In 1933 they opened their “Milíč House”, a flexibly oriented part-residential children's home with playrooms, clubrooms, together with library and gymnastics hall, a workshop and outdoor sports facilities.
However, a new form of externally imposed one-party dictatorship was taking hold in Czechoslovakia, and in December 1950 Fierz was refused re-admission to the country when returning from her sister's funeral, which she had attended in Switzerland.
[2][5][6] Olga Fierz was born into a Protestant family in Baden (Aargau), a small town with a mixed economy in the hill country west of Zürich.
[7] Olga stayed on in Brussels with her mother and sister for longer, obtaining by 1918 a higher-level teaching qualification from the teachers’ training seminary incorporated into the city's oldest secondary school for girls, the “Ecole normale Emile André”.
[1][2][9] Fierz had become a huge admirer of the Swiss educationist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, whose pioneering reforms had acquired widespread backing among progressive teaching circles in Europe, especially in the German speaking countries.
She employed various devices including games, dances, songs and dialogues, resorting to tales from the French classics when she found herself running short of ideas.
Her teaching methods were popular with her pupils, especially the older ones, while her obviously deep innate affection for children also ensured that she was a great success as a teacher in England.
As the woman complained that the workers were failing to attend to their duties, Olga Fierz asserted that if she were to find herself called upon to teach the children something with which she disagreed, she too would go on strike.
As an experienced languages teacher from Switzerland, a country with an established polyglot tradition and a reputation, in recent centuries, for political neutrality, Fierz was much in demand at the workcamp as a translator between pacifist activists of different nations.
The rare extent of her mastery of several mainstream European languages quickly became widely known, and freelance translation would in future provide a useful supplementary income stream when the necessity arose.
[b] Commentators assert that Pitter's vision was not instantly compatible with 26 year old Olga Fierz's own life plans, but any doubts she may have entertained were swept away.
Notwithstanding the absence of a conventional marriage between them, during the next couple of years they teamed up, after which they presented to the world a formidably effective partnership in respect of their shared vision of God's will until Pitter's death in 1976.
Olga Fierz had never had reason to renounce her Swiss passport: she was now politely but firmly invited by the embassy in Prague to leave Czechoslovakia at once and return home to Switzerland.
She reasoned – possibly correctly – that under German occupation her passport might afford her a measure of freedom not available to fellow workers who were Czechoslovak nationals, which could be of use in her work for the Milíč-House.
The years 1945-47 were a period of industrial scale ethnic cleansing, responding both to the demands of those who had fought in wartime antiNazi resistance and the strategic objectives of Moscow.
During the summer of 1945 Pitter and Fierz persuaded the “revolutionary council” to give them the use of four castle-manor houses in the countryside to the south of the city which had been used as concentration camps till 1945.
Pitter himself visited Dr. Emil Vogl, a physician who was at the time recovering from typhus in a sanatorium, and pleaded with the doctor to come and construct a medical facility for the home at Olešovice.
Existing staff and neighbours at the facilities were carefully cultivated in order to try and minimise the risk of looting by Soviet soldiers which had become a major problem in post-war Czechoslovakia.
Another recurring theme among some of the older Jewish children who had survived German concentration camps was a horror that someone might be about to try and “convert” them to Christianity, a fear which Pitter and Fierz did everything possible to correct.
[2] Between 1945 and 1950, while Fierz and Pitter concentrated on trying to redress to impact of the German occupation on the children in their care, Czechoslovakia faced continuing struggle, both among the politicians and, increasingly, on the streets.
In September 1951 Fierz, working from Switzerland with friends in Czechoslovakia and in East Germany, was able to participate in the arrangements for him to be smuggled across the border into the German Democratic Republic and from there to West Berlin.
He also underwent at least three in-depth interviews with representatives of U.S. intelligence who listened intently and took careful notes as he answered their questions on the state of culture and the arts in Czechoslovakia.
A series of Soviet-backed government takeovers in several countries of central Europe, together with other enforced population shifts,triggered a sustained flood of refugees from the east till approximately 1950.
Due to the large number of beneficiaries of as “Aktion Schlösser” / “Akce Zámky” who were by now building new lives in the newly launched State of Israel they had already received several invitations to travel to that country and engage in welfare work, but they believed that their first duty lay closer to home in the refugee camps of (western) central Europe, where at this stage they had no significant public profile.
They quickly fall into alcoholism, prostitution, theft and fraud.” Elsewhere, Pitter wrote: The long and forced stay in the camp caused bitterness and resentment in many.
By the time the camp could finally be closed, in 1962, she was suffering from a high fever symptomatic, according to Pitter in a memoire, of her complete physical and mental exhaustion.
The move was facilitated by a former attaché at the Swiss embassy in Prague called F.Glasser who knew them already at took time to write articles about them in the local newspapers, ensuring that the welcome they received from the townsfolk of Affoltern was friendly.
Lothar Neumann was still appreciative of support he and his father had received during the bad times in Prague, and had recently returned to Europe, settling in Geneva.
[1][10][12][18] During their semi-retirement Olga Fierz established the “Swiss Jan Hus Congregation for Czechs and Slovaks” (‘’”Johannes-Hus--Gemeinde der Tschechen und Slowaken”’’) and launched at least one small-scale specialist teaching project.
After he died in 1976 Fierz continued to produce it, but it no longer appeared either so regularly or so frequently, and it comprised almost exclusively extracted from the literary estate of Přemysla Pitter.