Almost 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries, a new report on Tuesday showed.
Nearly half of them, or 49 percent, are living in Israel; 18 percent live in Western Europe, 16 percent in the US and 12 percent in countries of the former Soviet Union, according to a study by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.
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 at an advanced age and often frail, with a median age of 86 years old. Twenty percent of survivors are older than 90 years old, and more women (61 percent) than men (39 percent) are still alive.
According to the Holocaust Survivors Worldwide. A Demographic Overview, based on figures that were collected up until August last year, the vast majority, or 96 percent of living survivors, are “child survivors” who were born after 1928.
“The numbers in this report are interesting, but it is also important to look past the numbers to see the individuals they represent,” said Greg Schneider, the Claims Conference’s executive vice president.
“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,” Schneider said.
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 were somewhere in hiding across Nazi-occupied Europe, but their numbers were a far cry from the pre-war Jewish population in Europe.
Of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland in 1939, only about 300,000 survived.
About 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, the demographic report concluded.
One of them is Ruth Winkelmann, who survived by hiding with her mother and sister in a garden shed on the northern outskirts of Berlin. Her father was killed in the Auschwitz death camp. Her younger sister Esther died of illness, hunger and exhaustion in March 1945, just weeks before the liberation of Berlin by the Soviet Red Army.
Winkelmann, who is 95 and still lives in Berlin, said there has not been a day in her life when she did not remember her beloved father.
“It always hurts,” she said. “The pain is there day and night.”
For its new report, the Claims Conference said it defined Holocaust survivors “based on agreements with the German government in assessing eligibility for compensation programs.”
For Germany, that definition includes all Jews who lived in the country from Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler came to power, to May 1945, when Germany surrendered unconditionally in World War II.
The group handles claims on behalf of Jews who suffered under the Nazis and negotiates compensation with Germany’s finance ministry every year. In June last year, the Claims Conference said that Germany agreed to extend another US$1.4 billion for Holocaust survivors around the globe for this year.
Since 1952, the German government has paid more than US$90 billion to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis.
The Claims Conference administers several compensation programs that provide direct payments to survivors globally, provides grants to more than 300 social service agencies worldwide and ensures that survivors receive services such as home care, food, medicine, transportation and socialization.
It has also launched several education projects that illustrate the importance of passing on Holocaust survivors’ testimonies to younger generations as their numbers grow smaller and with antisemitism on the rise again.
“The data we have amassed, not only tells us how many and where survivors are, it clearly indicates that most survivors are at a period of life where their need for care and services is growing,” Claims Conference president Gideon Taylor said. “Now is the time to double down on our attention on this waning population. Now is when they need us the most.”
Winkelmann, the Berlin survivor, did not talk to anyone for decades about the horrors she endured during the Holocaust — not even her husband.
However, in the 1990s, she was approached one day by a stranger who looked at her necklace with a Star of David pendant, asked if she was a Jewish survivor and whether she could talk about her experience to her daughter’s class.
“When I started talking about the Holocaust for the first time, in front of those students, I couldn’t stop crying,” Winkelmann told reporters last week. “But since then I’ve talked about it so many times, and every time I shed fewer tears.”
While she said there could never be any closure for the terror she and all the other survivors lived through, Winkelmann has now made it her mission in life to tell her story. Even at 95 years old, she still visits schools across Germany — and has a message for her listeners.
“I tell the children that we all have one God, and although we gave him different names and have different prayers for him, we shouldn’t look at what separates us, but what unites us,” she said. “And even if we disagree, we should never stop talking to each other.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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