Holocaust survivors

Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews withstood the concentration camps and death marches, although tens of thousands of them were so weak or sick that even with post-liberation medical care, they died within a few months of liberation.[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. Thus, for example, in Western Europe, around three quarters of the pre-war Jewish population survived the Holocaust in France and Italy, about half survived in Belgium, while only a quarter of the pre-war Jewish population survived in the Netherlands.[10] Around a third of Austrian Jews and 70% of German Jews who did not flee those countries by 1939 were killed.[11] In eastern and south-eastern Europe, most of Bulgaria's Jews survived the war,[12] as well as 60% of Jews in Romania[13] and nearly 30% of the Jewish population in Hungary.[14] Two-thirds survived in the Soviet Union.[15] Bohemia, Slovakia and Yugoslavia lost about 80% of their Jewish populations.[11] In Poland, the Baltic states and Greece close to 90% of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.[16][8][17][18]

Throughout Europe, a few thousand Jews also survived in hiding, or with false papers posing as non-Jews, hidden or assisted by non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews individually or in small groups. Several thousand Jews also survived by hiding in dense forests in Eastern Europe, and as Jewish partisans actively resisting the Nazis as well as protecting other escapees, and, in some instances, working with non-Jewish partisan groups to fight against the German invaders.[8]

Jewish refugees arriving in London from Nazi Germany and Poland in February 1939

The largest group of survivors were the Jews who managed to escape from German-occupied Europe before or during the war. Jews had begun emigrating from Germany in 1933 once the Nazis came to power, and from Austria from 1938, after the Anschluss. By the time war began in Europe, approximately 282,000 Jews had left Germany and 117,000 had left Austria.[19]

Only 10% of Polish Jews survived the war.[18] The majority of survivors (around 300,000) were those who fled to Soviet-occupied Poland and the interior of the Soviet Union between the start of the war in September 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.[18][17] The Soviet authorities deported tens of thousands of them to Soviet Central Asia, Siberia and other remote parts to the country.[17] Some deportees endured forced labor, extreme conditions, hunger and disease. Nonetheless, most managed to survive, despite the harsh circumstances.[6][7]

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, more than a million Soviet Jews fled eastward into the interior. During the war, some European 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. About 18,000 Jews escaped by means of clandestine immigration to Palestine from central and eastern Europe between 1937 and 1944 on 62 voyages organized by the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet (Organization for Illegal Immigration), which was established by the Jewish leadership in Palestine in 1938. These voyages were conducted under dangerous conditions during the war, with hundreds of lives lost at sea.[8][17][20]

U.S. Army surgeon attends to a survivor in a sub-camp of Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after liberation.

A survivor, reduced by starvation to a living skeleton, photographed after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British

For survivors, the end of the war did not bring an end to their suffering. 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. In some places, the Nazis had tried to destroy all evidence of the camps to conceal the crimes that they had perpetrated there. In other places, the Allies found only empty buildings, as the Nazis had already moved the prisoners, often on death marches, to other locations. However, in many camps, the Allied soldiers found hundreds or even thousands of weak and starving survivors. Soviet forces reached Majdanek concentration camp in July 1944 and soon came across many other sites but often did not publicize what they had found; British and American units on the Western front did not reach the concentration camps in Germany until the spring of 1945.[9][23]

When Allied troops entered the death camps, they discovered thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors suffering from starvation and disease, living in the most terrible conditions, many of them dying, along with piles of corpses, bones, and the human ashes of the victims of the Nazi mass murder. The liberators were unprepared for what they found but did their best to help the survivors. Despite this, thousands died in the first weeks after liberation. Many died from disease. Some died from refeeding syndrome since after prolonged starvation their stomachs and bodies could not take normal food. Survivors also had no possessions. At first, they still had to wear their concentration camp uniforms as they had no other clothes to wear.[9][24]

During the first weeks of liberation, survivors faced the challenges of eating suitable food, in appropriate amounts for their physical conditions; recuperating from illnesses, injuries and extreme fatigue and rebuilding their health; and regaining some sense of mental and social normality. 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.[21][25]

As survivors faced the daunting challenges of rebuilding their broken lives and finding any remaining family members, the vast majority also found that they needed to find new places to live. Returning to life as it had been before the Holocaust proved to be impossible. At first, following liberation, numerous 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. 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. Most did not find any surviving relatives, encountered indifference from the local population almost everywhere, and, in eastern Europe in particular, were met with hostility and sometimes violence.[21][26][27]

A group of orphaned survivors of the Holocaust, at the Atlit detainee camp, Palestine in 1944

Jewish survivors who could not or did not want to go back to their old homes, particularly those whose entire families had been murdered, whose homes, or neighborhoods or entire communities had been destroyed, or who faced renewed antisemitic violence, became known by the term "Sh'erit ha-Pletah" (Hebrew: the surviving remnant). Most of the survivors comprising the group known as Sh'erit ha-Pletah originated in central and eastern European countries, while most of those from western European countries returned to them and rehabilitated their lives there.[21]

Most of these refugees gathered in displaced persons camps in the British, French and American occupation zones of Germany, and in Austria and Italy. The conditions in these camps were harsh and primitive at first, but once basic survival needs were being met, the refugees organized representatives on a camp-by-camp basis, and then a coordinating organization for the various camps, to present their needs and requests to the authorities, supervise cultural and educational activities in the camps, and advocate that they be allowed to leave Europe and immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine or other countries.[22]

The first meeting of representatives of survivors in the DP camps took place a few weeks after the end of the war, on 27 May 1945, at the St. Ottilien camp, where they formed and named the organization "Sh'erit ha-Pletah" to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. 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.[22][28]

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. In historical research, this term is used for Jews in Europe and North Africa in the five years or so after World War II.

After the end of World War II, most non-Jews who had been displaced by the Nazis returned to their homes and communities. For Jews, however, tens of thousands had no homes, families or communities to which they could return. Furthermore, having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, many wanted to leave Europe entirely and restore their lives elsewhere where they would encounter less antisemitism. Other Jews who attempted to return to their previous residences were forced to leave again upon finding their homes and property stolen by their former neighbors and, particularly in central and eastern Europe, after being met with hostility and violence.[21][26][27][29][30]

Since they had nowhere else to go, about 50,000 homeless Holocaust survivors gathered in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Emigration to the Mandatory Palestine was still strictly limited by the British government and emigration to other countries such as the United States was also severely restricted. The first groups of survivors in the DP camps were joined by Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe, fleeing to the British and American occupation zones in Germany as post-war conditions worsened in the east. By 1946, an estimated 250,000 displaced Jewish survivors – about 185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy – were housed in hundreds of refugee centers and DP camps administered by the militaries of the United States, Great Britain and France, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).[24][21][22][29]

Survivors initially endured dreadful conditions in the DP camps. The camp facilities were very poor, and many survivors were suffering from severe physical and psychological problems. Aid from the outside was slow at first to reach the survivors. Furthermore, 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. Within a few months, following the visit and report of President Roosevelt's representative, Earl G. Harrison, the United States authorities recognized the need to set up separate DP camps for Jewish survivors and improve the living conditions in the DP camps. The British military administration, however, were much slower to act, fearing that recognizing the unique situation of the Jewish survivors might somehow be perceived as endorsing their calls to emigrate to Palestine and further antagonizing the Arabs there. Thus, the Jewish refugees tended to gather in the DP camps in the American zone.[9][30][31][32][33]

The DP camps were created as temporary centers for facilitating the resettlement of the homeless Jewish refugees and to take care of immediate humanitarian needs, but they also became temporary communities where survivors began to rebuild their lives. With assistance sent from Jewish relief organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in the United States and the Jewish Relief Unit in Britain, hospitals were opened, along with schools, especially in several of the camps where there were large numbers of children and orphans, and the survivors resumed cultural activities and religious practices. Many of their efforts were in preparations for emigration from Europe to new and productive lives elsewhere. They established committees to represent their issues to the Allied authorities and to a wider audience, under the Hebrew name, Sh'erit ha-Pletah, an organization which existed until the early 1950s. Political life rejuvenated and a leading role was taken by the Zionist movement, with most of the Jewish DPs declaring their intention of moving to a Jewish state in Palestine.[7][21][29][30][34]

