Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, died early Tuesday in New York at the age of 113, her family has confirmed.
Girone died at a nursing home on Long Island, where she had lived since last month. Her daughter Reha Bennicasa described her as “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.”
Born in 1912 in Janow, eastern Poland, Girone moved as a child to Hamburg, Germany. She later lived in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) with her first husband, Julius Mannheim, who was arrested during Kristallnacht and imprisoned at Buchenwald.
Screenshot: Ynet
Eight months pregnant at the time, Girone fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai, which accepted around 20,000 Jewish refugees between 1938 and 1941, two thirds of whom were from Austria and Germany.
A document sent by a distant cousin, written in Chinese, secured her visa and helped gain Mannheim’s release. In Shanghai, Girone supported her family by knitting and with the help of a Jewish businessman from Vienna, she sold knitted goods to help her to survive.
In 1947, the family immigrated to the US, first arriving by ship in San Francisco before settling in New York, where Girone reunited with her mother, brother and grandmother, who had all survived the war. To circumvent a $10-per-person limit on migrants, she famously sewed $80 into buttons on her clothing.
After separating from Mannheim, she remarried in 1968 and moved with her new husband, Jack Girone, to Queens. There, she opened a knitting store which became a neighbourhood institution before she sold it in 1980 at age 68.
Rose gave testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County.
Girone continued knitting well into her final years. At her 113th birthday celebration last month, she credited her longevity to “living every day with a purpose, having amazing children and eating lots of dark chocolate.”
