Survivors of the Holocaust lived through an attempted racial annihilation of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. While there is no single official definition, the term generally includes Jews who lived under Axis rule, those who fled to neutral or Allied nations, and sometimes non-Jewish groups—like the Roma—who faced similar systematic persecution. Over time, the definition has expanded to be more inclusive of various experiences of displacement and survival.
Most Holocaust survivors live in Israel and the United States as well as other minorities in France, United Kingdom, Canada and Eastern Europe.
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 had 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.
At the end of the war, the immediate issues faced by Holocaust survivors were physical and emotional recovery from the starvation, abuse, and suffering that they had experienced; the need to search for their relatives and reunite with them if any of them were still alive; rebuild their lives by returning to their former homes, or more often, by immigrating to new and safer locations because their homes and communities had been destroyed or because they were endangered by renewed acts of antisemitic violence, which until this day can still be felt in many European countries.
After the initial and immediate needs of Holocaust survivors were addressed, additional issues came to the forefront. Examples of such included social welfare and psychological care, reparations and restitution for the persecution, slave labor and property losses which they had suffered, the restoration of looted books, works of art and other stolen property to their rightful owners, the collection of witness and survivor testimonies, the memorialization of murdered family members and destroyed communities, and care for disabled and aging survivors, to name just a few.
Definition
The term "Holocaust survivor" applies to people who lived through the mass exterminations which were carried out by the Nazis. However, the term can also be applied to those who did not come under the direct control of the Nazi regime in Germany or occupied Europe, but were substantially affected by it, such as Jews who fled Germany or their homelands in order to escape the Nazis, and never lived in a Nazi-controlled country after Adolf Hitler came to power but lived in it before the Nazis put the "Final Solution" into effect, or others who were not persecuted by the Nazis themselves, but were persecuted by their allies or collaborators both in Nazi satellite countries and occupied countries.
Yad Vashem, the State of Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, defines Holocaust survivors as Jews who lived under Nazi control, whether it was direct or indirect, for any amount of time, and survived it. This definition includes Jews who spent the entire war living under Nazi collaborationist regimes, including France, Bulgaria and Romania, but were not deported, as well as Jews who fled or were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s. Additionally, other Jewish refugees are considered Holocaust survivors, including those who fled their home countries in Eastern Europe to evade the invading German army and spent years living in the Soviet Union.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a broader definition of Holocaust survivors: "The Museum honors any persons as survivors, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who lived as refugees or people who lived in hiding."
In the later years of the twentieth century, as public awareness of the Holocaust evolved, other groups who had previously been overlooked or marginalized as survivors began to share their testimonies with memorial projects and seek restitution for their experiences. One such group consisted of Sinti (Gypsy) survivors of Nazi persecution who went on a hunger strike at Dachau, Germany, in 1980 in order to draw attention to their situation and demand moral rehabilitation for their suffering during the Holocaust, and West Germany formally recognized the genocide of the Roma in 1982. Another group that has been defined as Holocaust survivors consists of "flight survivors", that is, refugees who fled eastward into Soviet-controlled areas from the start of the war, or people who were deported to various parts of the Soviet Union by the NKVD.
The growing awareness of additional categories of survivors has prompted a broadening of the definition of Holocaust survivors by institutions such as the Claims Conference, Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum so it can include flight survivors and others who were previously excluded from restitution and recognition, such as those who lived in hiding during the war, including children who were hidden in order to protect them from the Nazis.
Numbers of survivors At the start of World War II in September 1939, about 9.5 million Jews lived in the European countries that were either already under the control of Nazi Germany or would be invaded or conquered, either willingly or by force during the war.William W. Hagen. Before the "Final Solution": Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Antisemitism in Interwar Germany and Poland. Journal of Modern History July 1996: 1–31. Over two-thirds of these European Jews, or around 6 million people, were murdered by Germany and Romania, including over 600,000 Jewish children born during the war, so that by the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, about 3.5 million of them had survived. As of January 2026, about 196,600 survivors were alive.
Those who managed to stay alive until the end of the war and massacre, under varying circumstances, comprise the following:
Concentration camp prisoners 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.
Other survivors 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 before the Final Solution could be carried out. Thus, for example, in Western Europe, around three-quarters of the pre-war Jewish population survived the Holocausts in France and Italy, about half survived in Belgium, while only a quarter of the pre-war Jewish population survived in the Netherlands.For Italy, "Italy". Yad Vashem. For France, "France". Yad Vashem. For Belgium, "Belgium". Yad Vashem. For Netherlands, "The Netherlands". Yad Vashem. Around a third of Austrian Jews and 70% of German Jews who did not flee those countries by 1939 were killed. In eastern and south-eastern Europe, most of Bulgaria's Jews survived the war,"Bulgaria". Yad Vashem. as well as 60% of Jews in Romania"Romania". Yad Vashem. and nearly 30% of the Jewish population in Hungary."Hungary". Yad Vashem. Two-thirds survived in the Soviet Union."Unter der NS-Herrschaft ermordete Juden nach Land." / "Jews by country murdered under Nazi rule." Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung / Federal Agency for Civic Education (Germany), April 29th 2018 Bohemia, Slovakia and Yugoslavia lost about 80% of their Jewish populations. In Poland, the Baltic states and Greece close to 90% of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.
Throughout Europe, a few thousand Jews also survived in hiding, or with false papers posing as Aryans, 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.
Refugees
The largest group of survivors consisted of 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.
Only 10 percent of Polish Jews survived the war. 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. The Soviet authorities deported tens of thousands of them to Soviet Central Asia, Siberia and other remote parts of the country. Some deportees endured forced labor, extreme conditions, hunger and disease. Nonetheless, most managed to survive, despite the harsh circumstances.
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 neutral 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 British Palestine (formally, 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 British Palestine in 1938. These voyages were conducted under dangerous conditions during the war, with hundreds of lives lost at sea) .
Immediate aftermath
When the Second World War ended, the Jews who had survived the Nazi concentration camps, extermination camps, death marches, as well as the Jews who had survived by hiding in forests or hiding with rescuers, were almost all suffering from starvation, exhaustion and the abuse which they had endured, and tens of thousands of survivors continued to die from weakness, eating more than their emaciated bodies could handle, epidemic diseases, exhaustion and the shock of liberation. Some survivors returned to their countries of origin while others sought to leave Europe by immigrating to British Palestine or other countries.
Trauma of liberation
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.