The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. Age-old antisemitic myths, such as Jews' ritual murders of Christians, arose once again. In addition, the United States also changed its immigration policy to allow more Jewish refugees to enter under the provisions of the Displaced Persons Act, while other Western countries also eased curbs on emigration. For example, the Location Service of the American Jewish Congress, in cooperation with other organizations, ultimately traced 85,000 survivors successfully and reunited 50,000 widely scattered relatives with their families in all parts of the world. For survivors, the end of the war did not bring an end to their suffering. As news of the Kielce pogrom spread, Jews began to flee from Poland, perceiving that there was no viable future for them there, and this pattern of post-war anti-Jewish violence repeated itself in other countries such as Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. Initially these were paper records, but from the 1990s, an increasing number of the records have been digitized and made available online. At first, these were mainly for the purpose of prosecuting war criminals and often only many years later, for the sake of recounting their experiences to help process the traumatic events that they had suffered, or for the historical record and educational purposes.[58][61]. [88], The Holocaust Survivor Children: Missing Identity website addresses the issue of child survivors still hoping to find relatives or people who can tell them about their parents and family, and others who hope to find out basic information about themselves such as their original names, dates and place of birth, and parents names, based on a photograph of themselves as a child.[47][48]. When people tried to return to their homes from camps or hiding places, they found that, in many cases, their homes had been looted or taken over by others. They remain in the DP camps until they can leave Europe. Hitler took control over all Jews making them work and killing them. Jews, deemed "inferior," were considered an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. Prewar estimates for the latest year available (1937-1941). [7], At the start of World War II in September 1939, about nine and a half million Jews lived in the European countries that were either already under the control of Nazi Germany or would be invaded or conquered during the war. [8][9], Other Jews throughout Europe survived because the Germans and their collaborators did not manage to complete the deportations and mass-murder before Allied forces arrived, or the collaborationist regimes were overthrown. For most, hiding was a difficult decision that involved extraordinary risks. During . Jews had begun emigrating from Germany in 1933 once the Nazis came to power, and from Austria from 1938, after the Anschluss. The term "Sh'erit ha-Pletah" is thus usually used in reference to Jewish refugees and displaced persons in the period after the war from 1945 to about 1950. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Among these groups were Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men. / "Jews by country murdered under Nazi rule. Holocaust survivors in Greece There are very few Greek Jews who survived the holocaust who are still alive today. In historical research, this term is used for Jews in Europe and North Africa in the five years or so after World War II. [1][58], The number of memoirs that were published increased gradually from the 1970s onwards, indicating both the increasing need and psychological ability of survivors to relate their experiences, as well as a growing public interest in the Holocaust driven by events such as the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the existential threats to Jews presented by the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the broadcasting in many countries of the television documentary series "Holocaust" in 1978, and the establishment of new Holocaust memorial centers and memorials, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Those young survivors went on to form the '45 Aid Society, raising funds to support Holocaust education and other survivors. The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world. [59][60][65], Most of these books are written in Yiddish or Hebrew, while some also include sections in English or other languages, depending on where they were published. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents. [58], The writing and publishing of memoirs, prevalent among Holocaust survivors, has been recognized as related to processing and recovering from memories about the traumatic past. After a rumor spread that Jews had killed a Polish boy to use his blood in religious rituals, a mob attacked the group of survivors. The First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors took place in 1979 under the auspices of Zachor, the Holocaust Resource Center. It was one of the highest percentages in Europe. (Mackay 6) The Holocaust was a murder of 6 million Jewish people. Ultimately, the British take the refugees to Hamburg, Germany, and forcibly return them to DP camps. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The liberators were unprepared for what they found but did their best to help the survivors. A second volume of the "Register of Jewish Survivors" (Pinkas HaNitzolim II) was also published in 1945, with the names of some 58,000 Jews in Poland. Interviews were also conducted for the purpose of gathering evidence about war crimes and for the historical record. Liberation itself was extremely difficult for many survivors and the transition to freedom from the terror, brutality and starvation they had just endured was frequently traumatic: As Allied forces fought their way across Europe and captured areas that had been occupied by the Germans, they discovered the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Others went to Western countries as restrictions were eased and opportunities for them to emigrate arose. After most survivors in the DP camps had immigrated to other countries or resettled, the Central Committee of She'arit Hapleta disbanded in December 1950 and the organization dissolved itself in the British Zone of Germany in August 1951.