Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor and a strong advocate for sharing survivors’ stories, has died. She was 113.
She died Monday in New York, according to the Claims Conference, a New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
“Rose was an example of fortitude but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory,” Greg Schneider, Claims Conference executive vice president, said in a statement Thursday. “The lessons of the Holocaust must not die with those who endured the suffering.”
Girone was born on January 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland. Her family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when she was 6, she said in a filmed interview in 1996 with the USC Shoah Foundation.
When asked by the interviewer if she had any particular career plans before Hitler, she said: “Hitler came in 1933 and then it was over for everybody.”
Girone was one of about 245,000 survivors still living across more than 90 countries, according to a study released by the Claims Conference last year. Their numbers are quickly dwindling, as most are very old and often of frail health, with a median age of 86.
Six million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.
“This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have first-hand witnesses with us,” Schneider said. “The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.”
Girone married Julius Mannheim in 1937 through an arranged marriage.
She was 9 months pregnant living in Breslau, which is now Wroclaw, Poland, when Nazis arrived to take Mannheim to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Their family had two cars and so she asked her husband to leave his keys.
She said she remembers one Nazi saying: “Take that woman also.”
The other Nazi responded: “She’s pregnant, leave her alone.”
The next morning her father-in-law was also taken and she was left alone with their housekeeper.
After her daughter Reha was born in 1938, Girone was able to secure Chinese visas from relatives in London and secure her husband’s release.
In Genoa, Italy, when Reha was only 6 months old, they boarded a ship to Japan-occupied Shanghai with little more than clothing and some linens.
Her husband first made money through buying and selling secondhand goods. He saved up to buy a car and started a taxi business, while Girone knitted and sold sweaters.
But in 1941, Jewish refugees were rounded up into a ghetto. The family of three were forced to cram into a bathroom in a house while roaches and bed bugs crawled through their belongings.
Her father-in-law came just before World War II started but became sick and died. They had to wait in line for food and lived under the rule of a ruthless Japanese man who called himself “King of the Jews.”
“They did really horrible things to people,” Girone said of the Japanese military trucks that patrolled the streets. “One of our friends got killed because he wouldn’t move fast enough.”
Information about the war in Europe only circulated in the form of rumors, as British radios were not allowed.
When the war was over, they began receiving mail from Girone’s mother, grandmother and other relatives in the U.S. With their help, they boarded a ship to San Francisco in 1947 with only $80, which Girone hid inside buttons.
They arrived in New York City in 1947. She later started a knitting store with the help of her mother.
Girone was also reunited with her brother, who went to France for school and ended up getting his U.S. citizenship by joining the Army. When she went to the airport to pick him up in New York, it was her first time seeing him in 17 years.
Girone later divorced Mannheim. In 1968, she met Jack Girone, the same day her granddaughter was born. By the next year they were married. He died in 1990.
When asked in 1996 for the message she would like to leave for her daughter and granddaughter, she said: “Nothing is so very bad that something good shouldn’t come out of it. No matter what it is.”