Meet me at the station

Name tag (with string to wear around the neck) and 'Fluchtlingsausweis' (refugee card) belonging to Egon Sonnenschein. Egon was given these forms of identification when he was sent to stay with the Stamm family in Switzerland. He left from Yugoslavia and was instructed to get off the train at Schleitheim where the Stamm-Heusi family would be waiting to take care of him. They identified him by the tag around his neck.

Egon Sonnenschein was born in 1930 in Ptuj, Yugoslavia. He was 10 when Germany attacked Yugoslavia in April 1941 and his life on the run began. The journey of escape with his parents, Albert and Erna, and older brother took him through Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Italy and finally Switzerland.

The family first fled to his grandparents in Croatia, a puppet Nazi State run by the Ustashi. The brutality and murders he witnessed there remain ingrained in his memory. The Sonnenscheins survived thanks to the town mayor who saved over 300 Jews and Serbs from death. Desperate to leave Croatia for Italian-occupied Slovenia, the family purchased false identity papers. Despite paying a large sum for help, upon arrival they had no permits to enter the country legally. In 1943, the family moved again, crossing Lake Como and struggling up mountains, they made it to Switzerland, where they discovered people willing to help.

Egon was entrusted to the care of the foster family in 1943 until reunited with his parents in August 1945.