In the Midst of Life

she was taken on and told to work as an assistant on the VD wards, in which all the patients were dying. Syphilitic patients were feared, shunned and locked away, but Elisabeth found them to be pathetic creatures who were warm and pleasant, and simply craved friendship and understanding. She opened her heart to them, and it was this mutual affection that prepared her for worse that was to come.
    On 6th June, 1944, the combined allied forces landed in Normandy and the war changed. Thousands of refugees from all over Europe streamed into Switzerland. For days, then weeks, they marched, limped, crawled or were carried. The very old, the very young - all were half starved, ragged and verminous. Virtually overnight, the hospital was inundated with these traumatised victims of war.
    For weeks, Elisabeth worked entirely with children who were mostly orphans, frightened and lost. De-lousing and disinfecting them was the first job, then finding clothes, then the search for food. She and another girl stole most of the food from the hospital stores, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but nearly had serious consequences. She was saved from the wrath of the outraged authorities by a Jewish doctor, who quickly arranged for the Zürich Jewish community to refund the cost of the food. He proved to be a powerful influence on her young life. He was a Polish Jew, and he told Elisabeth the horrifying stories of the concentration camps that had been built in Poland, and of the need for dedicated young people to go to his sad country to help with rebuilding. His words were another clarion call to Elisabeth.
    On 7th May, 1945, all the bells of all the churches rang out in every country across Europe. People rejoiced, sang, danced, partied in the streets, got drunk. The war was over. It had lasted for sixyears, but the rebuilding would take much longer. Elisabeth joined the International Voluntary Service For Peace, and for four years worked with medical teams in some of the worst areas of devastation. When a team was assigned to go to Poland to set up a first aid station, she joined them, and went to Majdanek, a death camp, where 300,000 people had been gassed alive. She saw with her own eyes trainloads of children’s shoes and clothes, and trunks full of human hair that had been destined for Germany to make pillows. She smelled the sweet odour of the gas sheds, the smell of death, and the all-pervading stench of rotting corpses. She saw the barbed wire, the guard towers, the spotlights, and the rows of barracks in which men, women and children had spent their last days while they awaited their call to strip and form a line to enter the gas chamber, to fulfil the quota of exterminations for that day. She wandered around, numb with shock, and saw to her amazement, sketched on every wall of every barrack, hundreds of butterflies. What, in the name of Heaven, could impel people waiting in such conditions for their inevitable death, to depict the form of a butterfly? She did not know, none of us will ever know, but it was a concept that would fill her imagination, and haunt her for the rest of her life. It was this image, and the symbolic message sent out by these doomed people, that would eventually lead her to a belief in the God of Love.
    It was only after four years of this voluntary work that Elisabeth returned to Switzerland, more determined than ever to become a doctor. She had to start night school in order to learn the basics of science from scratch. There was no help from her father or her tutors, who told her to go and be a housewife, a maid, a seamstress - academia was not for girls. But she had been trained in the harsh school of life and she knew the value of persistence. In 1957, at the age of thirty-one, she passed her final examinations and became a country doctor in the mountain villages north of Zürich. It was a happy time.
    It is interesting to speculate on how life turns out for each of us, and how chance plays its part. Elisabeth always said it was the handof God guiding her. If she had not met and fallen in love with a handsome American doctor, she would have remained a contented family doctor in rural Switzerland, probably married to a respectable burger, happy to settle down after the hectic adventures of her youth. Instead, she married Emanuel Ross, went to America, and entered the maelstrom of American hospital medicine. This was where her intellectual life, coloured by her early experiences of suffering,