Mathilde Paravicini (born 9 June 1875 in Basel; died 10 June 1954 in Basel) was a Swiss philanthropist and a pioneer of the childrenâÂÂs trains.
Mathilde Paravicini was the youngest of five daughters of the Basel merchant family Emanuel Leonhard and Elise Paravicini-Heusler. The Paravicini family (Baseldytsch: Pravezi or Braveci) were religious refugees who escaped to Basel before the Valtellina massacre of 1620, where they became part of the cityâÂÂs patriciate. The humanitarian tradition of BaselâÂÂs patricians (the Daig) dates back to the 16th century.
After her father lost his fortune in the 1880sâÂÂwhich included the ironworks in LucelleâÂÂthe family had to adapt to more modest circumstances. The five daughters learned humility and helpfulness, and their father, unusually for the time, ensured that each of them received a practical vocational education.
After school, Paravicini spent a year in Neuchâtel to improve her French and then moved to Paris, where she completed a multi-year apprenticeship as a dressmaker. Back in Basel, she opened a tailoring workshop offering sewing courses, which she ran from 1898 to 1948, alongside her growing humanitarian work.
During the First World War, she gained international recognition for her charitable activities related to the transport of around half a million wounded soldiers and evacuees from occupied France. Neutral Switzerland served as a transit country where returning soldiers and civilians from Germany, France, the United States, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were provided with food, clothing, and medical care at the border stations of Schaffhausen, Basel, and Geneva before quickly continuing their journey. Paravicini worked on prisoner-of-war exchanges, in the Basel relief office for war hostages, and on the organizing committee for evacuation trains, assisting refugee women, children, and the elderly in Schaffhausen and Basel.
In 1916 she co-founded and became the first president of the Association for Women's Suffrage in Basel and Surroundings. The vice president was Georgine Gerhard, founder of the Basel section of the Swiss Relief Organization for Emigrant Children (SHEK).
In the summer of 1917 she organized childrenâÂÂs trains for children of Swiss expatriates in Germany, personally accompanying the journeys. The association Swiss Relief, Holiday Action for Swiss Children Abroad (later the Foundation for Young Swiss Abroad) sought host families and funding. Children suffering from tuberculosis were accommodated in mountain sanatoriums.
After the war, she continued the program with the foundation Pro Juventute, arranging annual holidays for thousands of expatriate Swiss children. During the famine in Vienna, about twenty aid organizations were founded in Switzerland; in 1920 they were coordinated by the newly established umbrella organization Union internationale de secours aux enfants (UISE) under the patronage of the ICRC. The Swiss Central Committee for Destitute Foreign Children developed the criteria for these childrenâÂÂs trains.
During the Great Depression, the workersâ relief organization led by Regina Kägi-Fuchsmann (later the Swiss Workersâ Relief SAH) collaborated with the SHEK, founded in 1933 by Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein. From 1934 to 1939, Paravicini was responsible for organizing the childrenâÂÂs trains from Paris. In 1939 she helped establish the Swiss Women's Auxiliary Service (FHD).
During the Second World War, Paravicini coordinated, in cooperation with the Swiss Working Group for War-Damaged Children (SAK) and later the ChildrenâÂÂs relief of the Swiss Red Cross, the transport of about 65,000 war-affected French children between 1940 and 1945. She was the only Swiss citizen granted permission to cross the Demarcation Line into occupied Paris to collect children from northern France and Bordeaux.
In Basel, she assisted Georgine Gerhard in the activities of the local SHEK section, supported by her extended family. Her nephew, Chief Physician Anton Christ, treated the children free of charge at the SHEK home âÂÂWaldeckâ in Langenbruck.
When the childrenâÂÂs trains were halted in late 1942, she continued her humanitarian work in the railway station center of the Friends of Young Women (FJM), serving as its president from 1921 until her death. During the war, the FJM âÂÂStübliâ (lounge) on the first floor of Basel station became a key hub of refugee assistance.
After the war, she organized childrenâÂÂs trains across Europe for the Swiss Donation, tirelessly accompanying and caring for children in the rough third-class carriages. Paravicini died in 1954 at the age of 79.