Holocaust survivor Rose Girone passed away on Monday at the age of 113. According to estimates, Rose was the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, according to the Claims Conference.
Rose was born in the village of Yanov in eastern Poland in 1912. During her childhood, the family moved to the city of Hamburg in Germany, where her family ran a store selling costumes for theaters. In 1938, she married through an arranged match with Julius Manheim, a German Jew. They moved to the city of Breslau (today, Wroclaw in Poland). After Kristallnacht, and when she was in her eighth month of pregnancy, Manheim was arrested and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
In 1939, they managed to escape to Shanghai, China, which at that time served as a refuge for European Jews during a period when all gates were closed to them. "They allowed my father to leave on the condition that we paid them and left within six weeks," said her daughter Raha Beniksa.
The war years in Shanghai were very difficult for them, but there she also learned to knit, which quickly became her source of income. In 1947, the family managed to obtain a visa to the US. They were allowed to take only ten dollars with them, but Rose utilized her knitting skills and hid 80 dollars inside the buttons of the sweaters she had sewn. From China, the family arrived by ship to San Francisco, and from there moved to New York where she met family members who had also managed to survive the Holocaust.
In 1968, Rose divorced Manheim and married Jack Giron. They moved to the Queens borough of New York, and Rose became a famous knitting teacher and owner of a legendary studio in the neighborhood.
"Mom was very proud of all her designs," her daughter told the New York Jewish Week: "People would bring advertisements from Vogue and say they wanted something exactly like in this picture. Mom would sit and decipher them. She loved it." In 1980, at the age of 68, Girone sold her business – but never stopped knitting.
According to the Long Island Herald, after her husband's death, Girone lived alone in her Queens apartment until the age of 103. About three years ago, she moved to a nursing home. "The secret to a long and healthy life is simple: live every day with purpose, have amazing children, and eat a lot of dark chocolate," she said on her 113th birthday which she celebrated on January 13, 2025. "She was just a wonderful woman," Beniksa told New York Jewish Week on Monday, "There was nothing too difficult for her. She was just wonderful."
