Marcel Junod - His Life After The Second World War

His Life After The Second World War

His deployment in Japan and other surrounding Asian countries lasted until April 1946 when he was able to return to Switzerland, having missed the birth of his son Benoit in October 1945. After he returned, he wrote the book Le Troisième Combattant, entitled in English, Warrior Without Weapons. It describes, in very personal language, his experiences during his various ICRC deployments. Other editions were published in German, in Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian]. An Italian translation of the book appeared in 2006, nearly 60 years later. It has been reprinted several times by the International Committee of the Red Cross in English, French and Spanish. The book is sometimes called the "bedside volume of all young ICRC delegates."

Thus it is our task to form a third front above and cutting across the two belligerent fronts, a third front which is directed against neither of them, but which works for the benefit of both. The combatants of this third front are interested only in the suffering of the defenceless human being, irrespective of his nationality, his convictions or his past. They fight wherever they can against all inhumanity, against every degradation of the human personality, against all injustice directed against defenceless human beings. It is for these fighters that Dr. Junod has coined the expression 'the third combatant'.

(Dr. Marcel Junod: Warriors without Weapons. From the foreword by Max Huber, former ICRC President)

From January 1948 until April 1949, Junod was active as a representative of the UN children's help organization, UNICEF, in China, after being invited for that position by then UNICEF director Maurice Pate. However, due to an illness that made it difficult to stand for long periods of time, he had to cut off his deployment. He also had to turn down a mission for the World Health Organization (WHO) and was forced to give up his career as a surgeon. He decided to become a specialist in anesthesiology, which would allow him to work sitting down. The need for additional training and education led him to Paris and London, and in 1951 he returned to Geneva and opened a new practice. For the first time since his time at the hospital in Mulhouse, he began regular work once again as a doctor. In 1953, he convinced the management of the Cantonal Hospital of Geneva to open an anesthesiology department, of which he later became the director. He was also able to finally devote himself to medical research, which he presented in numerous journals and at conferences.

In 1946, the USA wanted to honour Junod with the Medal of Liberty for his work on behalf of Allied prisoners in Japan, but a rule that Swiss citizens, while bound to military service, cannot accept foreign decorations, prevented him from receiving it. Four years later in 1950, he received the Gold Medal for Peace of Prince Carl of Sweden for his extensive humanitarian service. He was appointed a member of the ICRC on October 23, 1952 and elected vice-president in 1959. At the beginning of 1953, he relocated to Lullier, a small, charming village near Geneva, to find respite from his double burden as a physician and member of the ICRC. He spent almost all of his holidays with friends in Barcelona whom he knew from his mission in Spain. His positions in the ICRC sent him to Budapest, Vienna, Cairo, and elsewhere. In 1957 he attended the International Red Cross Conference in New Delhi, and in 1960 he visited national Red Cross societies in the Soviet Union, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Canada, and the United States. In December 1960 he was appointed Professor of Anesthesiology in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva.

Marcel Junod died on June 16, 1961 in Geneva from a massive heart attack while working as an anesthesiologist in an operation. The ICRC received more than 3,000 letters and other messages of condolence from all over the world. In the same year, he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the government of Japan. On September 8, 1979, a monument to Junod was inaugurated in the Hiroshima Peace Park. Each year on the anniversary of his death a commemorative meeting is held in front of the monument. On September 13, 2005, 60 years after he left Hiroshima, a similar monument was inaugurated in Geneva by the town and cantonal authorities.

The last sentence of the following quote from the final chapter of his book is written on the back of the Hiroshima monument:

. . . All these pictures are not merely out of the past. They are still with us all today and they will be with us still more tomorrow. Those wounded men and those pitiful captives are not things in a nightmare; they are near us now. Their fate is in our care. Let us place no reliance on the slender hope which lawyers have aroused by devising a form of words to place a check on violence. There will never be too many volunteers to answer so many cries of pain, to answer so many half-stifled appeals from the depths of prison and prison camp.

Those who call for help are many. It is you they are calling.

(Dr. Marcel Junod: Warrior without Weapons ICRC, Geneva, 1982, p. 312)