World's oldest Holocaust survivor dies at age 113   

Rose Girona, the world's oldest Holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 113, the Jewish news agency JTA reported Monday night. Rose has been living in the United States for the past few years, having fled Poland and Germany in 1947.

Rose is known for the knitting shop she ran in Forest Hills, New York's Queens neighborhood. On January 13, she celebrated her 113th birthday and was considered the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world. She passed away on Monday morning.

According to her daughter, Reha Benixa, Rose died of old age. She attributed her knitting work to helping save her family during the Holocaust.

The late Rose was an extraordinary person, and a beloved in the knitting community in New York. She testified from the past Holocaust, and provided testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, the Nassau County Holocaust Remembrance and Tolerance Center, and elsewhere.

Rose was born in Poland, and in 1912 her family moved to Hamburg, Germany, where she ran a costume store for the theater. In 1938, she married Julius Mannheim in an arranged marriage, and together with her husband they moved to Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland).

At that time, Kristallnacht began in Germany. Her husband, Julius, was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and Rose, who was eight months pregnant, fled the city to avoid harm.

In 1939, Rose jumped at an opportunity to leave Nazi Germany. Her cousin sent her a piece of paper that he said was a visa, written in Chinese. Shanghai was one of the last open ports in the world back then. Rose presented the visa to the Nazi authorities and managed to free her husband Mannheim from the Buchenwald camp.

"They released my father on the condition that we pay them and leave the country within six weeks, and so we did," daughter Benixa, who was 86 at the time, told New York Jewish Week author Tanya Singer in 2022.

Conditions in China were difficult for the Jewish refugees, but Rose – who had learned to knit by her aunt as a child – immediately approached it. She managed to find wool and clothes to knit for her newborn daughter, and later a Jewish man from Vienna who saw her works helped her sell her work and taught her about business.

The money she earned from the business in Shanghai provided the necessary income for her family. In 1947, when the family received a visa to the United States, knitting again played a crucial role in the family's well-being: each person was allowed to leave China with only $10, but Rose hid $80 in cash in buttons on the knitted sweaters in her hand.

On her 113th birthday, Rose Girona told the Herald that "the secret to a long and healthy life is simple: live every day with a purpose, have amazing children, and eat a lot of dark chocolate."