By Haunani Tomas Editor-in-Chief
In honor of Western’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, students and staff flooded the Willamette room of the Werner University Center to hear the story of Rosina Lethe. The event, organized by the Student Leadership and Activities board was held on Tuesday, April 21.
Lethe, a WWII survivor, felt the obligation to share her story to explain “the amount of suffering wars can cause.” Nearly 100 students and staff combined listened as Lethe began telling her survival story to her biggest crowd yet.
Lethe clarified that she was not involved with Hitler’s almost successful termination of the Jewish peoples. Her
involvement was just the opposite; Lethe and her family were put in a concentration camp because they were German.
Lethe’s story took place over the course of three years, in which she was separated from then happily reunited with her family.
Seventy-one years ago, the Germans occupied Yugoslavia, now Serbia, until the Russians came to claim territory.
When the Russians arrived, Germans retreated without gunfire because they realized they would cause more harm to the German population in Lethe’s town. Strategically, the Germans withdrew tanks and allowed Russians to take the town. Lethe was 15 years old.
Lethe said that three Russian officers used her family’s home as their living quarters. Her uncle, who was fluent in Russian, often played chess with the officers and made sure to let the officers win.
Then, one day, the townspeople were instructed to pack food for three days and meet by City Hall. Her town population
neared 15,000 people and by the end of the war it had dwindled to 5,000. The townspeople were driven out at gunpoint and “driven like cattle” on the road. They walked for 12 miles to the closest town, near the Hungarian border.
People “who couldn’t walk were shot on the side of the road,” Lethe said. The very next day, the townspeople walked another grueling 12 miles to a German village, surrounded by guards. The house the townspeople were told to stay in was
stripped of all furniture.
“So many people were in there,” Lethe said. “We were packed in there like sardines. There was barely room to walk.”
In addition to the claustrophobic living conditions, food supplies were low. The food that was available was unwholesome. This was the first concentration camp, or as Lethe referred to it “starvation camp,” that she stayed in.
“People began dying. Every day a wagon pulled by horses would come to collect the dead bodies,” Lethe said.
Russian officers demanded the townspeople to hand over their valuables, specifically any money and jewelry.
Lethe said, “the people who hid some [of their valuables] were shot and killed and left in the road for people to see.” One of the victims was her father’s cousin, who was shot and killed in from of his 6-year-old daughter.
The Russians began searching for workers to harvest corn. Lethe was chosen as a worker and taken back to the first town they stopped at on their way to the concentration camp. This marked the first time she was separated from her mother and sister. The workers lived in a transit camp and slept in wooden barracks that were made for soldiers.
“The food there was a little betterbecause they wanted people to be able to work,” Lethe said.
Lethe was lucky enough to meet a friend who was also away from her mother and family. One night, Lethe and her friend decided to escape. They walked all night along the Danube, Europe’s second longest river, and made it all the way back to their hometown. To their surprise, her friend’s mother was at home cooking. Her friend’s mother explained that people of Yugoslavian or Hungarian blood were released.
Over the course of the next two years, Lethe lived with different families who assisted in her endeavor to reunite
her family. Lethe made multiple secret trips into the camp her mother and sister were held in to deliver food to her malnourished sister, who Lethe describe as unrecognizable.
“I saw my sister and didn’t even recognize her,” Lethe said. “Her head was shaved to keep the lice out, and her eyes looked like they were falling out of her face.”
After crossing over the borders of Hungary and Austria, Lethe was somehow reunited with her mother, father and sister. By then, Lethe was 18.
Years later, Lethe met her husband and moved to Germany, then California and finally settled in the Willamette Valley.
“The Willamette Valley really felt like home, just like the farmlands we grew up on,” Lethe said.
