The oldest survivor of the Holocaust dies at 113

BarcelonaThe oldest Holocaust survivor, Rose Girone, died in New York on Monday at the age of 113. Girone was living in Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland, in 1937 when the Nazis took her husband to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She was eight months pregnant at the time. As she explained in later interviews, she heard one officer say to another: "Let's take the wife too," but the other replied: "She's pregnant, let's leave her alone."

Her husband, Julius Mannheim, and her father-in-law were taken to Buchenwald, but after giving birth to her daughter Reha, Girone managed to get her husband released and visas to go to China, one of the few countries that accepted Jewish refugees. But in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a ghetto was created for the Jews, where they had to eke out a living under a regime of terror.

Rose Girone, born Rosa Raugvogel, was one of 245,000 survivors of the Nazi Holocaust still alive in 90 countries, according to a study published last year by the New York-based Jewish Claims Conference. She is believed to be the oldest. In fact, the average age of survivors is 86, and is rapidly declining because most are older and in fragile health.

Girone was born on January 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, and at the age of six her family moved to Hamburg, Germany: "Hitler came in 1933 and it was all over for everyone," Girone herself had said in interviews. Up to six million Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps in Europe.

Under the rule of a Japanese who called himself "king of the Jews"

But this woman lived through another scenario of persecution against the Jews, in the territories under the control of the Japanese empire. In Shanghai, her husband, she and her daughter lived under the rule of a Japanese man who called himself "king of the Jews." "They did really horrible things to people," Girone had explained about the Japanese soldiers who patrolled the streets in trucks, according to AP. "One of our friends was killed because he was not moving fast enough," she had explained.

When the war ended in 1947, with the help of her mother and other relatives in the United States, they embarked for San Francisco. They arrived in New York and, later, Girone opened a wool shop. She was also able to meet her brother, whom she had not seen for 17 years.

Later she divorced Mannheim and, in 1968, she met Jack Girone, whom she married a year later. They were together until Jack's death in 1990. With a positive attitude, Girone always remembered that life had tested him many times, and that it had made him stronger. "Nothing is so bad that you can't also extract something good from it," he said.

"Rose was an example of strength, and now we are obliged to keep her memory alive," said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference in a statement released Thursday. "The lessons of the Holocaust must not die with those who lived through its suffering," he added.