Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, dies at 113

Rose Girone, a North Bellmore resident believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, has died. She was 113.

Girone, who attributed her longevity partly to dark chocolate, died on Monday at the Belair Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in North Bellmore, her family said. She had previously lived in Whitestone.

"She’s a legend, what she has gone through in her life," said her granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa Gallart, of Merrick. "She was 5 feet tall, but was a little powerhouse."

At the time of her death, Girone was believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit organization that secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors around the world.

"This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us," said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the group. "The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten. Rose was an example of fortitude but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory."

It was something of a miracle she made it not just to 113 but even out of her 20s, her family said.

Girone was born in Poland in 1912, and her family eventually moved to Hamburg, Germany, to set up a costume business. After a matchmaker set her up for an arranged marriage, she moved to her new husband’s hometown, Breslau, said her daughter, Reha Bennicasa, of Merrick.

Nazis in Poland

Girone soon became pregnant. That same year, 1938, the Nazis were ramping up their campaign against Jews. Months after her arrival in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), the Nazis arrested her husband, Julius Mannheim, and sent him and his father to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Bennicasa said. As he was led away, Mannheim tossed his wife the keys to the family car.

By November, with Girone eight months pregnant, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass — a wave of deadly violence against the country’s Jews. Girone rode around on a train for about 24 hours to try to avoid the violence or arrest, her granddaughter said. Weeks later, Girone struggled to find a hospital that would take her — a Jewish woman — to deliver her baby, though she finally did gain entry to one.

By mid-1939, the Nazis offered her husband and his father a deal: If Mannheim’s father would hand over his small shipping business along with some cash, they would be released from the camp and could leave Germany along with their families. They had to get out within six weeks.

They accepted, and before long Girone, her husband and her infant daughter were on their way to Japanese-controlled Shanghai along with some 20,000 other refugees. Mannheim’s father stayed behind in Germany for the time being.

A couple of years later, after Japan officially entered World War II, the family was forced to move into a rat-infested bathroom in a mostly Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, where they stayed for seven years, her daughter said. Mannheim’s father visited them in China, got sick and died there.

Family moves to U.S.

By 1947, the family obtained visas to come to the United States, and settled in New York City, first Manhattan, then Queens. After a few years, Girone divorced Mannheim.

She eventually opened a knitting store in Rego Park, Queens, with a partner, and then a second one in Forest Hills. She sold the business when she was in her late 70s but kept working there for years under the new owners. She later did volunteer knitting at a nursing home and at a store until she was 102, her daughter said.

Girone married Jack Girone, a salesperson for industrial photographic equipment, in 1968. He died in 1989.

She credited her long life to two things — her family and dark chocolate, her daughter said. "I’m a chocoholic," she once confessed.

She also was an adventurer and liked high culture, her daughter said. She took up sailing and had subscription seats to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center.

When she took to Long Island Sound in a sailboat she and Jack owned, "the worse the weather was the better; my mother liked it," said her daughter.

Rose Girone was cremated, and family services were private.