Almost 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries, a new report revealed Tuesday.
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, 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 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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.”
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.
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.”
It has also launched several educational projects that illustrate the importance of passing on the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies to younger generations as their numbers become smaller and antisemitism is on the rise again.
But in the 1990s, she was one day approached 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 school class.
“When I started talking about the Holocaust for the first time, in front of those students, I couldn’t stop crying,” Winkelmann told The Associated Press last week.
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