The Holocaust had a deep effect on society both in Europe and the rest of the world, and today its consequences are still being felt, both by children and adults whose ancestors were victims of this genocide.
Evidence in Germany
German society largely responded to the enormity of the evidence for and the horror of the Holocaust with an attitude of self-justification and a practice of keeping quiet. Germans attempted to rewrite their own history to make it more palatable in the post-war era.Margolin, Elaine. "The Post-War West Germans’ Post-Holocaust Distortions." Jewish Journal. 6 February 2014. 9 February 2015. For decades, West Germany and then unified Germany refused to allow access to its Holocaust-related archives in Bad Arolsen, citing privacy concerns. In May 2006, a 20-year effort by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum led to the announcement that 30–50 million pages would be made available to survivors, historians and others.Germany to open Holocaust archives Al-Jazeera 19 April 2006.
Survivors
Displaced persons and the State of Israel
The Holocaust and its aftermath left millions of refugees, including many Jews who had lost most or all of their family members and possessions, and often faced persistent antisemitism in their home countries. The original plan of the Allies was to repatriate these "displaced persons" to their countries of origin, but many refused to return, or were unable to as their homes or communities had been destroyed. As a result, more than 250,000 languished in displaced persons camps for years after the war ended. Many American-run DP camps had horrific conditions, with inmates living under armed guard, as revealed in the Harrison Report.Report of Earl G. Harrison. As cited in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Resources," Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons, 1945-1951The New York Times, 30 Sept. 1945, "President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews, He Acts on Harrison Report, Which Likens Our Treatment to That of the Nazis,"Robert L. Hilliard, "Surviving the Americans: The Continued Struggle of the Jews After Liberation" (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997) p. 214
With most displaced persons being unable or unwilling to return to their former homes in Europe, and with restrictions to immigration to many western countries remaining in place, the British Mandate of Palestine became the primary destination for many Jewish refugees. However, as local Arabs opposed their immigration, the United Kingdom refused to allow Jewish refugees into the Mandate territory. Countries in the Soviet Bloc made emigration difficult. Former Jewish partisans in Europe, along with the Haganah in British Mandate of Palestine, organized a massive effort to smuggle Jews into Palestine, called Berihah, which eventually transported 250,000 Jews (both displaced persons and those who had been in hiding during the war) to Mandate Palestine. After the State of Israel declared independence in 1948, Jews were able to emigrate to Israel legally and without restriction. By 1952, when the displaced persons camps were closed, there were more than 80,000 Jewish former displaced persons in the United States, about 136,000 in Israel, and another 10,000 in other countries, including Mexico, Japan, and countries in Africa and South America.Displaced Persons from the United States Holocaust Museum.
The Jewish population still remains below pre-Holocaust levels. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, the world Jewish population reached 15.2 million by the end of 2020 – approximately 1.4 million less than on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, when the number was 16.6 million.
Resurgence of antisemitism
The few Jews in Poland were augmented by returnees from the Soviet Union and survivors from camps in Germany. However, a resurgence of antisemitism in Poland, in such incidents as the Kraków pogrom on August 11, 1945, and the Kielce pogrom on July 4, 1946, led to the exodus of a large part of the Jewish population, which no longer felt safe in Poland.Columbia University release Anti-Jewish riots also broke out in several other Polish cities where many Jews were killed.Yad Vashem website
The atrocities were motivated in part by the widespread Polish idea of "Żydokomuna" (Judeo-Communism) which cast Jews as supporters of communism. Żydokomuna was one of the causes that led to an intensification of Polish antisemitism in 1945–48, which some have argued was worse than prior to 1939; hundreds of Jews were killed in anti-Jewish violence. Some Jews were killed for merely attempting to recover their property. As a result of the exodus, the number of Jews in Poland decreased from 200,000 in the years immediately after the war to 50,000 in 1950 and 6,000 by the 1980s.
Lesser post-war pogroms also broke out in Hungary.
Welfare in Israel It was reported in May 2016 that 45,000 Holocaust survivors are living below the poverty line in Israel, and in need of more assistance. Situations like these result in heated and dramatic protests on the part of some survivors against the Israeli government and related agencies. The average rate of cancer among survivors is nearly two and a half times the national average, while the average rate of colon cancer, attributed to the victims' experience of starvation and extreme stress, is nine times higher. , the population of survivors that live in Israel had fallen to 189,000."40% of Holocaust Survivors in Israel Live Below Poverty Line", Haaretz, December 29, 2005."Social Safety Nets" (PDF), In Re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Bank), September 11, 2000.
