[1] Their families were part of a patrician class that "turned to banking and philanthropic activities at the end of the 19th century, after losing control of the major public offices in Geneva.

[5] Marguerite van Berchem grew up primarily in the family palace of Château de Crans on a vineyard overlooking Lake Geneva and "she received an excellent education in Modern languages, music and archaeology and was attracted to the East".

Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the ICRC, under its president Gustave Ador, established the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA) to trace POWs and to re-establish communications with their respective families.

Based on her research there she published in 1924 a book about Christian mosaics from the fourth to the tenth centuries, with drawings made by her younger half-sister Marcelle, and in collaboration with Étienne Clouzot (1881–1944).

[6] In the second half of the 1920s, she was encouraged by the architectural historian Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell to study of the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and of the Great Mosque of Damascus.

[5] The results of Marguerite van Berchem's research on the two religious sites, where her father had done epigraphic studies, were published in 1932, as an independent part under her own name in the first volume of Cresswell's seminal work Early Muslim Architecture.

In 1934, for instance, she accompanied her fellow pioneering colleagues Marguerite Frick-Cramer and Lucie Odier to Tokyo, where they represented the organisation at the Fifteenth International Red Cross Conference.

"[11] One year after the end of the Second World War, van Berchem stressed in a publication her conviction that "differences in race, language and religion are no reasons that should divide the peoples, but that there are laws and profound links which may make this diversity a great wealth.

The artworks were from Sedrata, a historical site some 800 km (500 mi) south of Algiers near the oasis of Ouargla in the Algerian Sahara, which had been a prospering Berber city during the 10th and 11th centuries.

The Swiss Federal Council had decided in the previous year to establish the cultural institute, which took its seat under van Berchem's leadership in the Villa Maraini on the Pincian Hill and was opened in 1949.

The Israeli plane was attacked by four members of the militant organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, while it was preparing for takeoff at the Zurich International Airport in Kloten.

Upon her death, the former vice-president of the ICRC Jean Pictet, wrote in an obituary which was published by the Journal de Genève, which said: "A native of Geneva, she admirably embodied this ‹Geneva spirit›, thoughtful and reserved, willingly rebellious and caustic, but also generous and capable of igniting good causes.

Since she did not want the estate, which was built in 1715 at the Plateau de Frontenex in Cologny overlooking Lake Geneva, to fall into foreign hands, she gave it to the government under the condition that the state of the architectural ensemble would stay inalienable.