NEW YORK, February 28. /TASS/. Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, has died at a nursing home in the state of New York at the age of 113, CNN reported.
Girone was born to a Jewish family in 1912 in southeastern Poland, then a part of the Russian empire. As a child, Rose, whose name at birth was Raubvogel, moved to Hamburg, Germany. In 1937, she married Julius Mannheim, a German Jew, who was soon deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After a while, she obtained exit visas to China for her husband, herself and their daughter via a relative. Until 1940, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, some concentration camp inmates could be freed under certain conditions, the TV channel said. According to it, the woman was able to secure her husband’s release from Buchenwald, and the family set sail for Shanghai.
Back then, the Chinese municipality of Shanghai was occupied by Nazi Japanese troops, and Jews were deported to ghettos. After World War II ended, the family moved to the United States where Rose divorced Mannheim and married Jack Girone. In the United States, she worked as a knitting instructor.
There are currently around 245,000 living Holocaust survivors in more than 90 countries, according to the New York-based Claims Conference.
January 27 marks the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, a UN initiative. On that day in 1945, the Soviet Red liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, where more than 1.1 million people, including around 1 million Jews, had been tortured to death. Historians estimate that over 6 million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust.