Oldest Known Holocaust Survivor Dies in NY

Rose Girone, who would have been unlikely to see her 30th birthday if she hadn't escaped Nazi Germany just in time, has died at age 113. Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, died this week at a nursing home on Long Island. Girone, born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1912, was living in Germany and nine months pregnant when her husband and his father were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938, the New York Times reports. She said in a 1996 interview that one of the soldiers who came to their home also wanted to arrest her, but another said, "No, she's pregnant—leave her alone."

• After her father-in-law signed his shipping business over to the Nazis, they managed to get to Shanghai in 1939 with a visa—possibly fake—provided by relatives who had escaped to England. After Japanese occupiers forced the city's Jews into ghettos, the family "moved into a tiny, cockroach-infested room under the staircase of an apartment building that had once been a bathroom," CNN reports.

• The family made it to the US in 1947 with help from relatives and settled in New York City. "We were lucky to get out alive from Germany and from China, but she was very resilient, my mother. She could take anything," her daughter, Reha Bennicasa, tells CNN. "She was very level-headed, very commonsensical. There was nothing I couldn't bring to her to help me solve—ever—from childhood on," she said, per Reuters.
• Girone, who made money in Shanghai knitting clothes to sell, worked at knitting stores in New York and eventually opened two stores of her own. She kept teaching knitting until she was 102.

• "She always says the secret to her longevity is she loves to eat dark chocolate, she has good children, and she has a purpose," granddaughter Gina Bennicasa told the Long Island Herald last month. "She always said to me, 'Always have a purpose in life. Get up, and always have a purpose.'"
• Girone was the oldest of around 245,000 living Holocaust survivors, including around 14,000 in New York, according to the Claims Conference, which secures compensation for survivors. "Rose was an example of fortitude but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory," Greg Schneider, the nonprofit executive vice president, said Thursday, per the AP. "The lessons of the Holocaust must not die with those who endured the suffering."

(More Holocaust survivor stories.)