The slow and erratic handling of the issues regarding Jewish DPs and refugees, and the substantial increase of people in the DP camps in 1946 and 1947, gained international attention; public opinion resulted in increased political pressure to lift restriction on immigration to countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, as well as on the British authorities to stop detaining refugees who were attempting to leave Europe for Palestine, and imprisoning them in internment camps on Cyprus or returning them to Europe. Britain's treatment of Jewish refugees, such as the handling of the refugee ship Exodus, shocked public opinion around the world and added to international demands to establish an independent state for the Jewish people. This led Britain to refer the matter to the United Nations which voted in 1947 to create a Jewish and an Arab state. Thus, when the British Mandate in Palestine ended in May 1948, the State of Israel was established, and Jewish refugee ships were immediately allowed unrestricted entry. 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.[21][22][27]

The opening of Israel's borders after its independence, as well as the adoption of more lenient emigration regulations in Western countries regarding survivors led to the closure of most of the DP camps by 1952. Föhrenwald, the last functioning DP camp, closed in 1957. About 136,000 Displaced Person camp inhabitants, more than half the total, immigrated to Israel; some 80,000 emigrated to the United States, and the remainder emigrated to other countries, including Canada, Australia, South Africa, Mexico and Argentina.[34][35]

As soon as the war ended, survivors began looking for family members, and for most, this was their main goal once their basic needs of finding food, clothing and shelter had been met.[26]

Local Jewish committees in Europe tried to register the living and account for the dead. Parents sought the children they had hidden in convents, orphanages or with foster families. Other survivors returned to their original homes to look for relatives or gather news and information about them, hoping for a reunion or at least the certainty of knowing if a loved one had perished. The International Red Cross and Jewish relief organizations set up tracing services to support these searches, but inquiries often took a long time because of the difficulties in communications, and the displacement of millions of people by the conflict, the Nazi policies of deportation and destruction, and the mass relocations of populations in central and eastern Europe.[26][36][35]

Location services were set up by organizations such as the World Jewish Congress, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This resulted in the successful reunification of survivors, sometimes decades after their separation during the war. 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.[37] However, the process of searching for and finding lost relatives sometimes took years and, for many survivors, continued until their end of their lives. In many cases, survivors searched all their lives for family members, without learning of their fates.[38][39][40][41]

In Israel, to where many Holocaust survivors immigrated, some relatives reunited after encountering each other by chance. Many survivors also found relatives from whom they had been separated through notices for missing relatives posted in newspapers and a radio program dedicated to reuniting families called Who Recognizes, Who Knows?[42]

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. Others published notices in DP camp and survivor organization newsletters, and in newspapers, in the hopes of reconnecting with relatives who had found refuge in other places. Some survivors contacted the Red Cross and other organizations that produced lists of survivors, such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which established a Central Tracing Bureau to help survivors locate relatives who had survived the concentration camps.[26][35]

Various lists were collated into larger booklets and publications, which were more permanent than the original notes or newspaper notices. One such early compilation, "Sharit Ha-Platah" (Surviving Remnant), was published in 1946 in several volumes with the names of tens of thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust, 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.[43][44]

The first "Register of Jewish Survivors" (Pinkas HaNitzolim I) was published by the Jewish Agency's Search Bureau for Missing Relatives in 1945, containing over 61,000 names compiled from 166 different lists of Jewish survivors in various European countries. 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.[45][46]

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. Thus, for example, the German-Jewish newspaper "Aufbau", published in New York City, printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe, from September 1944 until 1946.[47]

Over time, many Holocaust survivor registries were established. Initially these were paper records, but from the 1990s, an increasing number of the records have been digitized and made available online.[48]

Following the war, Jewish parents often spent months and years searching for the children they had sent into hiding. In fortunate cases, they found their children were still with the original rescuer. Many, however, had to resort to notices in newspapers, tracing services, and survivor registries in the hope of finding their children. These searches frequently ended in heartbreak – parents discovered that their child had been killed or had gone missing and could not be found. For hidden children, thousands who had been concealed with non-Jews were now orphans and no surviving family members remained alive to retrieve them.[36][30]

