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Rose Girone, who is believed to be the survivor of the oldest living holocaust and a strong defender of sharing the stories of the survivors, has died. She was 113 years old.
She died on Monday In New YorkAccording to the claim conference, a conference based in New York on Jewish materials against Germany.
My father survived the Holocaust. Censorship did not stop the Nazis, it helped them
“Rose was an example of strength, but now we are obliged to continue in his memory,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the claims conference, in a statement on Thursday. “Holocaust lessons should not die with those who suffered suffering.”
Girone was born on January 13, 1912 in Janow, Poland. His family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when he was 6 years old, he said in an interview filmed in 1996 with the USC Shoah Foundation.
When the interviewer asked him if he had a particular career plan before Hitler, he said: “Hitler arrived in 1933 and then ended for everyone.”
Girone was one of the approximately 245,000 survivors who still live in more than 90 countries, according to a study published by the claims conference last year. Their numbers are decreasing rapidly, since most are very old already of fragile health, with an average age of 86 years.
Six million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.
“This death 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 He is sliding from memory to history, and his lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten. “
Girone married Julius Mannheim in 1937 through a fixed marriage.
He had 9 months pregnant living in Breslau, who is now Wroclaw, Poland, when the Nazis arrived to take Mannheim to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Her family had two cars and, therefore, asked her husband to leave her keys.
Jens-Christian Wagner (R), director of the Buchenwald Foundation and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials, talks to the participants in a crowns of placing crowns in the square of the call on the list at the Buchenwald Memorial on January 27, 2025. (Martin Schutt/Picture Alliance through Getty Images)
She said she remembers that a Nazi said: “Take that woman too.”
The other Nazi replied: “She is pregnant, leave her alone.”
The next morning, her father -in -law was also taken and left her alone with her keys.
After her daughter Reha was born in 1938, Girone was able to ensure Chinese visas of relatives in London and ensure the release of her husband.
In Genoa, Italy, when Reha was only 6 months old, they boarded a ship to Shanghai occupied by Japan with little more than clothes and some bedding.
Her husband first earned money by buying and selling second -hand products. He was saved to buy a car and started a taxis business, while Girone wove and sold sweaters.
But in 1941, Jewish refugees were arrested in a ghetto. The three family was forced to get into a bathroom in a house, while cockroaches and bedbugs crawled through their belongings.
His father -in -law arrived just before World War II began, but he got sick and died. They had to wait in the food tail and lived under the government of a ruthless Japanese man who called himself “king of the Jews.”
“They did really horrible things to people,” Girone said about Japanese military trucks that patrolled the streets. “One of our friends was killed because it would not move quickly enough.”
War information in Europe only circulated in the form of rumors, since British radios were not allowed.
When the war ended, they began to receive the mail of Girone’s mother, grandmother and other relatives In the United States. With their help, they approached a ship to San Francisco in 1947 with only $ 80, which Girone hid the buttons inside.
They arrived in New York City in 1947. Later a knitted shop began with his mother’s help.
Girone also met with his brother, who went to France for school and ended up obtaining his American citizenship by joining the army. When she went to the airport to pick it up in New York, it was the first time I saw him in 17 years.
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Girone later divorced Mannheim. In 1968, he met Jack Girone, the same day his granddaughter was born. For the following year they married. He died in 1990.
When asked in 1996 the message he would like to leave for his daughter and granddaughter, he said: “Nothing is so bad that something good should not leave it. It doesn’t matter anything.”