[21][27]. With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between: Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component. These efforts included both personal accounts and memoirs of events written by individual survivors about the events that they had experienced, as well as the compilation of remembrance books for destroyed communities called Yizkor books, usually printed by societies or groups of survivors from a common locality. [60], Since the 1990s, many of these books, or sections of them have been translated into English, digitized, and made available online.[66][67]. His book helps clarify why a much higher proportion of France's Jews survived the Holocaust than in other Nazi-occupied countries. By 1946, there were an estimated 250,000 Jewish displaced persons, of whom 185,000 were in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and about 20,000 in Italy. Aid from the outside was slow at first to reach the survivors. [20][25][26][28][29], Since they had nowhere else to go, about 50,000 homeless Holocaust survivors gathered in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. These included social welfare and psychological care, reparations and restitution for the persecution, slave labor and property losses which they had suffered, the restoration of looted books, works of art and other stolen property to their rightful owners, the collection of witness and survivor testimonies, the memorialization of murdered family members and destroyed communities, and care for disabled and aging survivors. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; [c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. [47], The Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database, maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, contains millions of names of people persecuted under the Nazi regime, including concentration camp or displaced persons camp lists that can be searched by place name or keywords. The United States admitted 400,000 displaced persons between 1945 and 1952. Almost every survivor also had to deal with loss of many loved ones, many being the only one remaining alive from their entire family, as well as the loss of their homes, former activities or livelihoods, and ways of life. Because the Nazis advocated killing children of unwanted groups, childrenparticularly Jewish and Romani childrenwere especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust. [69][70], The largest collection of testimonials was ultimately gathered at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994 after he made the film Schindlers List. When attempting to document numbers of victimsof the Holocaust, the single most important thing to keep in mind is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world. Most of the Yizkor books were devoted to the Eastern European Jewish communities in Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Hungary, with fewer dedicated to the communities of south-eastern Europe. Holocaust survivors have volunteered at the Museum on a regular basis across the institutionengaging with visitors, sharing their personal histories, serving as tour guides, translating historic materials, and more, since the Museum opened. The following chart shows the estimated number of Jews killed during the Holocaust by country. [86][87], In partnership with the Arolsen Archives, the family history website Ancestry began digitizing millions of Holocaust and Nazi-persecution records and making them searchable online in 2019. Title: How Many Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust? They research the history of Jewish life in Europe before the war and the Holocaust itself; participate in the renewal of Yiddish culture; engage in educating others about the Holocaust; fight against Holocaust denial, antisemitism and racism; become politically active, such as with regard to finding and prosecuting Nazis, or by taking up Jewish or humanitarian causes; and through creative means such as theater, art and literature, examine the Holocaust and its consequences on themselves and their families. Like adults, more teens know when the Holocaust occurred (57%) and what Nazi-created ghettos were (53%) than know how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust (38%) or how Hitler became chancellor of Germany (33%). Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. [10] In eastern and south-eastern Europe, most of Bulgaria's Jews survived the war,[11] as well as 60% of Jews in Romania[12] and nearly 30% of the Jewish population in Hungary. Parents sought the children they had hidden in convents, orphanages or with foster families. Survivors of the Holocaust include those persecuted civilians who were still alive in the concentration camps when they were liberated at the end of the war, or those who had either survived as partisans or been hidden with the assistance of non-Jews, or had escaped to territories beyond the control of the Nazis before the Final Solution was Starting in the late 1970s, conferences and gatherings of survivors, their descendants, as well as rescuers and liberators began to take place and were often the impetus for the establishment and maintenance of permanent organizations. A communication pattern that psychologists have identified as a