Confined
to wander
The Yenish are one of Switzerland’s oldest minorities, whose itinerant way of life was targeted for decades by a state-sanctioned campaign that tore children from their families. Bede Yolland investigates the murky histories that lie behind the country’s serene self-image.
The Yenish managed to create a role for themselves as itinerants, carrying stories and skills between villages, but modern life has changed customs, and now most live in rented apartments. What is beyond doubt is the sense of the Yenish as a travelling culture. They continue to carry stories of life on the move and celebrate knife-grinding, accordion playing, basket weaving and Bootschen (a game like pétanque, which requires no special equipment, only stones). Many families display model caravans in their homes.
They also carry a bleeding wound, a history of persecution and epistemic violence. Between 1926 and 1972, the Kinder der Landstrasse programme, run by charitable foundation Pro Juventute, attempted to wipe out non-sedentary life in Switzerland. Over 600 Yenish children were forcibly removed from their families, separated from siblings, and abandoned to a precarious life of abuse and neglect. Other children were also taken, and by other organisations, but the Yenish were targeted directly as a group.
The Radgenossenschaft office is scrupulously clean. I wonder how the staff control the dust, given the choice of flooring. Willi Wottreng, managing director, has spent the last few years raising awareness of the Yenish experience. He shakes my hand and leads me to a conference table. He wears a gold earring. “Always on the left ear,” he says when I ask. The gold dances as he explains he had it pierced ten or so years ago, to display the small gold triangle on its hoop. It’s a symbol popular with Yenish men, though he’s unsure why, or what it represents. “Earth, fire and water,” he suggests. Perhaps air is missing because it’s the only element freely available.
Wottreng tells me that for most Yenish, the traveller status is about identity and nostalgia rather than a lived reality: approximately 2,000 people live “a part of the year in their caravans”, but inevitably they also settle permanently. Between thirty and forty thousand Swiss residents are thought to be sedentary Yenish, and many more are not even aware of their roots. Being nomadic is “a specialty”, and Yenish activists who try to re-establish the old ways are admired. Itinerancy is often seen as impractical and disruptive, at odds with the ordered society.
In Switzerland, there are rules against washing laundry on Sundays and flushing the toilet at night – anything that feels disruptive of a certain way of life. This conservatism has everyday benefits: quality of living is generally high, and although the country is bordered on all sides, I never encounter physical barriers. On trams and trains, the ticket system works on trust; you just hop on and off. Even swimming, the rivers and lakes are open to all and (mostly) you undress and jump, leaving clothes and valuables in a neat pile on the bank. From train windows all week, I’ve seen crops without hedges or fences; sunflowers, salad and vines grow side by side.
The country is famous for its sweeping landscape. The mountain regions – with their looser controls – once sheltered travelling families. Still, there has always been an uneasy relationship with strangers, and Johanna Spiri’s internationally famous 1880 novel Heidi is as much a story of outsider suspicion as it is the idealisation of rural life. When James Baldwin travelled to a small village near Lausanne in 1951, he commented in his essay “Stranger in the Village” that, although not actually inaccessible, the landscape could feel “absolutely forbidding”. Given that children called him Neger, it is no surprise that it wasn’t simply the landscape that filled him with the “rage of the disesteemed”.
The country was first officially mapped between 1845 and 1864 by Guillaume Henri Dufour. Twenty five etched copper plates, now on display in the Swiss National Museum, show the topography in glorious detail. Beautifully made – using a form of parallel line shading called hachure, rather than contour lines – the map implied an immutable landscape. It fostered a sense of Swiss unity and, as Dufour himself claimed, was also part of a process of “securing vulnerable borders”. When Teju Cole followed in Baldwin’s footsteps, he found the country not unwelcoming but still elusive.
Even geographical landscapes change: with each man-made
advance (such as railway and watercourse realignment), the cartographers would hammer out the back of the copper and re-etch the work. Now, change is accelerating and impacting the movement of people. In 2025, the village of Blatten was destroyed by a glacier collapse. In Bern, the temperature of the river Aare with its glacier-blue current, is rising. “It’s 25°… 26°,” I’m told. “It has never been so warm before.”
The Aare is unusual in Switzerland as a river that stays within national borders. In the evening, young professionals sit along its edge in neat monochrome swimsuits; there is no litter, not even leaves on the water. It’s impossible not to think of the tidying up of unwanted individuals and communities by Swiss society: the disordered, the impoverished, the unwell. As Wottreng puts it, the “majority speaks very well about Yenish people” but “they do not want them in their neighbourhood”.
There was a moment after I first jumped into the river when
I wondered if I’d made a mistake. What looked like a simple meander was a series of crosscurrents that turned me upside down. The water ran fast. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out.
