Autobiography Paul Schmid

My mother, Berta Schmid-Bürgi, grew up with her two older brothers Karl and Paul in Gachnang, Switzerland. “Berteli” Bürgi was a cheerful girl, well known to everyone in the small farming village.

Her parents’ house, located at what was once the exit from the village, still stands to this day. The former country road led right past the house and immediately afterwards up the mountain via Oberwil to Frauenfeld. If you take the path by foot, you’ll get to Frauenfeld in just under an hour. A classic farmer’s garden adorned the old half-timber construction, and behind it, the view opened out onto a magnificent garden of over seventy high-trunk fruit trees. In the barn were fifteen cows and a few oxen. Her father, Karl Bürgi, traded the oxen in addition to his business in fruit and dairy products. He bought the young animals, taught them to work, and sold them on for a small profit.

The water of the well rippled day and night beneath the window of Berteli’s small room, and the same pairs of swallows would nestle in the room year after year.

Life on the farm was far from idyllic, though. Berteli’s mother passed away when she was just seven years old. One Anna-Maria Lampert, an attractive twenty-three-year-old, came all the way from Grisons to work on the farm as a maid, bringing two illegitimate children with her. The widower soon married the maid, twenty-eight years younger than him, and the number of children on the farm grew from five to seven.

Berteli loved going to school; she found learning easy. Ninety children were taught in one schoolroom by a single teacher. The older, stronger students had to help teach their younger classmates to read, count, and write. Berteli’s academic achievements were easily sufficient to go onto secondary school, but her father refused to let her. He seemed to value her help on the farm more. Berteli never forgave him for this harsh decision.

She was only seventeen years old when her father died of pneumonia. Her older brother Paul took up the mantle of head of the family after being appointed as guardian to Berteli, even though she was just four years his junior.

The enterprising stepmother and widow Anna-Maria, only thirty-four years old, did not find it difficult to find a new pair of hands to man the farm. The new marriage soon produced two more children, breathing more life into the beautiful half-timber building.

Berti told herself:“Why ask lots of questions about money and property if I’m happy?” (Johannes Martin
Müller, 1750–1814). She left all the household effects bequeathed to her by her brother Paul to the farm’s numerous residents and set up her own family at the age of twenty-one, far away from her parents’ ol