Olga Fierz

Olga Fierz (26 July 1900 – 17 June 1990) was a Swiss teacher and translator. After 1926 she teamed up with Přemysl Pitter to undertake welfare work for disadvantaged children in Prague. In 1933 they opened their “Milíč House”, a flexibly oriented part-residential children's home with playrooms, clubrooms, together with library and gymnastics hall, a workshop and outdoor sports facilities. There were also educators on hand to help children with school work issues. After 1938 the focus changed. The “Milíč House” attracted suspicion from the security services: it became unacceptably dangerous to accommodate orphaned Jewish children in it. Fierz was nevertheless able to concentrate on arranging deliveries of food and other basic essentials to the hiding places in the city of Jewish children suffering persecution and, increasingly, to Jewish orphans. After 1945 Pitter and Fierz were able to take over four abandoned chateaux in the countryside south of Prague and convert these into temporary orphanages. In addition to Jewish children, the slaughter of war and the Soviet mandated ethnic cleansing of the middle 1940s meant there were large numbers of abandoned and destitute children of German ethnicity to be cared for, and the two groups, hitherto racially segregated by the authorities (and frequently in the eyes of society more generally), were treated as one. However, a new form of externally imposed one-party dictatorship was taking hold in Czechoslovakia, and in December 1950 Fierz was refused re-admission to the country when returning from her sister's funeral, which she had attended in Switzerland. The next year Přemysl Pitter was also expelled, and for ten years their welfare work was concentrated on a refugee camp near Nuremberg (Franconia) in the part of Germany that had been relaunched, in 1949, as the U.S.-sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany). Here the focus was again on children, caught up in the refugee tide created by the imposition of Soviet one-party rule over much of Eastern and central Europe.Olga Fierz received various marks of official recognition during her life-time, and the accumulation of awards continued after she died. In 1966, acting on behalf of the State of Israel, Yad Vashem, honoured her as a Righteous Among the Nations. On 21 May 1985 a tree was planted in her honour along the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem. Some years after she died in 1990 a recently discovered “Main-belt Asteroid” (SPKID: 2048782) was named in her honour.