communication feature between parents who experienced trauma and their children has been referred to as the "connection of silence". It broke down during the last year and a half of the war. [8][16][19], When the Second World War ended, the Jews who had survived the Nazi concentration camps, extermination camps, death marches, as well as the Jews who had survived by hiding in forests or hiding with rescuers, were almost all suffering from starvation, exhaustion and the abuse which they had endured, and tens of thousands of survivors continued to die from weakness, eating more than their emaciated bodies could handle, epidemic diseases, exhaustion and the shock of liberation. The first of these books appeared in the 1940s and almost all were typically published privately rather than by publishing companies. These searches frequently ended in heartbreak parents discovered that their child had been killed or had gone missing and could not be found. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. [6][7][16][17], During the war, some Jews managed to escape to neutral European countries, such as Switzerland, which allowed in nearly 30,000, but turned away some 20,000 others; Spain, which permitted the entry of almost 30,000 Jewish refugees between 1939 and 1941, mostly from France, on their way to Portugal, but under German pressure allowed in fewer than 7,500 between 1942 and 1944; Portugal, which allowed thousands of Jews to enter so that they could continue their journeys from the port of Lisbon to the United States and South America; and Sweden, which allowed in some Norwegian Jews in 1940, and in October 1943, accepted almost the entire Danish Jewish community, rescued by the Danish resistance movement, which organized the escape of 7,000 Danish Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives in small boats from Denmark to Sweden. How many Jews died during the Holocaust? When 150 Jews returned to the city, people living there feared that hundreds more would come back to reclaim their houses and belongings. [63][64], Yizkor (Remembrance) books were compiled and published by groups of survivors or landsmanshaft societies of former residents to memorialize lost family members and destroyed communities and was one of the earliest ways in which the Holocaust was communally commemorated. In part she showed how Germany fought two wars simultaneously: World War II and the racial war against the Jews. [44][45], Newspapers outside of Europe also began to publish lists of survivors and their locations as more specific information about the Holocaust became known towards the end of, and after, the war. (In 1920, Great Britain received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer Palestine, and administered the territory until 1948.) [1], Many members of the "second generation" have sought ways to get past their suffering as children of Holocaust survivors and to integrate their experiences and those of their parents into their lives. . Most survivors sought to leave Europe and build new lives elsewhere. Many, however, had to resort to notices in newspapers, tracing services, and survivor registries in the hope of finding their children. Despite this, thousands died in the first weeks after liberation. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who lived as refugees or people who lived in hiding. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted and killed other groups, including at times their children, because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma (Gypsies), Germans with disabilities, and some of the Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians). [41], Initially, survivors simply posted hand-written notes on message boards in the relief centers, Displaced Person's camps or Jewish community buildings where they were located, in the hope that family members or friends for whom they were looking would see them, or at the very least, that other survivors would pass on information about the people whom they were seeking. A wide range of organizations have been established to address the needs and issues of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. As Germany marks 1,700 years of Jewish life, DW looks back at key . August 3, 1945Harrison issues report on Jews in GermanyUS special envoy Earl Harrison heads a delegation to the displaced persons' camps in Germany. [77], The World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants was founded in 1985 to bring child survivors together and coordinate worldwide activities. "Family approach with grandchildren of Holocaust survivors,", Holocaust survivor testimonials and witness accounts, looted books, works of art and other stolen property, Jews who managed to escape from German-occupied Europe, rescued by the Danish resistance movement, Jewish communities had been ravaged or destroyed, British, French and American occupation zones of Germany, Displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe, British and American occupation zones in Germany, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, rescuers refused to give up hidden children, anti-Jewish violence occurred in several central and Eastern European countries, anti-Jewish pogrom occurred in July 1946 in Kielce, Yossi Katz (geographer) Holocaust survivor assets, museums and memorials to remember the Holocaust, Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants, American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, Arolsen Archives-International Center on Nazi Persecution, American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, "How the Definition of Holocaust Survivor Has Changed Since the End of World War II", "Unter der NS-Herrschaft ermordete Juden nach Land." 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