The story of Paul Grüninger, a forgotten Swiss hero who saved the lives of many Jewish refugees in 1938

A cold night in late November 1938 somewhere between Austria and Switzerland. It is freezing. A 14-year-old boy, his name is Erich Billig, slips across the border from Austria into Switzerland. On November 9 of that year, Nazi storm troops had vandalized Jewish shops and apartments and burned down synagogues all over Germany and Austria. Erich had been hiding in an apartment in Vienna and then started his secret journey to find shelter in Switzerland. His father had been deported to the concentration camp in Dachau. His brother had been able to flee and was now in Zurich. Erich’s mother put her youngest son on a train to Altach, a little town near the Swiss border, hoping that he would find a way to get to Zurich and join his brother.

In 1938, Switzerland did not want to take these masses of fleeing Jews into the country and had closed the border. Many German and Austrian Jews had fled to Switzerland. Most of them were sent back.

Switzerland had decided that any person crossing the border after August 19, 1938 without proper documents was denied entry without exception. We are in late November. Erich has missed that important deadline. He tries to cross the border illegally during the night but the dogs of the Swiss border police discover him. He is sent back into Austria. A few days later, Erich tries it again and this time he is lucky. He makes it into St. Gallen, where he is welcomed by a Jewish relief center. A police man appears and checks Erich’s documents. He stamps them. He tells the boy that he can stay.

My story is not so much about Erich. He survived the war along with his brother. I want to tell you the story of that policeman. His name is Paul Grüninger. In November 1938, he is the commander of the state police in St. Gallen. Grüninger is 47 years old at that time, the son of a cigar shop owner. An ordinary citizen, not particularly interested in politics, a dutiful officer. His daughter Ruth describes him as a normal man who liked to hike on weekends and play soccer with his friends. However, on April 3, 1939, about 4 months after he stamped the documents of Erich Billig, he is called in front of his superior and released from all duties. Local authorities had started an investigation when they saw so many Jews getting into St. Gallen. All these Jews had their papers stamped with an arrival date before August 19. When being interrogated, Grüninger admited that he had manipulated the date on his stamp. Hundreds of refugees had entered the country because of him and therefore would survive the Holocaust. In Fall 1940 Grüninger appears in front of a judge and is convicted for violating his professional oath and breaking Swiss law. He is kicked out of the police forces and has to pay a fine of 1300 CHF. Paul Grüninger will struggle for the rest of his life, marginalized by his compatriots. He remains poor and during long periods of his life he has no job. When Grüninger is dismissed from the St. Gallen Police in Fall 1940, his daughter Ruth is studying business in Lausanne at my university. She has to drop out, go home and support her parents. She never made it to graduation.

Grüninger died in 1972. On the rare occasions when he talked about this particular moment in his life, he would always say one thing: “I could do nothing else”. His daughter Ruth has said that he was never burdened by resentment. He was singing in the choir into his seventies, never complained. In 1971, one year before he died, he was interviewed by Swiss TV and he was asked “Would you act in the same way if the situation were the same?” And he answered without hesitation: “Yes, of course. I would do and act exactly the same.”

The Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl who was deported to Auschwitz examined why some people survived the camp while others did not. He found a very clear difference between both types of people. Those who were able to imagine a future beyond the concentration camp had more energy to fight for survival. They had something to hope for. A reason to live. They found meaning. As Frankl later wrote: “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”

Was Paul Grüninger a happy man? Certainly not! People who met him observed a certain sadness in him. But still, he would have taken the same road again if he had the choice, because what he did, was profoundly meaningful to him.