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The family’s situation continued to grow worse. “My father had not only had enough of living in the Ticino, but also of living with his family. He left us and rented a room in Zurich Niederdorf. Mother suffered silently and without complaining. One day – I was eleven – she put me on a train to Zurich. I was to bring father back home. Traveling alone was not unusual for me. I was not afraid. And father simply belonged to us.” He met the courageous girl at Zurich’s main station, showed her the city, and she got to know the various taverns in the Niederdorf. Rosa was able to convince him to return to the family. “I don’t know how I succeeded; somehow he himself came to his senses.”

But Lugano was to bore him again soon. He wanted to return to Zurich. For Rosa this meant to leave all that she had come to love, to be uprooted again, to go to a new school, find new friends.

“Mother – good-natured as she was – cooperated in everything. She was quite Victorian and religious, was eager to establish a good family life and valued order and etiquette. Pleated skirt, pink blouse – I was always nicely dressed. Pants, certainly not! Mother had my little dresses as well as all her clothes custom-made by a dress-maker.”