For children who had been hidden to escape the Nazis, more was often at stake than simply finding or being found by relatives. Those who had been very young when they were placed into hiding did not remember their biological parents or their Jewish origins and the only family that they had known was that of their rescuers. When they were found by relatives or Jewish organizations, they were usually afraid, and resistant to leave the only caregivers they remembered. Many had to struggle to rediscover their real identities.[36][49]

In some instances, rescuers refused to give up hidden children, particularly in cases where they were orphans, did not remember their identities, or had been baptized and sheltered in Christian institutions. Jewish organizations and relatives had to struggle to recover these children, including custody battles in the courts. For example, the Finaly Affair only ended in 1953, when the two young Finaly brothers, orphaned survivors in the custody of the Catholic Church in Grenoble, France, were handed over to the guardianship of their aunt, after intensive efforts to secure their return to their family.[50][51]

In the twenty first century, the development of DNA testing for genealogical purposes has sometimes provided essential information to people trying to find relatives from whom they were separated during the Holocaust, or to recover their Jewish identity, especially Jewish children who were hidden or adopted by non-Jewish families during the war.[52][53]

Young Holocaust survivors aboard the refugee ship Mataroa arrive in Haifa port, July 1945

After the war, anti-Jewish violence occurred in several central and Eastern European countries, motivated to varying extents by economic antagonism, increased by alarm that returning survivors would try to reclaim their stolen houses and property, as well as age-old antisemitic myths, most notably the blood libel. The largest anti-Jewish pogrom occurred in July 1946 in Kielce, a city in southeastern Poland, when rioters killed 41 people and wounded 50 more. 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. Most survivors sought to leave Europe and build new lives elsewhere.[27][54][55][56]

Thus, about 50,000 survivors gathered in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy and were joined by Jewish refugees fleeing from central and eastern Europe, particularly Poland, as post-war conditions there worsened. 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. As the British Mandate in Palestine ended in May 1948 and the State of Israel was established, nearly two-thirds of the survivors immigrated there. Others went to Western countries as restrictions were eased and opportunities for them to emigrate arose.[21][22]

Holocaust survivors suffered from the war years and afterwards in many different ways, physically, mentally and emotionally.[57]

Most survivors were deeply traumatized both physically and mentally and some of the effects lasted throughout their lives. This was expressed, among other ways, in the emotional and mental trauma of feeling that they were on a "different planet" that they could not share with others; that they had not or could not process the mourning for their murdered loved ones because at the time they were consumed with the effort required for survival; and many experienced guilt that they had survived when others had not. This dreadful period engulfed some survivors with both physical and mental scars, which were subsequently characterized by researchers as "concentration camp syndrome" (also known as survivor syndrome).

Nonetheless, many survivors drew on inner strength and learned to cope, restored their lives, moved to a new place, started a family and developed successful careers.[58]

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. However, many survivors felt that they could not describe their experiences to those who had not lived through the Holocaust. Those who were able to record testimony about their experiences or publish their memoirs did so in Yiddish.[1][59]

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.[59]

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.[62] By the end of the twentieth century, Holocaust memoirs had been written by Jews not only in Yiddish, but also other languages including Hebrew, English, French, Italian, Polish and Russian. They were written by concentration/death camp survivors, and also those who had been in hiding, or who had managed to flee from Nazi-held territories before or during the war, and sometimes they also described events after the Holocaust, including the liberation and rebuilding of lives in the aftermath of destruction.[59]

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, 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 experience.[1][59] While historians and survivors themselves are aware that the retelling of experiences is subjective to the source of information and sharpness of memory, they are recognized as collectively having "a firm core of shared memory" and the main substance of the accounts does not negate minor contradictions and inaccuracies in some of the details.[64][65]

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. The first of these books appeared in the 1940s and almost all were typically published privately rather than by publishing companies. Over 1,000 books of this type are estimated to have been published, albeit in very limited quantities.[60][61][66]

