Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Rosa Rein, who would have turned 113 in March, has died in a nursing home in canton Ticino. She was Switzerland’s oldest person and, according to wikipedia, one of the 15 oldest “verified” people in the world. When she celebrated her birthday in 2009 she was still able to walk, although she had some vision and hearing loss.
Rosa Rein was born in 1897 in Dzietzkowitz, now part of Poland, the daughter of relatively comfortable farmers, according to RTI, Swiss Italian radio. She married for the first time in 1935, at age 38, after running a textile business, but the young Jewish woman and her German husband fled to Brazil at the time of the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom.
Her mother later died in a concentration camp and her husband died in Brazil. Rosa Rein then married for a second time, in 1949. She and her husband traveled widely, and in 1964 they visited Lugano, reportedly fell in love with it, and settled there, according to the Giornale del Popolo Ticino newspaper.
She moved into a nursing home only in 2001, after a fall.
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 15 February 2010.
Filed under: Society
Tags: 112 years old, 15 oldest people in world, Brazil, centennary, concentration camp, death, Germany, Jewish, Kristallnacht, Lugano, mother, Nazi, oldest living Swiss, oldest Swiss person, Poland, Rosa Rein, Ticino