Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting.
Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would often say.
Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home on Long Island on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113.
Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children.
There are about 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors alive around the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which supports survivors.
“This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us,” said Greg Schneider, the organization’s executive vice president. “The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.”
“Rose was an example of fortitude, but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory,” he said.
Rose Raubvogel was born on Jan. 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, to Klara Aschkenase and Jacob Raubvogel. The family later settled in Hamburg, Germany, and started a costume business.
She married Julius Mannheim in 1938 in an arranged marriage. The couple moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) that year, not long before Mr. Mannheim and his father were arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
A year later, now with an infant, Ms. Girone received a document written in Chinese from family members who had escaped to England. It appeared to be a visa for safe passage to Shanghai, but “it could have been anything,” Ms. Bennicasa said, explaining that the family later learned it could have been a fake document.
Mr. Mannheim’s father agreed to hand over his shipping business plus a payment to the Nazis in exchange for their release from the concentration camp. With the visa, Ms. Girone, her husband and 6-month-old Reha set sail for Japanese-occupied Shanghai along with 20,000 other refugees.
Mr. Mannheim had a small taxi business at first, while Ms. Girone made money by knitting clothes. But once Japan declared war in 1941, Jews were rounded up into a ghetto. Ms. Girone had to beg the ghetto’s overseer for a place for her family to live, and the only arrangement they could manage was an unfinished, rat-infested bathroom in a house. The family of three would live there for seven years.
Mr. Mannheim had to abandon his taxi business and turned to hunting and fishing, while Ms. Girone continued to sell her knitwear. She eventually made friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. It would be a lifeline for decades to come.
By 1947, Ms. Girone’s mother and grandmother had already made it to the United States, and they sponsored the family to join them. Ms. Girone secretly stashed $80, and the family set off that year for San Francisco, where they lived for about a month before taking a train to New York.
Within a few years, Ms. Girone had divorced Mr. Mannheim, and she and Reha bounced from furnished room to furnished room around Manhattan, where she “scrimped and saved” while working at knitting stores, Ms. Bennicasa said.
Ms. Girone eventually saved enough to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and she opened a second store in Forest Hills, where “we actually had a real apartment, not just a furnished room,” Ms. Bennicasa recalled. Ms. Girone would continue to work and teach knitting until she was 102.
In 1968, Ms. Girone married Jack Girone, who died in 1989. In addition to Ms. Bennicasa, she is survived by her granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa.
Gina Bennicasa remembered her grandmother’s frequent sayings, including “Growing old is fun, but being old is not fun.” One stood out among the rest: “You have to wake up and have a purpose.”
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