26 Facts About Holocaust survivors

1.

Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa.

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2.

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 implemented.

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3.

Term "Holocaust survivors survivor" applies to Jews who lived through the mass exterminations which were carried out by the Nazis.

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4.

Additionally, other Jewish refugees are considered Holocaust survivors, including those who fled their home countries in Eastern Europe in order to evade the invading German army and spent years living in the Soviet Union.

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5.

Largest group of Holocaust survivors were the Jews who managed to escape from German-occupied Europe before or during the war.

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6.

Some Holocaust survivors returned to their countries of origin while others sought to leave Europe by immigrating to Palestine or other countries.

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7.

At first, following liberation, numerous Holocaust survivors tried to return to their previous homes and communities, but Jewish communities had been ravaged or destroyed and no longer existed in much of Europe, and returning to their homes frequently proved to be dangerous.

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8.

Furthermore, having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust survivors, many wanted to leave Europe entirely and restore their lives elsewhere where they would encounter less antisemitism.

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9.

The camp facilities were very poor, and many Holocaust survivors were suffering from severe physical and psychological problems.

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10.

Furthermore, Holocaust survivors often found themselves in the same camps as German prisoners and Nazi collaborators, who had been their tormentors until just recently, along with larger number of freed non-Jewish forced laborers, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the Soviet army, and there were frequent incidents of anti-Jewish violence.

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11.

Opening of Israel's borders after its independence, as well as the adoption of more lenient emigration regulations in Western countries regarding Holocaust survivors led to the closure of most of the DP camps by 1952.

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12.

In many cases, Holocaust survivors searched all their lives for family members, without learning of their fates.

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13.

In Israel, where many Holocaust survivors emigrated, some relatives reunited after encountering each other by chance.

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14.

One such early compilation was called "Sharit Ha-Platah", published in 1946 in several volumes with the names of tens of thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust survivors, collected mainly by Abraham Klausner, a United States Army chaplain who visited many of the Displaced Persons camps in southern Germany and gathered lists of the people there, subsequently adding additional names from other areas.

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15.

Holocaust survivors suffered from the war years and afterwards in many different ways, physically, mentally and spiritually.

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16.

Nonetheless, many Holocaust survivors drew on inner strength and learned to cope, restored their lives, moved to a new place, started a family and developed successful careers.

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17.

Some survivors began to publish memoirs immediately after the war ended, feeling a need to write about their experiences, and about a dozen or so survivors' memoirs were published each year during the first two decades after the Holocaust, notwithstanding a general public that was largely indifferent to reading them.

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18.

However, for many years after the war, many survivors felt that they could not describe their experiences to those who had not lived through the Holocaust.

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19.

Survivor memoirs, like other personal accounts such as oral testimony and diaries, are a significant source of information for most scholars of the history of the Holocaust survivors, complementing more traditional sources of historical information, and presenting events from the unique points of view of individual experiences within the much greater totality, and these accounts are essential to an understanding of the Holocaust survivors experience.

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20.

Child survivors of the Holocaust were often the only ones who remained alive from their entire extended families, while even more were orphans.

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21.

The First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors took place in 1979 under the auspices of Zachor, the Holocaust Resource Center.

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22.

Descendants of Holocaust survivors were recognized as having been deeply affected by their families' histories.

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23.

Second generation of the Holocaust survivors has raised several research questions in psychology, and psychological studies have been conducted to determine how their parents' horrendous experiences affected their lives, among them, whether psychological trauma experienced by a parent can be passed on to their children even when they were not present during the ordeal, as well as the psychological manifestations of this transference of trauma to the second generation.

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24.

For example, in November 1979, the First Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors was held, and resulted in the establishment of support groups all over the United States.

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25.

Holocaust Global Registry is an online collection of databases maintained by the Jewish genealogical website JewishGen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust; it contains thousands of names of both survivors trying to find family and family searching for survivors.

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26.

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.

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