Zigeuner

They are locals, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. A Swiss family of musicians, Jenische. Wherever they perform, the 13-year-old on the clarinet and the mother on the double bass are the stars of the evening. They play folk music and live in a small house by Lake Zurich, where the children go to school. Until they have to flee: the mother comes running with her hair flying and sends her children off to escape alone. She and the father will hold off the authorities on that spring evening in 1929. The children fled into the night by themselves. They saved themselves from the grasp of pursuers who tore hundreds of Jenische children from their families. This happened in Switzerland, where the removals of children continued until spring 1972 – until the daughter of one of the fleeing children from 1929, now 13 herself, learned from the newspaper that her father's story about the children's escape was not a tale of bandits.