A lack of adequate stopping places is a major problem for non-sedentary Yenish, Sinti and Roma in Switzerland today. As in England, there has been a catastrophic loss of common land (known in Switzerland as allmend) and, with that, comes strain between landowners and the travellers hoping to rent pitches. Although the right to park is supposedly enshrined in cantonal law, municipalities continue to reject applications for new traveller sites. Quality land is too precious, with better returns to be made on constructing shops, businesses and more profitable housing. The same is true in London. In South Bermondsey, only a short walk from the luxury apartments of Tower Bridge, a narrow alley of traveller caravans and portacabins runs between railway and road. The absence of greenery is at odds with any romantic notion of traveller life.
In Bern, until a few years ago, the Standplatz (permanent site) was situated under the highway. “Not a nice place,” said an elderly couple, enjoying ice creams on the wide terrace by Bern Minster. This Standplatz was unsuitable in many ways: noisy, poorly served for utilities, and situated on contaminated land. Recently, occupants have brought legal cases concerning toxicity and illness.
A newer site has been established at Bern-Buech, a tiny indication of evolving public opinion. I wanted to visit, but going to a travellers’ site is the same as “going to an apartment”, Wottreng warned me. Private, like a family home with a locked front door, and I’d need an invitation. But I don’t need any introduction on Google: it’s easy to get there. I take my little orange Pegman down Riedbachstrasse and turn at the signpost for 190–194. There are chalets and bungalows, gleaming caravans and campervans, blurred dogs and children.
It is laid out as a wagon wheel, a Yenish symbol of a lost travelling life. I can see the pattern as I zoom out.
I start to look at places differently, scanning for suitable stopping points, with access to water, latrines, provisions and the absence of hostility. I see hints of traveller life everywhere: caravans up on blocks, tarpaulin enclosures by the side of the river, wagon wheels hung on walls. But no actual travellers.
All over Switzerland – from the French-German-Swiss tripoint near Basel, to Zermatt, where you can ski into Italy – I ask about the Yenish. Mostly, Swiss locals are quick to nod. “I know them,” a bartender tells me as he pulls my kleines Bier (a standard serving size of beer, equating to roughly half a UK pint). “They come here, to the bar sometimes.” I don’t know precisely what he means, but on leaving, I turn down a side alley at Brungasse and spot a couple of rough sleepers by a small fountain, known as Stettbrunnen (similar to a water trough, where butchers’ servants used to wash entrails).
This muddle around traveller identity is common. Yenish, Sinti and Roma are often clumped together as Zigeuner (vagabond) and the word carries an implicit slur. According to Wottreng, many non-sedentary Yenish say that “one day you will have to pay” for declaring your heritage. But for others, it is “the only way to maintain our people”.
Little is fixed for the Yenish. The recognition of them as a Swiss national minority rests on a declaration by the Federal Council and is a political, not legal definition. Whether Yenish and Sinti are one minority or two is also undetermined. Wottreng believes “being Yenish is not a question of blood… We have always been a mixed people.” I ask him, “Would you say you are Yenish?” He turns his face to one side, his eyebrows have a distinguished thrust as he replies, “I always answer: the old president [of the Radgenossenschaft] says I am Yenish.”
The fight for recognition has been long and difficult, affecting not just Yenish but other families whose children were taken. In 2016, a reparations fund was established, and over 7,000 children applied for compensation. In 2025, the Swiss Federal Council finally issued an apology to the Yenish and other minority groups, recognising the Kinder der Landstrasse programme as a crime against humanity under international law. I asked a local caretaker about this apology, and he replied that some were not keen: it was “small” compared with most political concerns.
Still, Switzerland is adapting. Alongside stories of national history, museums such as the Landesmuseum in Zurich are grappling with the less heroic stories of the past. In a side room, video interviews detail the harrowing memories of children fostered and abused. And the shadow is long; nightmares of shame, trauma and a lack of belonging continue to haunt survivors. At the Bernisches Historisches Museum, I found the Forgotten by Fortune (2025) installation: a burst of white dots chased across dark walls and ceilings, like a wild constellation of stars. The dots commemorate children forcibly removed from their families. It feels transgressive as an artistic statement. But there’s a sanitising in it too, this turning of trauma into something beautiful. I spotted W Waser, who had added “Jenisch” in brackets. I was glad to see a name survive.
Back in the Radgenossenschaft offices, Wottreng leaves me to explore the small museum. I peer into glass cabinets at passports, paperwork, accordions and hunting traps. There is a catalogue with names of Yenish children, detailing the institutions and prisons where they were placed. The box is heavy. Each of these children has been reduced to lines of type, their individual stories largely lost.
But the Yenish are not simply looking backwards, dwelling on trauma. They are attempting to build connections across borders in the hope that European recognition will strengthen their hand. Moving with certainty is not the only way to live. Slowly, and by grouping together, Yenish and other itinerant communities are changing the stereotypes that surround them. They understand the power of recognition and adaptation, of reaching across borders to make connections. Today, as the whole of Europe confronts seismic change, this crossing is not a neutral undertaking. For all of Europe, it is a journey of survival.
Under a policy euphemistically called “administrative detention”, Swiss authorities locked up “disruptive” or non-conforming people: rebellious teenagers, unmarried mothers, those deemed “workshy”, in labour camps and prisons, without any criminal conviction, right up until the 1980s