have two sons and a daughter, six granddaughters and a grandson, and reside in Chester, New Jersey. In 1993 John retired and now teaches chemistry at Rutgers University and Morris County College. After over thirty years in the real estate business, Bigna is now a real estate counselor and a referral agent. She has returned to teaching languages from her home and is delighted with the quality of her students. She loves teaching and sometimes feels that she should have gone back to tutoring years ago. Bigna has a cheerful, exuberant personality and says, “I am happy 90 percent of the time, the remaining 10 percent I get cranky like everybody else.” Her glass is always half full, not half empty. Many times Bigna has been asked: “What made you decide to write a book?” Her answer: “My main reason is that, having lived through the horrors of the Second World War and having been liberated by the Allies, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for all the soldiers, past, present, and future, and their families, who have sacrificed so much for us. This is my way of saying thank you.” One other reason, of course, is that she wanted her children and grandchildren to know more about Europe and her background. Bigna also strongly feels that it is important never to forget how terribly destructive wars are, particularly for the people who have to live in war zones. Bigna is also the author of "Rocky, my Friend," a short children's story and "Coronets, Butterflies and Roses" also a children's book with four short stories, that will be published by the end of 2004.