Rosa Samrskja didn’t hear news of D-Day landings. She wasn’t compelled to listen to the radio like Americans and Britons. June 6, 1944, Rosa was 17 and didn’t know about the men dying in the water and on the beaches of Omaha, Sword, Gold, Utah and Juno. She didn’t know about vast formations of parachute troops jumping from plane after plane into France.

But in a way, they were storming the French beaches, fighting and dying for people held in concentration camps, death camps and slave labor camps all over Eastern Europe. They were fighting for people like Rosa who had escaped — or were hiding — from those terrible camps. By 1944, Rosa was working hard for a German farmer but it was delightful after months in a slave labor camp.

She loves the American military for defeating Nazi Germany. When she hears planes from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station over her North Whidbey home, she has run out waving an American flag. Sometimes, pilot dip their wings to her.

“When planes go over, I don’t complain,” she said. “Boys like them gave their lives for my freedom.”

Father walks away, backwards

In November 1942, almost-13-year-old Rosa left her family in Russia and started walking west with Germans. She left a loving family in a coal-mining town. Her father walked in the snow with her but as drifts built up, he had to turn back or risk losing his way. Saying goodbye to her beloved father was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Harder than work she’d ever done like gleaning and hand threshing wheat. Carrying clothes miles to a river to wash by beating on stones with wooden paddles. Harder than hauling water for miles. Harder than digging for coal in a pile of rubble left by miners.

When her father, Simon, started walking away, he walked backwards. Rosa turned and looked at him but doesn’t know how many times. Tears were freezing on his moustache. One of the last things he said to her was, “When this war is over and you are alive, please come home to us.”

She did, but not for decades. By then her father was dead.

Early years in Russia difficult

Rosa Samarskja was born Jan. 25, 1927, in Russia in the northwest part, near St. Petersburg. The best coal in the world came from her town, she said. Her mother, beautiful Maria, was born there, and met her father Simon, after he got out of the Navy and found a job in the coal mine.

Simon and Maria married days after meeting. At first they lived in a one-room house with dirt floors that Simon built. Years later, they moved to a four-room house with a cellar for storing food. Neither had running water or electricity. Her father worked changing shifts. Diphtheria killed Rosa’s baby brother. Much of the time, Rosa didn’t have shoes. One year, drought killed crops and people starved.

“I thank God for every piece of bread I have,” Gooch said.

Her father planted an orchard with cherries, apricots and plums. Their garden held raspberries, cabbage, carrots, onions, corn, beans and turnips. Rosa and her mother hauled river water to the orchard and gardens.

In spite of the hard work, theirs was a sweet home, she said.

“Even a chicken that wandered in would be loved,” Rosa said.

Russia was a communist country and no one mentioned God or prayed. They feared being arrested and no one would see them again.

One time, her grandmother visited and whispered to Rosa about Jesus. How he died for everyone’s sins. How he was resurrected. How Rosa should pray to him. Rosa found a special place in the hills around her home where she talked to Jesus and felt safe.

War begins, Germans near

When war started, times got harder. Germany’s military was strong, Russia’s weak. As fighting came closer in late 1942, Russians destroyed anything Germany could use including mines and railroads. Germans kept coming. They broke down fences and camouflaged their tanks with branches from fruit trees. They took all the food.

“We could not say anything,” Rosa said. “We would get a bullet in the head.”

One night, German soldiers ordered her house. They told her parents to get her ready. Rosa left the next morning, after her parents and sister made a small package with clothes and food.

Rosa and other children walked through snow to the closest railroad in the next town. Then they were packed in railroad cars for the ride to Warsaw, Poland. One this trip, which Gooch estimates lasted five days, they had snow to drink.

From Warsaw, they traveled to Berlin where they were powdered with DDT to kill lice and their clothes were disinfected. Here they had their first food — vegetaable soup. It would be Rosa’s last good meal for months.

Sold into factory work

Children were sold to factories. Rosa and one girl from her town were bought by an old man on a bicycle. Their first night in the barracks, they got no food because they had not worked. That night, American bombers came.

“Americans really know how to bomb,” Rosa said. She was so scared she ran outside and hid in the first thing she saw: stinging nettles. She was too sick to work the next day. Girls in her factory made tools for farmers but other girls in the camp made munitions. Girls who could not work were beaten. She was beaten for making a fire from fallen branches. She was beaten for telling a matron the shower’s water had been turned off. She worked from early in the morning to late afternoon. Her rations were black coffee and turnip or cabbage soup.

