Almost 80 years after the
Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90
countries. Nearly half of them, or 49%, are
living in Israel; 18% are in Western Europe, 16% in the United States, and 12%
in countries of the former Soviet Union. Before
the publication of the demographic report, there were only vague estimates
about how many Holocaust survivors are still alive. Their numbers are quickly dwindling, as most are very old and
often of frail health, with a median age of 86. Twenty percent of survivors are
older than 90, and more women (61%) than men (39%) are still alive. The vast majority, or 96% of survivors, are “child survivors”
who were born after 1928. These are
Jews who were born into a world that wanted to see them murdered. They endured
the atrocities of the Holocaust in their youth and were forced to rebuild an
entire life out of the ashes of the camps and ghettos that ended their families
and communities. Six million European Jews and
people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators
during the Holocaust. It is not clear exactly how many
Jews survived the death camps, the ghettos or somewhere in hiding across
Nazi-occupied Europe, but their numbers were a far cry from the pre-war Jewish
population in Europe. In Poland, of the 3.3 million
Jews living there in 1939, only about 300,000 survived. Around 560,000 Jews lived in Germany in 1933, the year Adolf
Hitler came to power. At the end of World War II in 1945, their numbers had
diminished to about 15,000 — through emigration and extermination. Germany's Jewish community grew again after 1990, when more than
215,000 Jewish migrants and their families came from countries of the former
Soviet Union, some of them also survivors. Nowadays,
only 14,200 survivors still live in Germany.
Sunday 28 January 2024
Holocaust Survivors
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