A Long Island woman believed to be the world’s oldest survivor of the Holocaust has died at age 113.
Rose Girone, who once credited her longevity to dark chocolate, survived the Nazi horror of Kristallnacht and her husband’s time at a concentration camp to eventually move with her family to the States and thrive, kin said.
“She made the best of terrible situations. She was very level-headed, very commonsensical,” said Girone’s daughter, Reha Bennicasa, according to Jewish media.
Girone was born in the village of Yanov in eastern Poland in 1912 and moved with her family as a child to Hamburg in northern Germany.
In 1938, she married her first husband, German Jew Julius Manheim, and the couple moved to the city of Breslau, today Wroclaw in Poland, just as the Nazis launched Kristallnacht, the infamous night of deadly violence against Germany’s Jews.
She was eight months pregnant when her husband was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939.
“My father was in a concentration camp when I was born,” Bennicasa told FOX 5 at her mother’s 113th birthday celebration last month.
“They allowed my father to leave on the condition that we paid them and left within six weeks,” Bennicasa said.
The family was able to secure visas and fled to the Chinese city of Shanghai, which took in more than 20,000 Jewish refugees during World War II.
There, Girone took up knitting, a hobby that ultimately became her profession.
The family moved to the US after the war in 1947, and she opened two knitting stores in Queens, where she was a beloved part of the local community.
In the past decade, she had been living at the Belair Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in North Bellmore, where she passed away peacefully Monday morning.
Girone is survived by her daughter Bennicasa and a granddaughter, Gina.
“She always said the secret to her longevity is she loves to eat dark chocolate,” her granddaughter told the Long Island Herald last month.
“She has good children, and she has a purpose. She always said to me, ‘Always have a purpose in life. Get up, and always have a purpose.’ “
