NEW YORK (JTA) — Gisela Kohn Dollinger tricked death twice.

Read more: http://www.jta.org/2014/03/18/news-opinion/united-states/gisela-kohn-dollinger-refugee-who-rescued-husband-from-dachau-dies-at-111#ixzz2yaMuk8jt

Gisela Dollinger with her great-great-great-grandnieces. (Courtesy Carole Vogel)

Gisela Dollinger with her great-great-great-grandnieces. (Courtesy Carole Vogel)

Soon after Kristallnacht, when she was 36, Dollinger persuaded the Gestapo to release her husband, rather than send him to a concentration camp, and the two of them fled Austria for Shanghai, where she almost died of typhus.
After that, death seemed to forget all about her — until last week, when Dollinger passed away peacefully at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Hospital. She was 111 years old.
Dollinger’s passing came just weeks after Alice Herz-Sommer, a pianist and the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary who was believed to be the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, died at the comparatively young age of 110.
Known by her friends and family as “Gisa,” Dollinger was the youngest of 15 children. She was born in Baden-be-Wien, a Vienna suburb, on Aug. 30, 1902, according to her relatives.

Read more: http://www.jta.org/2014/03/18/news-opinion/united-states/gisela-kohn-dollinger-refugee-who-rescued-husband-from-dachau-dies-at-111#ixzz2yaMyVfaE
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