Older survivor of the known holocaust dies at 113

Rose Giroe, the oldest survivor of the known holocaust, died at 113, eight decades after the end of World War II. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Reha Bennicasa.

Bennicasa, who is also a Holocaust survivor, said Giroe died in a nursing home in Bellmore, New York, on Monday.

Giroe, whose birth name was Rosa Raubvogel, was born in 1912 in a Jewish family in southeastern Poland, then part of Russia. As a child, she moved to Hamburg, Germany.

In 1937, she married a German Jew named Julius Mannheim. When she was nine months pregnant, her husband was deported to Buchenwald, in Central Germany, one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, she said in a 1996 interview with USC Shoah Foundation, which collects testimonials from survivors.

According to her report, one of the Nazi soldiers who went to their house to deport her husband also wanted to arrest her, but another dissuaded him saying, “No, she’s pregnant-leave her alone.”

Soon after, in 1938, Giroe’s daughter, Reha, was born.

“I couldn’t give her the name I wanted – Hitler had a list of names prepared for Jewish children and this was the only one I liked, so I named it,” she told USC Shoah Foundation.

She sent a postcard to her husband with information about the birth of the baby, including her weight. While her husband was in Buchenwald, Giroe learned that a relative in London could help the couple get out of Shanghai, who was one of the only ports that accepted Jewish refugees.

“He knew someone who knew someone who gave Chinese visas,” she said in the interview. Otherwise she added, “I don’t know what would have happened to us.”

Until 1940, some concentration camp inmates, including Jewish prisoners, could be released under certain conditions, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. With a visa, Giroe managed to ensure the release of Buchenwald’s husband, but they had to leave for China in six weeks and deliver all their jewelry, economies and valuables to a center of central collection as they were forbidden to leave Germany with them.

The three left for Shanghai, grateful for escaping the Nazi terror regime. At the time, however, Japan was waging a war against China and, right after its arrival, the Japanese occupied the Chinese sea ports and the Jews were forced to move to ghettos. The family moved to a small cockroach -infested room under the stairs of an apartment building that was once a bathroom.

No one could get out of the ghetto, except for the permission of a Japanese officer who was calling himself, “The King of the Jews,” she told her statement to USC Shoah Foundation.

While in China, she started knitting clothes to sell – a craft that would continue for the rest of her life and which she credited as a source of her strength.

In an interview with CNN Bennicasa, her daughter, said: “We were lucky to go out alive from Germany and China, but she was very resilient, my mother. She endured anything. ”

After the war, Giroe and his family moved to the United States. She started working as a knitting instructor and lived in several places in the New York area, eventually opening a knitting store in Queens.

Her first marriage ended in divorce, and later she married Jack Giroe.

She told the Foundation that survival taught her to find something good even in tragic events.

“Nothing is so bad that something good should not get out of it,” she said, adding that through her experience she has become “fearless.”

“I could do anything and everything,” he said.

In an interview with the same foundation, Bennicasa echoed her mother’s comments, saying, “I feel prepared to face anything through her example.”

There are about 245,000 survivors of the still living holocaust, of whom about 14,000 live in New York, according to Claims Conference.

This content was originally published in an older survivor of the known Holocaust dies at 113 on the CNN Brazil website.

Source: CNN Brasil

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