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. The first Yizkor books were published in the United States, mainly in Yiddish, the mother tongue of the landsmanschaften and Holocaust survivors. Beginning in the 1950s, after the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors to the newly independent State of Israel, most of the Yizkor books were published there, primarily between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. From the later 1970s, there was a decline in the number of collective memorial books but an increase in the number of survivors' personal memoirs. 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.[61]

Since the 1990s, many of these books, or sections of them have been translated into English, digitized, and made available online.[67][68]

In the immediate post-war period, officials of the DP camps and organizations providing relief to the survivors conducted interviews with survivors primarily for the purposes of providing physical assistance and assisting with relocation. Interviews were also conducted for the purpose of gathering evidence about war crimes and for the historical record.[69] These were among the first of the recorded testimonies of the survivors Holocaust experiences.

Some of the first projects to collect witness testimonies began in the DP camps, amongst the survivors themselves. Camp papers like Undzer Shtimme ("Our Voice"), published in Hohne Camp (Bergen-Belsen), and Undzer Hofenung ("Our Hope"), published in Eschwege camp, (Kassel) carried the first eyewitness accounts of Jewish experiences under Nazi rule, and one of the first publications on the Holocaust, Fuhn Letsn Khurbn, ("About the Recent Destruction"), was produced by DP camp members, and was eventually distributed around world.[7][30]

In the following decades, a concerted effort was made to record the memories and testimonials of survivors for posterity. French Jews were amongst the first to establish an institute devoted to documentation of the Holocaust at the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.[30] In Israel, the Yad Vashem memorial was officially established in 1953; the organization had already begun projects including acquiring Holocaust documentation and personal testimonies of survivors for its archives and library.[70][71]

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 Schindler’s List. Originally named the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, it became a part of the University of Southern California in 2006. The foundation’s mission was to videotape the personal accounts of 50,000 Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, a goal which it achieved in 1999 and then surpassed.[72]

In 2002, a collection of Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivor testimonies opened at the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, Germany.[72]

In 1981, around 6,000 Holocaust survivors gathered in Jerusalem for the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.[73][74]

In 1988, the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, was established to as an umbrella organization of 28 Holocaust survivor groups in Israel to advocate for survivors' rights and welfare worldwide and to the Government of Israel, and to commemorate the Holocaust and revival of the Jewish people. In 2010 it was recognized by the government as the representative organization for the entire survivor population in Israel. In 2020, it represented 55 organizations and a survivor population whose average age was 84.[75]

A Jewish Brigade soldier and nurses of the Jewish Agency taking care of Jewish refugee children in Florence, Italy, 1944

Child survivors of the Holocaust were often the only ones who remained alive from their entire extended families, while even more were orphans. This group of survivors included children who had survived in the concentration/death camps, in hiding with non-Jewish families or in Christian institutions, or had been sent out of harm's way by their parents on Kindertransports, or by escaping with their families to remote locations in the Soviet Union, or Shanghai in China. After the war, child survivors were sometimes sent to be cared for by distant relatives in other parts of the world, sometimes accepted unwillingly, and mistreated or even abused. Their experiences, memories and understanding of the terrible events they had suffered as child victims of the Nazis and their accomplices was given little consideration.[76]

In the 1970s and 80s, small groups of these survivors, now adults, began to form in a number of communities worldwide to deal with their painful pasts in safe and understanding environments. The First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors took place in 1979 under the auspices of Zachor, the Holocaust Resource Center. The conference and was attended by some 500 survivors, survivors’ children and mental health professionals and established a network for children of survivors of the Holocaust in the United States and Canada.[77]

The International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors held its first international conference in New York City in 1984, attended by more than 1,700 children of survivors of the Holocaust with the stated purpose of creating greater understanding of the Holocaust and its impact on the contemporary world and establishing contacts among the children of survivors in the United States and Canada.[78]

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. The organization began holding annual conference in cities the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. Descendants of survivors were also recognized as having been deeply affected by their families’ histories. In addition to the annual conferences to build community among child survivors and their descendants, members speak about their histories of survival and loss, of resilience, of the heroism of Jewish resistance and self-help for other Jews, and of the Righteous Among the Nations, at schools, public and community events; they participate in Holocaust Remembrance ceremonies and projects; and campaign against antisemitism and bigotry.[76]

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