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Swiss historical drama ‘Labyrinth of Peace’ shatters the myth of Switzerland’s neutrality in WWII
It’s Switzerland in 1945 and the war has just ended. A group of deeply traumatized, ragged-looking Jewish teenagers recently liberated from Buchenwald have been sent to live in a former Swiss school building.
A young Swiss woman named Klara cares for them, while her new husband, Johann, runs her family’s textile business, whose success is dependent on the work of unrepentant Nazis living in comfort in Swiss exile. Johann’s brother, Egon, home from the war after five years working as a Swiss border guard, is wracked by guilt for having to turn away Jewish mothers and children at the frontier. His new postwar job in the attorney general’s office: hunting down ex-Nazis.
This is the premise of “Labyrinth of Peace,” an engrossing Swiss drama set in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust that is now available exclusively on ChaiFlicks, the Jewish streaming service in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Shot in Switzerland and released in the country to great acclaim in 2020, the six-episode series is fraught with drama, romance and moral struggles.
“Labyrinth of Peace” is the brainchild of award-winning Swiss-Italian screenwriter and director Petra Volpe, who wanted to tell the compelling story of a little-known chapter of postwar history while also spotlighting the morally questionable role Switzerland took during and after the war.
“Switzerland wanted to show that they were on the right side of history, since they knew they had failed the Jews by locking down the country” during the Holocaust, and therefore took in Jewish refugees after the war, Volpe said in an interview from her home in Brooklyn. “When actual refugees arrived and they weren’t cute children younger than 12, and someone asked where the little boys were, the rabbi said of the youngest ones, ‘They were all gassed.’ Switzerland wasn’t happy when teenagers showed up. They didn’t treat them as nicely as they should have.”
The Buchenwald Boys, as they were called, had lost their childhoods and most of their families during the war years. More than 60,000 Jews died in Buchenwald — including my great-grandfather, after he, my grandfather and uncle were arrested on Kristallnacht and sent to the concentration camp. But some 900 youths survived and were among those liberated by U.S. forces.
Jewish refugee agencies came to their rescue, and they were sent to various sites in France, England and Switzerland for rehabilitation. “Labyrinth of Peace” turns the story of a group sent to Switzerland into an absorbing historical drama that belies the myth of Swiss neutrality and demonstrates how guilt and moral conflicts ran through families even after combat ended.
“Labyrinth of Peace” illuminates a little-known chapter of postwar history while spotlighting the morally questionable role Switzerland took during and after World War II. (ChaiFlicks)
In the series, the recently liberated Buchenwald Boys find themselves at the heart of many more interests than anyone first realizes.
One of the teens, Herschel, falls in love with the Swiss Klara, whose father’s textile factory profited handsomely during the war. The family home is rich in sumptuous detail, from silk damask wall coverings to lush oriental carpets covering the floors to the gold-rimmed Limoges tea pot from which servants pour drinks. Nearby, the Buchenwald Boys live in empty classrooms without sufficient food or clothing, after arriving in the country wearing little but rags.
In real life, the 370 or so Buchenwald Boys who were sent to Switzerland became political pawns, Volpe says. They were promised several months of rest and rehabilitation, but their stay in Switzerland was cut short when authorities in pre-state Israel told them they were going to Palestine. Most didn’t want to go; some asked to settle in Australia and others wanted to stay in Switzerland.
“Everyone just wanted to bring them to Israel and get them out of sight,” said Volpe, who is not Jewish but is married to a Jewish man. “There’s collective guilt.”
In the series, the character of Egon is based on a real Swiss border guard whose story is known from frequent letters he wrote home to his wife. Egon is introduced to viewers as he arrives home just in time for his brother’s wedding to Klara. He is wracked with guilt and anger.
“Every day he had to drag mothers and young kids back across the border and it’s killing him,” Volpe said.
Desperate for expiation, Egon gets drawn into the U.S. authorities’ search for Nazis who moved to Switzerland and are living under cover with adopted names and identities.
Meanwhile, his brother Johann — Klara’s husband — is trying to transform his father-in-law’s textile business into a success by producing a low-cost synthetic alternative to nylon. Johann touts the achievement as a pure Swiss creation, but it turns out that it’s the work of a Nazi chemist working under an assumed name in the family lab — putting Johann in a morally dubious position and creating conflict with his wife.
