Children's Village

In Marseilles, Gerard Vamuchin was growing up like a little animal. He had never known his father, and the Germans had deported his mother. When people talked to him, he backed away in terror. Like thousands of Europe's children, he was homeless.

That was last spring; now eleven-year-old Gerard has found a home--in Trogen, Switzerland. His face is freshly scrubbed, his pipestem legs are filling out on milk, fresh vegetables and meat. Gerard is one of the lucky first 29 citizens of Pestalozzi Children's Village.* By next year, the village will house 380 orphans from foreign countries.

At Pestalozzi, French children will speak in French, Dutch in Dutch, Poles in Polish. Boys and girls from each nation will have their own farmhouses, own foster parents and classrooms. The Swiss do not intend to make good Swiss out of the children--just good Frenchmen, good Dutchmen, good Poles, with perhaps a Swiss accent on international tolerance. When they have mastered a trade, and their homelands are ready for them, the Pestalozzians will return.

Pestalozzi Village is the dream of Walter Robert Cord, 36, an ailing, angular Swiss editor, who has already raised a million Swiss francs ($234,000) or about a fourth of what he needs for the project. Trogen's town meeting voted him the eleven-acre site, overlooking Lake Constance. Swiss students volunteered their labor.

Last week young voices echoed against Trogen's green hillsides, while strong young arms sawed timber and dug cellars for new homes in the village. Trogen's best efforts, Walter Corti knew, would never house more than a few hundred of Europe's helpless thousands. But the thin man was not discouraged. Said he: "The main thing is to get this village going as a model for other countries."

*Named for Switzerland's Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), founder of the first progressive school (TIME, Jan. 14).

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