Searching for records of victims
There has been a recent resurgence of interest among descendants of survivors in researching the fates of their relatives. Yad Vashem provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known Jewish victims. Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names is searchable over the internet yadvashem.org or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in Israel. Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the internet, are listed in Holocaust (resources).
Impact on culture
Effect on the Yiddish language and culture In the decades preceding World War II, there was a tremendous growth in the recognition of Yiddish as an official Jewish European language, and there was even a Yiddish renaissance, particularly in Poland. On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million speakers of Yiddish in the world.Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, . The Holocaust destroyed the Eastern European bedrock of Yiddish, though the language was rapidly declining anyhow. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Jewish public rejected the cultural autonomy which was offered to it by the government and opted for Russification:David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 1918-1930, Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp 13-14. while 70.4% of Soviet Jews declared Yiddish their mother tongue in 1926, only 39.7% did so in 1939. Even in Poland, where harsh discrimination left the Jews as a cohesive ethnic group, Yiddish was rapidly declining in favour of Polonization. 80% of the entire Jewish population declared Yiddish its mother tongue in 1931, but among high school students this number fell to 53% in 1937.David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. pp 84-85. In the United States, the preservation of the language was always a unigenerational phenomenon, and the immigrants' children quickly abandoned it for English.: Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Wayne State University Press, 2015. עמ' 316.
Starting with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, and continuing with the destruction of Yiddish culture in Europe during the remainder of the war, the Yiddish language and culture were almost completely rooted out of Europe. The Holocaust led to a dramatic decline in the use of Yiddish, because the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day lives were largely destroyed. Around five million victims of the Holocaust, or 85% of the total, were speakers of Yiddish.Solomo Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3.
Holocaust theology
Holocaust theology is a body of theological and philosophical debate concerning the role of God in the universe in light of the Holocaust of the late 1930s and 1940s. It is primarily found in Judaism; Jews were drastically affected by the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in a genocide by Nazi Germany and its allies. Jews were murdered in higher proportions than other groups; some scholars limit the definition of the Holocaust to the Jewish victims of the Nazis as Jews alone were targeted for the Final Solution. Others include the additional five million non-Jewish victims, bringing the total to about 11 million. One third of the total worldwide Jewish population was murdered during the Holocaust. The Eastern European Jewish population was particularly hard hit, being reduced by ninety percent.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have traditionally taught that God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all-good) in nature. However, these views are in apparent contrast with the injustice and suffering in the world. Monotheists seek to reconcile this view of God with the existence of evil and suffering. In so doing, they are confronting what is known as the problem of evil.
Within all of the monotheistic faiths many answers (theodicies) have been proposed. In light of the magnitude of depravity seen in the Holocaust, many people have also re-examined classical views on this subject. A common question raised in Holocaust theology is "How can people still have any kind of faith after the Holocaust?"
Orthodox Jews have stated that the fact that the Holocaust happened does not diminish the belief in God. For a creation will never be able to fully grasp the creator, just as a child in an operating theater can not fathom why people are cutting up a live person's body. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe once told Elie Wiesel, after witnessing the Holocaust and realizing how low human beings can stoop, who can we trust, if not God? Nevertheless, Orthodox Judaism does encourage us to pray and cry out to God, and complain to him how he lets bad things happen.
Art and literature Theodor Adorno commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," and the Holocaust has indeed had a profound impact on art and literature, for both Jews and non-Jews. Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl and Anne Frank, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. Indeed, Paul Celan wrote his poem "Todesfuge" as a direct response to Adorno's dictum.
The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including Oscar winners Schindler's List, The Pianist and Life Is Beautiful. With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. The result has included extensive efforts to document their stories, including the Survivors of the Shoah project and Four Seasons Documentary, as well as institutions devoted to memorializing and studying the Holocaust, including Yad Vashem in Israel and the US Holocaust Museum. The historic tale of the Danish Jews fleeing to Sweden by fishing boat is recounted in an award-winning American children's novel.
Pre-1945 European art