Rose Girone, oldest known Holocaust survivor, died at the age of 113

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rose girone, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, which suffered from both German and Japanese oppression, died at the age of 113. This was confirmed by her daughter, Reha Bennicasa.

life and origin

According to the New York Claims Conference, which manages compensation from Germany to the victims of the Nazis, it was the oldest known Holocaust survivor. Girone was born in a Jewish family in Poland in 1912, which was part of Russia at the time. In her childhood she moved to Hamburg, Germany.

The deportation and escape

1937 she married a German Jew named Julius Mannheim. Her husband was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp for nine months pregnant, one of the most notorious camps in the Nazis. In an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, she reported that a Nazi soldier who came to deport her husband also wanted to arrest her. Another soldier, however, stopped him and said: "No, she is pregnant - leave her alone."

A short time later, Girone's daughter, Reha, was born in 1938. "I couldn't call her what I wanted-Hitler had completed a list of names for Jewish children, and that was the only one I liked, so I called her that," Girone recalled the USC Shoah Foundation interview.

She sent a postcard to her husband with information about the birth of the baby, including her weight. While her husband was in Buchenwald, Girone learned that a relative in London could help them get departure visa for Shanghai, one of the few ports who accepted Jewish refugees.

life in Shanghai

"He knew someone who knew someone who spent Chinese visa," she said in the interview with the USC Shoah Foundation. Otherwise she would not know what would have happened to them. Until 1940, some prisoners, including Jewish prisoners, were released from concentration camps under certain conditions. With the visa, Girone was able to secure the release of her husband from Buchenwald, but they had to travel to China within six weeks and should hand over all their jewelry, savings and valuables at a central collection point because it was forbidden to leave Germany with them.

The family made their way to Shanghai, grateful to have escaped the Nazis. But Japan waged war against China, and shortly after her arrival, the Japanese occupied the Chinese seaports, which forced the Jews to pull in ghettos. The family lived in a small room infected by cockroaches under the stairs of a residential building that was once a bathroom.

The challenge in the ghetto

Nobody was allowed to leave the ghetto unless a Japanese official who called himself "the King of Jews", she said in her testimony in front of the USC Shoah Foundation. While she was in China, she started knitting clothes to sell her - a craft that continued to the end of her life and that she saw as a source of her strength.

In an interview with CNN, Bennicasa said about her mother: "We were lucky to get out of Germany and China alive, but my mother was very resistant. She could endure everything."

after the war in the USA

After the war, Girone moved to the United States with her family. She started working as a knitting teacher and lived in several places in the New York area before finally opening a wool shop in Queens. Her first marriage ended in a divorce, and later she married Jack Girone.

She informed the USC Shoah Foundation that her survival had taught her to find something good even in tragic events. "Nothing is so bad that something good should not emerge from it," she said, adding that she became "fear -free" through her experiences and "could do everything."

In another interview, Bennicasa said: "I feel ready to meet everything through my mother's example." According to the Claims Conference, there is still about surviving of the Holocaust , of which around 14,000 live in New York.