Eve Lasch Whyte Drazen photograph collection

Eva (Eve) Erika Lasch was born on June 4, 1929, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a Catholic mother Anna Lasch and a Jewish father. Eva was raised Catholic. In October 1938, Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland border region of Czechoslovakia. In the Munich Pact, the major European powers, not including Czechoslovakia, agreed to this exchange for a promise of peace from Hitler. In March 1939, Hitler broke the Pact and occupied the Bohemia and Moravia provinces where Prague was located. Eva’s father escaped to the United States. Sometime after July 7, 1943, Eva was imprisoned in Liebenau concentration camp in Germany. Liebenau was established by the Germans to hold noncombatant civilian and diplomatic enemy nationals, chiefly female and from the United States and Great Britain, as prisoners of war. As a POW camp, it was visited by the Red Cross which supplied the inmates with food and supplies. Eva was likely released during a prisoner exchange at the camp. She was in a refugee camp in Switzerland prior to her departure from Marseille, France, aboard the ship Gripsholm. She and her mother Anna arrived in the US on February 21, 1945. In 1951, Eve married Joseph Drazen. The couple had three sons and lived in Chicago. She later married George Whyte in 1973. Eve died on January 6, 1981, in California.