She lived through Nazi Germany and survived Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 113. Her death was confirmed by daughter Reha Bennicasa, herself a Holocaust survivor. Bennicasa said that Girone died on Monday in a nursing home in New York’s Bellmore.
“She was a strong lady, resilient. She made the best of terrible situations. She was very level-headed, very commonsensical. There was nothing I couldn't bring to her to help me solve – ever – from childhood on,” Bennicasa said in a statement reported by Reuters.
Girone lived not only through Nazi Germany but survived the Japanese occupation of Shanghai as well. Born Rose Raubvogel on 13 January 1912 in Janow, Poland, she moved to Hamburg, Germany, as a child. She married Julius Mannheim in 1937 and moved to Breslau, where, while pregnant with Bennicasa, she watched as her husband and father-in-law were arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald.
“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,” Girone told the USC Shoah Foundation in a 1996 interview about Bennicasa’s birth. Mannheim and his father were released but only after the family’s shipping business, jewellery and savings were handed over to the Nazis. Girone sought help from a relative in London, who got her exit visas to Shanghai.
Girone left for Shanghai with six-month-old Bennicasa, her husband, and 20,000 other Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. However, as Japan entered the war in 1941, Jews in Shanghai were rounded up and forced to live in ghettos. After much pleading with the ghetto overseer, Girone and her family moved into an unfinished, rodent-infested room that had once been a bathroom, The New York Times reported.
“Nothing is so bad that something good shouldn’t come out of it,” Girone told the USC Shoah Foundation. After the war ended, Girone and her family moved to New York in 1947. Girone became a knitting instructor, continuing the work she had started in Shanghai to make money. She continued to teach until she turned 102.
“We were lucky to get out alive from Germany and from China, but she was very resilient, my mother. She could take anything,” Bennicasa told CNN. Girone’s marriage to Mannheim ended in divorce in 1948 and she married Jack Girone in 1968. “She always says the secret to her longevity is she loves to eat dark chocolate,” her granddaughter Gina Bennicasa told The Long Island Herald earlier this year, when Girone turned 113.
“She has good children and she has a purpose. She always said to me, ‘Always have a purpose in life. Get up and always have a purpose.’”. There are about 245,000 Holocaust survivors still alive and around 14,000 of them live in New York, according to the Claims Conference, which is based in the city and represents victims of Nazi persecution and helps them negotiate restitution.
