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‘I never received any humanity’

Rose-Marie ended up on the street after being mistreated swissinfo.ch

“I was born in 1936 in canton St Gallen. There were three of us and my mother died in a psychiatric hospital when she was 25. My father always said that the doctors killed her. He was a musician and couldn’t look after us so we were placed in an orphanage. We were mistreated, always hungry, and the sisters were moved around every four years so that they wouldn’t get attached [to us].


“When I was 14, I was placed with some farmers to look after their 20 children. The conditions were terrible and I wasn’t paid, but I was so ignorant that I didn’t even know that I could have been paid… I ran away, I was sent back, thrown into the street, all that.

“When I was 20, I found a job as a maid in Lausanne. There, my problems really began. I went to a ball with another girl, we got picked up and raped and fell pregnant. My boss didn’t have any children but she threw me out on the street without a cent. On Christmas night I wanted to throw myself off a bridge. I had just put one leg over the rail when my baby kicked for the first time. I swore to him that that I would look after him, but still he was traumatised by the five years that we lived on the street. I didn’t speak French very well and people detested me because I was Swiss-German. I slept in churches, washed in the fountains; I spent the day shelling seeds left for the birds. I licked the dirty dishes from the Uniprix restaurant. Finally, they gave me lodgings. I worked at the fairgrounds with the clay shooting. I learned how to be a salesperson and I became a demonstrator of household electrical goods.”

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SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR