Roslï Näf

Roslï Näf was a Swiss Red Cross nurse, born on 9 May 1911, who is remembered for taking great risks to save Jewish children in Nazi-occupied France. After three years assisting Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa she worked with the Swiss International Committee of the Red Cross from 1941 and was assigned to direct the care and protection of about one hundred Jewish children and adults at the Chateau de la Hille in Ariège. When French police arrested 42 of the teenagers in August 1942 and took them to the Le Vernet internment camp, she travelled to the camp, refused to leave without them and stayed for days until they were released a few hours before deportation. She then arranged escape routes into Switzerland with the French underground and sympathetic Swiss citizens, and ninety of the original children survived the war. The Red Cross dismissed her for this, and she was named Righteous Among the Nations by Israel. She died on 15 September 1996 in a Swiss nursing home.