Many Nazis who fled Germany after the war found new lives in Switzerland, where their pasts largely were overlooked. The same happened in America, too; the U.S. government put ex-Nazi scientists to work developing military hardware and even rockets for the country’s fledgling space program.
The setting for “Labyrinth of Peace” is a verdant Swiss school where Jewish teens recently liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp are sent to be rehabilitated. (ChaiFlicks)
“Switzerland imported the knowledge of German war criminals,” said Volpe, who grew up near Zurich, lived in Berlin for 20 years as an adult and has resided in New York for the past decade. “They tried to hire scientists from the chemical industry. Swiss economic success is based on knowledge we took from the Nazis.”
Volpe’s series shatters the notion of Switzerland’s ostensible neutrality and demonstrates how many Swiss shared in the war’s sins.
“War criminals were treated like royalty in Switzerland because they had money, and refugees were treated like criminals,” observed Volpe.
“Labyrinth of Peace” was a hit when it aired on Swiss national television, and last year won awards at several Jewish film festivals in the United States. The series is now available nationwide on ChaiFlicks, the subscription streaming service that focuses on Jewish and Israeli content.
For Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 18, the JCC of Manhattan will screen two episodes from the series followed by a Q&A with Volpe.
At the end of the series (no spoilers!), Klara and a friend are shown driving while she opens a thin book that Herschel, the eldest of the Buchenwald Boys who fell in love with her, wrote and gave her. In his introduction Herschel writes, “I have done my best to prevent what was meant to be prevented. The eradication of us and our history.”
“The main message in his diary is: ‘They didn’t erase our voice and I can still tell my story,’ Volpe said. “That’s a form of victory also, and a very important message.”
Watch “Labyrinth of Peace” here.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
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Trump’s humiliation of Netanyahu marks a sea change in the US-Israel relationship
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s carefully cultivated image as a master of geopolitics is on life support after reports that President Donald Trump on Monday cursed and mocked him in a phone call, calling him “f- – – ing crazy” and ordering him to stand down in Lebanon.
In response, Netanyahu’s opponents and even some of his former allies are accusing him of mortgaging Israel’s sovereignty and reducing the country to strategic dependence on Washington. They’re right. Trump is treating Netanyahu less like the leader of a sovereign ally and more like a subordinate expected to obey instructions.
As a result, Israel suddenly looks less like an independent regional power and more like an American client state.
A rupture long in the making
The roots of this humiliation stretch back months, to the beginning of the Iran war itself. In early March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the United States entered the war because Israel was preparing to strike Iran and the White House feared that Tehran would retaliate against American forces afterward.
Ever since, American officials, including Trump himself, have disseminated the narrative of the war as a preventive intervention designed partly to manage the consequences of expected Israeli escalation. But as the war has dragged on, becoming exactly the kind of open-ended Middle Eastern entanglement Trump once promised to avoid, the public narrative has instead increasingly become that Netanyahu had talked Trump into a war that backfired, making Trump look foolish.
This week came the payback.
On Monday, Netanyahu publicly threatened major strikes on the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut if Hezbollah attacks continued. Iran responded by suspending ceasefire talks, apparently gambling that Trump wanted an exit ramp badly enough to restrain Israel rather than risk a wider regional explosion. The gamble worked.
In the Monday call, Trump reportedly ordered Israel to cease fire immediately, demanding to know “what the f – – -” Netanyahu was doing, accusing Israel of causing escalation, and declaring — incorrectly — that he had “kept Netanyahu out of jail,” a reference to his efforts to persuade President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu in his ongoing corruption trial.
Intentional humiliation
American presidents have pressured Israeli leaders before. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion withdrew from the Sinai peninsula in 1957 under heavy pressure from then-President Dwight Eisenhower after the Suez Crisis. Washington pressured Israel to stop military operations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and again during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Yet previous confrontations unfolded differently. American presidents pressured Israeli leaders privately while preserving the appearance of mutual respect between allies. Even when Washington prevailed, both governments generally tried to avoid publicly humiliating each other.
