Switzerland is the setting of the narrator’s 1963 return to Europe, a visit shaped by his wife Mary’s serious illness and by his confrontation with people whose safe distance from wartime violence contrasts with his own childhood and adolescence in Eastern Europe. Its polished resorts and surviving defenses become more than scenery: they frame his isolation, his doubts about postwar claims of peace, and his decision to turn from social science to fiction.

A Return for Treatment

In the spring of 1963, the narrator came to Switzerland with Mary, his American-born wife. They had visited before, but this time she was seeking help for a supposedly incurable illness that had troubled her for months. Expecting to stay for some time while she consulted another group of specialists, they took a suite in a palatial hotel overlooking the lake in a fashionable old resort.

The narrator’s days there moved between the clinic and the surrounding landscape. When Mary was receiving treatment, he hired a car and drove without a destination along carefully tended Swiss roads. The orderly countryside carried visible traces of a different past: squat steel and concrete tank traps, installed during the war to impede advancing tanks, still stood beside the roads. Crumbling and purposeless after an invasion that never came, they seemed to him as out of place as the hotel’s aging exiles.

Exiles and the Distance from War

The hotel housed a clique of wealthy Western Europeans who had arrived shortly before the outbreak of World War II. They had left their homelands before the slaughter began and had never been forced to fight for their lives. Now in their seventies and eighties, they spent much of their time in the hotel’s lounges and restaurants or walking through its private park, increasingly unwilling or unable to leave the grounds. The narrator sometimes followed them, stopping at portraits of visiting statesmen and reading plaques commemorating international peace conferences held in the hotel after World War I.

When conversations turned to Central or Eastern Europe, the residents stressed that they had known the war only through radio and newspapers. The narrator countered their distance with figures about the scale of killing in the country where most extermination camps had been located: between 1939 and 1945, he said, direct military action had killed a million people, while invaders had exterminated five and a half million; more than three million of the victims were Jews, and a third of them were under sixteen. The losses amounted to 220 deaths per thousand people, not counting those mutilated or left physically and spiritually broken. His listeners acknowledged that they had believed reports of camps and gas chambers were exaggerated, but his experience of childhood and adolescence during the war and postwar years had taught him that reality surpassed even the most bizarre fantasies.

The Lake and Isolation

On many afternoons, the narrator rented a boat and rowed without aim across the lake. The quiet did not relieve his isolation. Mary, the emotional link to his life in the United States, was dying; contact with what remained of his family in Eastern Europe came only through infrequent, cryptic letters, always vulnerable to censorship. The lake thus became a place where physical solitude brought the pressures of illness, separation, and uncertain communication into sharp focus.

From the water, his anguish extended beyond loneliness and fear of Mary’s death. The hotel’s peace-conference plaques and the residents’ complacent memories prompted him to question whether the treaties had been signed in good faith. Later events, he felt, undermined their assurances: those who had guaranteed peace could become initiators of war. The residents’ inability to accept that reversal left them unable to grasp what people like the narrator and his parents, with no chance to escape, had endured.

From Disillusionment to Fiction

The contrast between the narrator’s knowledge and the exiles’ hazy view of history disturbed him enough to make him reconsider his own work. He decided to leave social science for fiction. Politics, in his view, offered extravagant promises of a utopian future; fiction could instead present lives as they were truly lived. Switzerland’s layered landscape—the polished resort, its memorial plaques, and the tank traps left beside manicured roads—gave concrete form to the distance between declarations of peace and the violence people had experienced.

The visit also unsettled the narrator’s earlier resolve never to return to the country where he had spent the war years. His survival, he believed, had depended solely on chance, while hundreds of thousands of other children had been condemned. Yet he had not understood himself simply as a bearer of private guilt or as a chronicler of collective disaster; he had thought of himself as a storyteller. In Switzerland, the tension between that identity and the need to face the past helped redirect his understanding of what fiction could do.