Feb. 27 (UPI) — Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor and someone who suffered at the hands of Germany and Japan during World War II, has died at the age 113, her daughter, Reha Bennicasa, confirmed Thursday.
Bennicasa said her mother died on February 24th at a nursing home in New York state.
Claims Conference, based in New York and which oversees compensation from Germany to victims of the Nazis, confirmed Girone was the oldest survivor.
Girone was born Rosa Raubvogel in 1912 in Poland, which at the time was part of Russia. She moved to Hamburg, Germany, during her childhood during which her family ran a theatrical costume shop.
Girone married a German Jew in 1937 and, while on the verge of giving birth, her husband was taken from their home by police and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
She later said while telling her story to the USC Shoah Foundation that the officers wanted to arrest her, too, but that her husband, Julius Mannheim, talked them out of it because she was pregnant with Bennicasa, who was born shortly thereafter.
“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,” Gireon said in her oral history to the Shoah Foundation.
She said she told her husband about Bennicasa’s birth with a postcard while he was at Buchenwald. She said she had a family member in London who was able to get her and her husband exit visas to China, she told the Shoah Foundation.
“He knew someone who knew someone who gave out Chinese visas,” she said in the interview with the Shoah Foundation, according to CNN. “I don’t know what would have happened to us” if that had not happened, she continued.
Girone moved with her husband and daughter to the U.S. in 1947 where she opened a pair of knitting shops in Queens and continued to knit until she was 102, according to local media reports.
The marriage ended in divorce. She later married Jack Girone. She would later say that she learned important life lessons from her experience as a Holocaust survivor.
“Nothing is so bad that something good shouldn’t come out of it,” she said. She said the experience made her unafraid. “I could do anything and everything.” Girone credited her long life to having children and eating dark chocolate, she told a New York TV station.
