Warja's mother, Mary Lavater-Sloman, was born in Hamburg in 1891 and died in Zurich in 1980, descended from the Sloman family of shipowners. Captain William Sloman had moved from Great Yarmouth (England) to Hamburg, which was already a thriving Hanseatic city, and founded his shipping company there in 1793.
Her grandmother, Amelie Albers Schönberg (1845 - 1919), was a gifted illustrator. And her mother, Mary born Albers from Hamburg, was also a passionate painter. From 1898 to 1907 Mary Sloman was allowed to attend a girls' school. Because her ancestors the English founder of the shipping company Sloman, was English, the "English" was held very high. According to her own account, Warja's mother had an English nurse and a French-speaking Swiss governess. Because she later traveled often in Russia with her father Friederich Leopold Robert Loesner-Sloman, she also spoke fluent Russian. This knowledge of the language came in handy later when she was able to read many sources in the original text for writing her books. When she was 18, she moved with her family to St. Petersburg. There she met her future husband, Emil Lavater. They married in 1912 and lived in Winterthur.
Warja's parents Emil Lavater (1882- 1962) and Mary Sloman (1891 - 1980) married in 1912 and lived in Winterthur, where Emil worked for the Sulzer machine factory as an engineer. In 1913 their daughter Barbara Esther, called Warja, was born. On behalf of the Sulzer company, they settled in Moscow, where her brother Caspar was born. In 1919, the family had to flee Moscow in the middle of the revolution, bullets whizzing around their heads. The escape was very difficult. The Bolshviks had plundered their bank account and so they could not pay a bribe for the stamps of the exit papers.
The Lavater family was lucky, they were Swiss and thanks to various helpers they were able to get across the border in an open cart. The children were sick and cried a lot, now they had to hide and be quiet. In the hay sack of the coachman they were able to smuggle cash that otherwise would have been taken from them at various checkpoints.
Emil wrote a small booklet "Bolshevism" at his own expense. He described what he had experienced in Moscow and wanted to warn the Swiss population against Bolshevism. They lived first again in Winterthur and a year later until 1922 in Athens, where father Lavater also worked for the Sulzer company. Mother Mary taught the children herself and, as Warja reported, mainly about Greek mythology.
Back in Winterthur, Mary Lavater-Sloman began writing her first books. She became a best-selling author with biographies of historical figures.
Emil Lavater, a citizen of Zurich, was born in Paris on June 25, 1882. He was directly descended from the brother of Johann Caspar Lavater, the physician Diethelm Lavater from Zurich (1743 - 1826), who had studied medicine in Leipzig and Halle (graduating with a doctorate). In Zurich he was a Grand Councillor in 1775-98, admitted to the Chamber of Reformation in 1778, member of the Sanitary Council in 1779, etc., an important and innovative man who was probably one of the first psychiatrists, because he cared for sick people at his home. Emil attended the Lycee Janson in Paris, having lost his father at the age of seven. At the age of 16 he came to Winterthur to the pastorate of Dean Herold, whose brother, bank director Herold, was his godfather. In Winterthur, Emil Lavater attended grammar school and obtained his diploma in order to study mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic from 1902 to 1906. He spent his practical years working for various engineering companies in the USA, at the Skoda Works in Pilsen and until 1912 at the Duflon Constantinovich Company in St. Petersburg, where he met Mary. From 1913 he worked for the Sulzer machine factory in Winterthur.
Johann Caspar Lavater
Johann Caspar Lavater was an important figure in Warja's family. There were kept books and objects that had belonged to him. Johann Caspar Lavater was born on November 15, 1741 in Zurich in the house "Zum Waldries". His father was a doctor and keeper of the Grossmünster monastery, his mother, a born Escher vom Glas.
With a letter of complaint in 1762 to Felix Grebel, anonymously written and sent to all important men in Zurich, Lavater condemned the bailiff for abuse of office. Lavater and his friends Heinrich Füessli and Felix Hess not only became known, but although Grebel was convicted, they also had to leave the country under pressure.
In 1766 Lavater married Anna Schinz (1742-1815). They had eight children together, but only Heinrich (1768-1819), Anna ("Nette" 1771-1852), and Anna Louise (1780-1854) reached adulthood.
Between 1775 and 1778, he published four volumes of his work "Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnisse und Menschenliebe" (Physiognomic Fragments, for the Promotion of Human Knowledge and Human Kindness) in which he presented his research on human physiognomy. He had different parts of faces drawn, mouth, ears, nose to represent the different types of people. He showed that even a peasant or a poor person can be intelligent and beautiful. One way of showing the human face was that of the silhouette.
In 1775 Lavater was elected the first pastor at the Orphanage Church, and three years later he became a deacon at the Zurich City Church of St. Peter. In the grave next to St. Peter's Church apparently lies not his body, but that of his wife Anna. Napoleon's seizure of power prompted Lavater to publish "Wort eines freyen Schweizers an die französische Nation" (Word of a Free Swiss to the French Nation). In 1799 he was arrested for this. In Zurich, in front of his house Waldries on Spiegelgasse sat French soldiers. He brought them bread. One of the soldiers, who misunderstood this gesture shot him in the leg. He died of this wound in 1801 after a long period of suffering.
