Switzerland's most senior citizen Rosa Rein prepared to celebrate her 111th birthday in customary fashion Monday: with a glass of champagne and surrounded by the media.
Rein, who since 2001, has lived at a home for the elderly near the southern city of Lugano, was born into a Jewish family March 24, 1897 in what was then the German region of Silesia and lost her mother in a Nazi concentration camp.
She and her husband fled to Brazil, where she lived for 20 years before settling in Genoa, Italy at the beginning of the 1960s and eventually in Switzerland.
She is a few years younger than the woman who is currently the oldest woman in the world: American Edna Parker will celebrate her 115th birthday on April 20.
ama/cld/gk
Switzerland-senior-birthday
AFP 241236 GMT 03 08
COPYRIGHT 2002 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.