The Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published on Tuesday what is believed to be the first comprehensive and verified estimate of the size of this population, where they live and what their needs are. Known as the Claims Conference, it is an organization that works to secure the payment of reparations from the German and Austrian governments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi government in Germany, which was in power between 1933 and 1945, equivalent to two-thirds of Europe's pre-1933 Jewish population. The Nazis also persecuted and massacred Roma people, other minorities, and political enemies on a smaller scale during this period. time.
Today, the world's Jewish population is estimated at approximately 15 million. According to the Claims Conference report, survivors alive today are spread across more than 90 countries. Nearly half of them live in Israel. The United States, France, and Russia host the next largest group of survivors.
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Distribution of Holocaust survivors by country
Residency (2023). In percentage.
Note: The map excludes countries with less than 0.1% of
Holocaust survivors.
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Distribution of Holocaust survivors by country of residence (2023). In percentage.
Note: The map excludes countries with less than 0.1% of Holocaust survivors.
sSource: ConnFHsConcerning Jewish material claims against Germanyny (Claims ConFHsAnd therefore)
Most survivors alive today were children during the Holocaust: 75% of them were between the ages of 3 and 12 in 1945, when World War II ended. Today, the average age of this group is 86 years. More than 60% of them are women.
“The data forces us to accept that Holocaust survivors will not be with us forever,” Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said in a news release. “We have already lost most of the survivors.”
Rudiger Mahlo, representative of the Claims Conference in Europe, said it was important to look not only at the statistics revealed in the report, but also “the people behind them”.
“All of these people were condemned to death,” Mahlo said. “It is our responsibility to take care of them until the end of their lives.”
Holocaust survivors by country of residence
sSource: ConnFHsImpact on Jewish material claims against
heatny (Claims ConFHsAnd therefore)
Samuel Granados/The Washington Post
Holocaust survivors by country of residence
sSource: ConnFHsConcerning Jewish material claims against Germanyny (Claims ConFHsAnd therefore)
Samuel Granados/The Washington Post
When survivors die, a living part of history dies with them. Leon Weintraub, 98, a living Jewish survivor, said it is more important than ever to share and preserve the lessons of that history in the face of Holocaust denial and growing nationalist sentiment across Europe. He added that although there was evidence of Nazi crimes, “there are still those who deny that it happened.”
Weintraub was 13 years old when the Nazis forced him and his family to leave their home in Lodz, Poland, and move to the ghetto, where he learned to work as an electrician. The family was then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where more than a million people were killed, most of them in gas chambers. Weintraub's mother and aunt were among them. He said he still remembers “the smell of burning flesh around the clock” and the “thick black” smoke coming from the chimneys.
Weintraub managed to escape Auschwitz by integrating himself with a group of prisoners who were sent to work in a different concentration camp. He was forcibly transferred to two other camps before Allied forces liberated him in April 1945. With his body weight reduced to about 77 pounds, and sick with typhoid fever, Weintraub ended up in a hospital in Germany. He added that out of 80 members of his family, only 16 people survived.
After the war, Weintraub practiced as an obstetrician-gynecologist in Poland and Sweden. Since the 1980s, he has shared his story publicly to raise awareness about the horrors of the Holocaust and help ensure it never happens again. “It starts out very innocent, just: 'I don't like these people,'” he said. “And then it becomes hatred,” he said, “and you end up in the gas chamber.”
Before publishing its demographic report, the Claims Conference collected data on Holocaust survivors who received regular compensation payments or were eligible for services administered by organizations working with the Claims Conference. But it did not have updated information on the thousands of survivors who received one-time payments at some point during the past four decades, including whether they were still alive.
That changed in 2021, when the Claims Conference negotiated with the German government for supplemental payments for some eligible Holocaust survivors. In order to disburse these annual payments, which are designed to last until 2027, the organization reached out to more than 200,000 survivors, according to the report.
The estimate of 245,000 Holocaust survivors alive today does not include survivors who never applied to receive compensation payments or never contacted a claims conference.
The needs of Holocaust survivors are They change as they get older, Mahlo said. After the Claims Conference was first established in 1951, Mahlo said most survivors who contacted the organization wanted to know if they were eligible for any compensation for what happened to them. As they got older, “it evolved into: Can I get home care?”
These days, Mahlo said, they tend to ask more existential questions, such as: “Who will remember when I'm not here anymore?” Who will remember the fate of my family, and what happened during the Holocaust? [the Holocaust]? Who will remember… the way we remember her?”
