Rose

Eight-year-old Rose had everything a girl needed growing up in Vienna, Austria before World War II. She was christened as Rose Edith Irene Frances Brezcina, after several Catholic Saints and, although she did not know it then, she would need all of the divine intervention she could get in the years that followed. She and her extended family lived peaceful ordinary lives in a typical working class Viennese neighborhood, but there was nothing ordinary or typical about Rose. She possessed a spiritual awareness beyond her years, and she brought a spirit of confidence and joy into every situation. Whether she was sitting with her grandmother who was dying of colon cancer, and trying not to gag from the stench of the colostomy bag, or enjoying a fun-filled summer in the Austrian countryside with her cousins on her aunt and uncle’s farm, Rose lived her life with a deep sense of faith and purpose that would serve her well in the days ahead. Her faith would soon be tested, though, as the Nazi army moved into Austria in 1938 and war came to her city. Before she would even reach her teens, Rose would be among top gymnasts selected to perform for Hitler and, afterwards shake his hand and receive his personal congratulations; she would witness her best friend, Marta, a Jew, seized from her classroom by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp, never to be seen or heard from again; she would willingly accept her uncle’s invitation to join him in an underground effort to hide Jews, by providing him food that she managed to sneak from her mother’s pantry; and, as a result of her efforts, she would suffer painful torture on two separate occasions by Gestapo and SS soldiers who were determined to force her to reveal the whereabouts of her uncle and his underground activities. But, despite their torture, she did not betray her uncle’s trust. As if that was not enough, Rose experienced the death of her only sibling, her three-year-old brother, in an air raid bombing. In that same attack, her home was completely destroyed, leaving her with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. Yet, despite all the loss, the heartache, the pain, Rose knew that God was with her, and she saw evidence of His presence even in the smallest of things. When the war ended, and the Russian Red Army drove the remaining German soldiers out of Vienna, Rose’s family hoped conditions would improve. But they soon discovered that the Mongol Russian soldiers were worse on the Viennese citizens than the Germans they had displaced. A few weeks later, Rose’s mother went missing. When she returned three days later, the family discovered she had been kidnapped and repeatedly gang-raped by her Russian captors. Such kidnappings and rapes by the Mongol Russians became common place, and many of the young women committed suicide after they had been victimized. At her parents’ insistence, young Rose set out on a courageous solo journey to escape from the Russian sector of Vienna to her aunt’s home in Salzburg which was in the American-controlled sector. Normally, a trip of only five hours by train, it became a three-week ordeal filled with clandestine train rides, perilous river crossings, capture by the Russian soldiers, interrogations, jail breaks, narrow escapes, and near starvation. However, as her struggle to survive got tougher, Rose’s spirit grew that much stronger. In the end World War II, with all of its challenges, proved to be no match for this courageous girl from Vienna.