Rose Girona was eight months pregnant and lived in Breslau, Germany in 1938 when her husband was sent to Buchenwald’s concentration camp. She got a passage to Shanghai, but was forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once established in the United States, he rented what he could find while supporting his daughter with knitting.
Despite the difficulties, including two pandemics, Giroe embraced life with an urgent positivity and common sense. “Are we not lucky?” She used to say.
Giroe was considered the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died in an asylum in Long Island on Monday, said her daughter and survivor, Reha Bennicasa. Giroe was 113 years old.
Her secret to longevity was simple, she said: dark chocolate and good children.
There are about 245,000 Jewish survivors of the living holocaust worldwide, according to the Jewish material claims conference against Germany, which supports survivors.
“This match reminds us of the urgency of sharing Holocaust’s lessons while we still have eyewitnesses with us,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the organization. “The holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are very important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.
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“Rose was an example of Fortaleza, but now we are required to continue in his memory,” he said.
Rose Raubvogel was born on January 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, daughter of 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 wedding. The couple moved to Breslau (currently Wroclaw, Poland) that year, just before Mannheim and his father were arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
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A year later, now with a baby, Giroe received a document written in Chinese family members who had escaped to England. It seemed to be a safe visit to Shanghai, but “it could have been anything,” said Bennicasa, explaining that the family later found out that it could be a fake document.
Mannheim’s father agreed to deliver his transportation business and make a payment to the Nazis in exchange for their release from the concentration camp. With the visa, Giroe, her husband and 6 -month -old daughter, Reha, settled to Shanghai, occupied by the Japanese, along with 20,000 other refugees.
Mannheim had a small taxi business at the beginning, while Giroe made money doing knitting clothes. But as soon as Japan declared war in 1941, the Jews were gathered in a ghetto. Giroe had to beg the ghetto supervisor for a place for his family to live, and the only arrangement they got was an unfinished and rated bathroom in a house. The family of three would live there for seven years.
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Mannheim had to leave his taxi business and turned to hunting and fishing, while Giroe continued to sell his knitting clothes. She ended up making friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. That would be a board of salvation for decades.
By 1947, Girona’s mother and grandmother had already reached the United States and sponsored the family to join them. Giroe secretly kept $ 80, and the family left that year to San Francisco, where they lived for about a month before taking a train to New York.
Within a few years, Giroe had divorced Mannheim, and she and Reha moved in room in a furnished room in Manhattan, where she “saved” while working in knitting stores, Bennicasa said.
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Giroe eventually saved enough to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and opened a second store in Forest Hills, Queens, where “we actually had a real apartment, not just a furnished room,” said Bennicasa. Girone would continue to work and teach knit until he was 102.
In 1968, Giroe married Jack Girone, who died in 1989. In addition to Bennicasa, she leaves her granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa.
Gina Bennicasa remembered her grandmother’s frequent phrases, including, “Aging it’s fun, but being old is not fun.” One stood out among the others: “You have to wake up and have a purpose.”