This time the humiliation was part of the strategy — a change that bodes ill for Israel’s standing as an independent regional power.
Trump wants Tehran, Beirut, Riyadh, Doha, Cairo, and every other Middle Eastern capital to understand that he controls the pace of escalation, and that Netanyahu obeyed when ordered to stand down.
That public spectacle explains the intensity of the Israeli backlash.
“There has never been an Israeli prime minister who accepted such a humiliating demand,” former military chief and current prime ministerial candidate Gadi Eisenkot wrote on social media. Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, whose coalition poses a major threat to Netanyahu’s control in upcoming elections, effectively slammed Netanyahu as allowing the U.S. to dictate Israeli military policy, with Bennett accusing Netanyahu of running “a government that has lost control of Israeli sovereignty.”
Even the conservative Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm. Israel had “found itself in the humiliating position of having to seek American approval to defend its own citizens,” the paper argued in an editorial. “The United States is now actively restraining Israel from taking decisive military action.”
Netanyahu’s image in tatters
For years, Netanyahu cultivated an image of himself as uniquely capable of managing Israel’s relationship with the U.S. while preserving Israeli strategic independence. His supporters portrayed him as a geopolitical virtuoso who understood American politics better than any rival and who could navigate complex power dynamics while defending Israeli interests.
Now that image lies in ruins.
Over the last decade, Netanyahu systematically alienated nearly every pillar of Israel’s traditional support structure aside from the American right.
He offended European governments through relentless settlement expansion, confrontations with the European Union, and contempt in response to liberal Western criticism. Europe remains Israel’s largest trading partner, yet Israel now faces the growing possibility of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and even challenges to its associated nation status with the European Union.
Then came the rupture with the American Democrats.
In 2015, Netanyahu traveled to Washington to campaign openly against then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran before a joint session of Congress. Strategically, that marked a turning point. Netanyahu transformed support for Israel from a matter of bipartisan American consensus into an increasingly polarized issue.
Afterward, he tied himself even more tightly to the Republican right, and especially Trump. He cultivated the impression that he exercised unusual influence over Trump himself, encouraging supporters to believe that he had effectively turned the White House into an extension of his own political operation.
That illusion has now collapsed spectacularly.
The final and perhaps most reckless step came when reports emerged that Netanyahu sought Trump’s intervention regarding his corruption trial. Even without confirming those reports’ accuracy, the perception that an Israeli prime minister already dependent on Washington for military and diplomatic backing was now personally dependent on an American president for political survival was devastating.
This week confirmed that dependence now defines the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, the supposed master statesman, has maneuvered himself — and Israel — into a strategic cul-de-sac. Now the question is: Is there any way out?
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NYU student draws hate crime charges for flying flag with swastikas, Star of David over campus building
(New York Jewish Week) — A New York University student is facing hate crime charges for allegedly raising a flag depicting a Star of David, two swastikas and the letters “NYU” over a university building during commencement last month.
Alexander Stepnowsky, 23, of Fairfield, Connecticut, was arrested Tuesday afternoon on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and charged with one count of hate crime burglary, two counts of aggravated harassment and one count of criminal trespassing in a hate crime, according to the New York City Police Department.
An NYU spokesperson said Stepnowsky would also face discipline from the university.
“The symbols that were represented are antisemitic and hateful to every person of conscience; this appalling act violated our sense of community and solidarity,” said the spokesperson, Wiley Norvell. “In addition to criminal proceedings, we will immediately pursue our disciplinary procedures, which carry the most severe consequences.”
The arrest comes as NYU has faced heightened scrutiny over antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric on its campus in recent years. In 2024, the school revised its hate speech policy to define slurs against “Zionists” as potentially in violation of its harassment code. During this year’s commencement, the school withheld the diploma of student who used his address to accuse Israel of genocide.
The flag depicting the swastikas flew briefly over the roof of New York University’s Steinhardt building, named for the major Jewish philanthropists Michael and Judy Steinhardt, during the school’s commencement on May 13.
Michael Steinhardt is a co-founder of Birthright, the organization that underwrites free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults.
Stepnowsky pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday and was released without bail, according to CBS News.
The office of Stepnowsky’s lawyer, Vickie Mwitanti, declined to comment.
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