Rose Girone, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, died early this week at the age of 113 in a retirement home in Bellmore, New York. After she managed to flee Nazi Germany with her child and husband, who was released from Buchenwald, the young family in Shanghai had to move from the Japanese occupier to a hobby in the ghetto.
Rose was born in 1912 in the southeast of Poland, which was then part of Russia. As a child she moved to the German city of Hamburg. In 1937 she married Julius Mannheim, who was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp when Rose was very pregnant. In 1996 the woman said in an interview that one of the Nazis also wanted to take her with her, but that another soldier managed to prevent this. “She is pregnant, leaves her alone,” he would have said.
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Not long after, in 1938, her daughter Reha was born. “I could not give the girl the name I wanted, since the Nazi regime had drawn up a list with admitted names for Jewish children. Reha was the only name I liked. “
Around that time she learned that a family member in London could help the family with exit documents to Shanghai, one of the few refugees that at that time still welcomed Jewish refugees. With the help of that paper, Rosa succeeded in convincing the Nazis to let her husband go. “I don’t know what else would have happened to us.” When they leave for China, the family had to leave all the jewelry, savings and valuables.
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After their arrival in Shanghai, the Chinese harbor fell into the hands of Japan and Jews were ordered to move to ghettos. The family were housed in a room with cockroaches, under the staircase of an apartment building. After the war they moved to the United States. Rosa went to work there as a knitting teacher and opened a knitting store in Queens. After her divorce, she got married to Jack Girone. Rosa indicated in the years afterwards to be “fearless” after everything she had experienced. “Nothing is so bad that nothing good can come out,” she said.