Rose Girone is dead, considered the oldest Holocaust survivor and a staunch advocate for sharing the survivor’s story. She is 113 years old.
She died Monday in New York, according to the claim meeting, which is a Jewish material claims meeting against Germany in New York.
My father survived the Holocaust. Censorship didn’t stop the Nazis, it helped them
“Rose is an example of perseverance, but now we have an obligation to continue her memory,” Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the conference, said in a statement Thursday. “The lessons of the Holocaust must not be with those suffering death.”
Girone was born on January 13, 1912 in Janow, Poland. Her family moved to Hamburg, Germany when she was six years old, and she said in a 1996 filming interview with the USC Shoah Foundation.
When the interviewer asked her if she had any special career plans before Hitler, she said: “Hitler came in 1933 and then everyone was over.”
Girone is one of about 245,000 survivors still living in more than 90 countries, according to a study released by the Claims Conference last year. Their number has dropped rapidly because most people are very old and often healthy, with a median age of 86.
During the Holocaust, six million European Jews and other ethnic minorities were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators.
“This death reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust, and we still have first-hand witnesses with us,” Schneider said. “The Holocaust is sliding from memory into history, and its lessons are so important, especially in today’s world that it has been forgotten.”
Girone married Julius Mannheim in 1937 through an arranged marriage.
She was nine months pregnant and lived in Breslau, now Froclaw, Poland, when the Nazis were taken to Mannheim to Buchinwald concentration camp. Their family has two cars, so she asks her husband to leave the keys.
Jens-Christian Wagner (R), director of the Memorial Foundation of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-dora, spoke with participants at a wreath ceremony held on January 27, 2025 at the Rolling Call Square in the Buchenwald Memorial. (Martin Schutt/Picture Alliance by Getty Images)
She said she remembered a Nazi saying, “Take that woman, too.”
Another Nazi replied: “She is pregnant, don’t worry about her.”
The next morning, her father-in-law was also taken away, alone with their housekeeper.
After her daughter Reha was born in 1938, Girone was able to obtain a Chinese visa from relatives in London and ensure her husband’s release.
In Genoa, Italy, Reha was only 6 months old when they boarded a ship to the Japanese-occupied Shanghai, with only clothes and some linens.
Her husband first made money by buying and selling second-hand goods. He saved the car, drove the taxi business, and Girone knitted and sold sweaters.
But in 1941, Jewish refugees were surrounded by slums. The family of three was forced to stuff into the bathroom in the house, while cockroaches and bedbugs crawled over their belongings.
Her father-in-law came before the start of World War II, but was ill and died. They had to line up for food and live under the rule of a ruthless Japanese man who called himself the “King of Jews.”
“They did something horrible to people,” Guillen said of the Japanese military trucks on patrol streets. “One of our friends was killed because he wasn’t moving fast enough.”
Information about the European war was spread only in the form of rumors, as British radios were not allowed.
After the war, they began to receive emails from Girone’s mother, grandmother and other relatives, and with their help boarded a ship, landing in San Francisco in 1947 for $80, with Girone hiding in buttons.
They arrived in New York City in 1947. Later, with the help of her mother, she set up a weaving shop.
Girone was also reunited with her brother, who went to France to attend school and eventually gained American nationality through the military. It was the first time she had seen him in 17 years when she picked him up in New York at the airport.
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Gillen later divorced Mannheim. In 1968, she met Jack Girone, and the same day her granddaughter was born. By the second year, they got married. He died in 1990.
When asked in 1996 that she wanted to leave information for her daughter and granddaughter, she said: “Nothing is so bad that it shouldn’t come out. Anyway.”
