Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, has died at age 113
Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor who endured both German and Japanese oppression but lived for eight decades beyond the end of World War II, has died at age 113. The death was confirmed by her daughter, Reha Bennicasa.
She was the oldest known living Holocaust survivor according to the New York-based Claims Conference, which administers compensation from Germany to victims of the Nazis.
Bennicasa, who is also a Holocaust survivor, said Girone died at a nursing home in Bellmore, New York, on Monday.
Girone, whose name at birth was Rosa Raubvogel, was born in 1912 into a Jewish family in southeastern Poland, then part of Russia. As a child, she moved to Hamburg, Germany.
In 1937, she married a German Jew named Julius Mannheim. When she was nine months pregnant, her husband was deported to Buchenwald in central Germany, one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, she said in a 1996 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, which collects survivor testimonies.
She said that one of the Nazi soldiers who came to their house to deport her husband also wanted to arrest her, but another dissuaded him by saying, 'No, she's pregnant – leave her alone.'
Soon after, Girone's daughter, Reha, was born in 1938.
'I could not name her what I wanted – Hitler had a list of names prepared for Jewish children and this was the only one I liked so I named her that,' she told USC Shoah Foundation.
She sent a postcard to her husband with information about the baby's birth, including her weight. While her husband was at Buchenwald, Girone learned a relative in London could help the couple obtain exit visas to Shanghai, which was one of the only ports accepting Jewish refugees.
'He knew someone who knew someone who gave out Chinese visas,' she said in the interview with the USC Shoah Foundation. Otherwise, she added, 'I don't know what would have happened to us.'
Until 1940, some concentration camp inmates, including Jewish prisoners, could be released under certain conditions, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. With the visa, Girone was able to secure her husband's release from Buchenwald but they had to leave for China within six weeks, and they were told to deliver all of their jewelry, savings and valuables to a central collection location as they were forbidden to leave Germany with them.
The three of them set sail for Shanghai, grateful to have escaped the Nazis' regime of terror. But Japan was waging war against China and shortly after their arrival, the Japanese occupied Chinese seaports and Jews were ordered to move into ghettos. The family moved into a tiny, cockroach-infested room under the staircase of an apartment building that had once been a bathroom.
No one could leave the ghetto except with the permission of a Japanese official who called himself 'The King of the Jews,' she said in her testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation.
While in China, she began knitting clothes to sell – a trade she would continue for the rest of her life and which she credited as a source of her strength.
In an interview with CNN, Bennicasa, her daughter, said, 'We were lucky to get out alive from Germany and from China, but she was very resilient, my mother. She could take anything.'
After the war, Girone and her family moved to the United States. She began working as a knitting instructor and lived in several spots in the New York area, eventually opening a knitting store in Queens.
Her first marriage ended in divorce, and she later married Jack Girone.
She told the USC Shoah Foundation that survival taught her to find something good even in tragic events.
'Nothing is so bad that something good shouldn't come out of it,' she said, adding that through her experience she became 'unafraid. I could do anything and everything.'
In an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Bennicasa echoed her mother's remarks, saying, 'I feel prepared to face anything through her example.'
There are about 245,000 survivors of the Holocaust still alive, of whom around 14,000 live in New York, according to the Claims Conference.
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