Holocaust Survivors

The term “Holocaust survivors” refers to victims of Nazi persecution who remained alive in 1945 following the systematic genocide of approximately six million European Jews by the German Third Reich and its collaborators during World War II.

Of the millions murdered by the Nazis, including ethnic Poles, Romani, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political and religious opponents, only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation. Thus, the term Holocaust survivor most comprehensively refers to the remnant of decimated European Jewry after the war.

Scholars estimate that, taking into account the extremely high death rate of Jewish survivors immediately after their liberation from death and slave labor camps - conditions at Bergen Belsen alone were so horrific that 28,000 prisoners died there after being freed - not more than 30,000 East European Jews were living in the Occupied Zone of Germany in the summer of 1945. This number swelled in the years between 1945 and 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors fled to American-occupied Germany from the anti-Semitism and pogroms in the war’s aftermath. As no precise records were kept, exact numbers of Holocaust survivors vary.

The Holocaust survivors faced urgent and overwhelming challenges. The American Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee organized disaster relief centers, Displaced Persons camps, and missing persons lists. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA, was established in 1943 to assist war ravaged countries. In 1946, Polish Jewish refugee Ludwig Rajchman, with the support of U.S. President Herbert Hoover, created UNICEF to address the urgent needs of child survivors of war.

In the Displaced Persons camps set up for the masses of war refugees, Holocaust survivors lived among their killers because Allies differentiated by nationality, not religion. Of the seven to nine million displaced persons living outside their countries after the war, only the Jews had nowhere to go.

Between 1948 and 1956, the majority of Holocaust survivors found refuge in Israel and the United States, with Israel absorbing the greatest percentage of refugees in relation to population in history.

While many Holocaust survivors were able to locate surviving family members, many reunions occurred only decades afterwards, and many never at all. Sixty five years after the Holocaust, attempts to trace lost children and infants are registered with Jewish agencies, Holocaust museums, and on Red Cross and Missing Persons lists and websites. Due to the recent release and computerization of previously withheld Holocaust documentation, those Holocaust survivors still alive are only now able to attempt to discover the fates of family members

Because infants, children and the elderly were the most susceptible targets of both the vicissitudes of war in general and the murder machine of the Nazis in particular, post-Holocaust Jewry was scarred by the generational loss of these age groups.

Restitution payments for slave labor and grievous physical harm, including torture and medical experimentation, were instituted by the German government in 1953. There was no restitution for murdered family members or the loss of homes or property. Financial restitution awarded to organizations representing Holocaust survivors often failed to reach those it was designed to assist. Controversy continues to rage in Israel today over the delinquent administration of these funds.

The issue of psychological and trauma counseling for Holocaust survivors was largely unaddressed. In addition, Holocaust denial gained credibility among groups of pseudo-historians seeking to delegitimize the suffering of the survivors and obscure the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators.

The vast body of documentation and literature concerning Holocaust survivors continues to grow and play an incalculable role in preserving the truth. An outpouring of personal accounts and major films attempts to address the still incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivors and their children include modern-day heads of government and industry, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, artists and scientists. Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are among hundreds of international institutions preserving the memory of the Holocaust. The Spielberg Foundation and other educational foundations have recorded thousands of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. The Concentration Camps and Ghettoes where the Holocaust survivors were incarcerated and tortured are today preserved as the most chilling of recorded history’s cautionary tales.

Sixty five years after the Holocaust, the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled to fewer than 70,000.