MY OWN PIECE OF SKY

In 1902 Vienna, Emilie Reich was born to Austrian, Hungarian Jewish parents, her mother a Kindergarten teacher died when Emmi was 12. Emmi aspired to work with children, studying medicine at Vienna University Children’s Hospital, during the reformist epoch. She studied under the visionaries, Clemens Von Pirquet and Hans Salzar. The “first commandment” of Dr. Salzar was that his staff take the time and care to enlist a child’s cooperation in whatever exam or treatment that was taking place. “What matters most is not the illness but the child.” Von Pirquet. Her degree in Austria did not stand when she moved to Budapest with her mathematician husband, Pikler and she sat all her exams for a second time to receive her diploma.

In Trieste Emmi gave birth to her first child, and she and her husband implemented their physiological theories while raising the first of three children.

From 1936-1945 Emmi’s husband Pikler was imprisoned for “political reasons”. Because Emmi was Jewish she was unable to practice medicine at that time in Hungary, so she opened a private practice, actualizing the humanistic approach she so believed in. Her enlightened methods included visiting the 100 families she treated in their homes for the first ten days after a baby’s birth, then weekly visits for months, encouraging parents to journal every detail of their child’s nature.

After Hitler discovered Hungary’s secret negotiations with the United States and Britain, the Nazis invaded Hungary. 450, 000 Jews were deported, mostly to Aushwitz. The families the Jewish Emmi treated gave her false documents, and names, and her student, Magda Gerber hid her and her children in her home, risking execution by the Nazis. Dr. Pikler lived under the guise of a maid, and her children were instructed to treat her as such, as the Gerber’s visiting relatives from Transylvania. She continued treating children in the basement of the Gerber’s home.

In addition to the extermination of a half a million Hungarian Jews, approximately 300,000 Hungarian soldiers and 80,000 non-Jewish civilians died during World War II. Budapest was severely damaged. It was at this time, in 1946 that The City of Budapest asked Dr. Pikler, whose excellent reputation preceded her, to run a local orphanage housing 70 children ages birth to three. Officially known as The National Methodological Institute for Infant Care, it was simply referred to as “Lóczy” for the street on which it sat. Many children were orphaned and many physically, psychologically, emotionally harmed and malnourished. Emmi did not return to her private practice, instead she opened Lóczy.

With 70 shell-shocked children many surviving their mothers who died from Tuberculosis during their births, her techniques were so specific and she so scrupulous that Emmi fired all the staff within two months, bringing inexperienced young women from the countryside whom she could train in her methods to facilitate the attention these infants required, beyond the typical child rearing practices. Emmi and her staff kept journals detailing every move these babies made, their sleep habits, their feeding times, and their development, deriving a security in a rhythm of daily life, both they and the infants could predict and rely on. Miraculously these damaged children grew up to be healthy, well adjusted, successful adults, with few if any hospitalizations.

Her emphasis at Lóczy was to show the children that they were worthy of the love of others. From the moment these babies were greeted at Lóczy they were enveloped in a safe environment, treated with respect, spoken to and cared for in a slow, peaceful manor, without unnatural stimulus, the whispering shadow from the trees in the garden mesmerizing enough.

700 children lived at Lóczy in the first 20 years. Emmi wrote volumes on how to raise contented, peaceful babies, and her student, Magda Gerber founded RIE (Resource for Infant Educarers) in the US in 1980, and has since become a sought after practice of Dr. Pikler’s vision, as the grassroots teachings spread, there was a recent article in Vanity Fair, flourishing celebrity names in Los Angeles who have adopted RIE as “The Holy Grail” of parenting.