“I did not eat meat, butter, eggs, or any good thing for months,”Gooch said.

Risking death in an escape

By spring of 1944, Rosa was ready to escape. She knew she would be shot if anyone found her. But she was ready. Lice crawled over her body. Her bones showed through her skin from work, cold and lack of food.

During bombings, she had run from her barracks to shelters in the mountains. Going to work the next morning, she had seen people who were killed running for the shelters.

“In the shelters, I would hear a bomb and think, ‘This one will hit,’”she said. The next morning, she remembered seeing people lying here and there.

It was all because of “this damn Hitler,” she said.

Rosa was ready.

In the early hours of one morning she escaped under the wire. She asked a girl from her town to camouflage the hole. Rosa knew if she were found, she would be shot.

After more than a year in the labor camp, Rosa said she was a “living skeleton” and people would know where she had been.

She found a sympathetic woman who hid her. The woman’s 18-year-old son had been killed in the war. This woman cut Rosa’s hair, gave her medicine for lice and found a farmer who needed help.

Work on the farm was nothing new to Rosa. And she had food. “Good food, all I could eat,” Rosa said.

She didn’t care how hard the work was – threshing wheat by hand — or how smelly, cleaning animal stalls and hauling manure to the fields. She wasn’t beaten or starved.

But she, and the farmer who helped her, were in a perilous situation. Rosa had no papers classifying her. In a military society which demanded such identifiers, she could not buy items, nor could she travel. Without papers she did not exist and if caught, she and the farmer could be sent to a camp or killed in what might be a slow death.

Rosa was ready for the risks.

Her father had told her: “You have two hand. You have two eyes. You can do anything.”

So she hoed earth, planted and tended crops, harvested and waited for the war to end.

June,1944. Gooch said she did her chores which included milking 16 cows three times a day. She met Dutch boys who had escaped concentration camps and worked on neighboring farms.

“Those were worse than where I was,” she said.

She felt the ground shake as Americans bombed near by Dusseldorf and other nearby towns flat.

Rosa sees her first American

One day an American plane was shot down near the farm. Rosa ran to the crash site to help. The pilot parachuted safely. He walked through trenches to American lines about six miles away. He was the first American she had seen.

In the spring of 1945, a day came that was so quiet, Rosa wondered what was happening. There was no shooting, no bombing. Nothing.

Herman Schreuders, one of the Dutch boys, came running with a white sheet on a stake. The farmer and his wife put out sheets on poles and Rosa went to see the Americans near the Rhine River.

“I can still see them, chewing gum riding on tanks like nothing was happening,” she said.

The Americans brought peace, love and freedom, she said.

“To me, (the planes) are the sound of freedom. I thank God every day on my knees for this country,” she said.

If any aircrews see an American flag being waved on northeast Whidbey Island, it’s Rosa Gooch saying thank you.

How Rosa reached America

Once World War II ended, Rosa had to decide where she would go: stay in Germany, home to Russia or walk to Holland with Hermann, one of the boys she had met. Her family might have been killed. She didn’t want to return to a Communist country.

After praying, she went to Holland, but when they reached more Americans, they learned she would need to marry Herman to get to Holland.

April 22, 1945, she and Herman were married. Three days’ train travel got them to Holland. Once in Holland, nurses gave sandwiches to boys, not girls. “They thought we took up with German soldiers,” Rosa said. It was her first welcome to Holland. They walked to Herman’s parents’ home where they found his mother and aunt. The first thing Herman’s mother said was “I am so disappointed in you. You took up with a poor Russian girl.”

That was her second welcome to Holland. The aunt told her to come and see her anytime. Rosa became the cook and maid. Herman found a job that paid 38 guilders a week. They paid 36 to his mother.

Eventually, the family met a Mormon on a mission in Holland. After that man came back to America, his parents sponsored Rosa’s family moving to Idaho.

In the 1970’s, Rosa obtained a visa to visit Russia. Her father was dead but her mother and brothers were still alive. Rosa found a tin container filled with family photos she had buried before German occupation. And she defied authorities again by taking a train to visit another brother.

Years, later, Rosa and Herman divorced. She had met Richard Gooch earlier and they reconnected. They were married and she and her children moved to Whidbey Island.

Gooch was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. At officers’ club functions, Gooch often told people how happy she was when she hear military planes.

“This is the most beautiful, blessed country,” she said.