Those authorities were Swiss and those refugees were German Jews, but the comparisons with Britain today are telling. Then as now, the government reckoned they had enough headaches of their own. Only a few folk cared enough to reach out to persecuted people beyond their own borders, and two of the folk who cared were the young Swiss couple who ran this bookshop. Emil had just turned Emmie was Their shop flourished and, when Hitler came to power, they responded by founding a publishing house called Europa Verlag.
This name reflected their internationalism. More than a hundred German and Austrian authors were published by this enterprising couple they also published the Italian anti-fascist writer Ignazio Silone. When their books were banned in Germany , they responded with a daring window display of censored titles, piled high like a funeral pyre.
Officially, Switzerland was neutral β an island of democracy and liberty, not at all beholden to the Third Reich. Unofficially, the situation was more complex. German was the mothertongue of most Swiss citizens. The two countries enjoyed close cultural and economic ties. Here in Zurich, life was especially fraught. This was a German-speaking city with many German residents, not all of whom were anti-Nazi. The German border was barely 20 miles away.
The Swiss authorities were loath to antagonise their German neighbours, and so Emil and Emmie received scant support and a good deal of obstruction from their fellow countrymen. In , when Emil was expelled from the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, the Swiss Federal Council followed suit by threatening to ban their books.
Their activities were monitored by the police and, after , by the army too. As the war dragged on the country remained unoccupied, but no one knew how long that would last. After the Anchluss and the fall of France, Switzerland was surrounded. The Swiss Patriotic Federation, which was sympathetic to Nazi Germany, had many influential supporters, especially in the upper echelons of the Swiss army.
