essays of holocaust survivors

• Nieman Foundation
• Fellowships

To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

Nieman News

Back to News

Strictly Q&A

February 24, 2023, auschwitz stories told by those who lived them, the director of the auschwitz-birkenau state museum in poland has collected hundreds of survivor testimonials, told with a rawness that no outsider could.

By Andrea Pitzer

Tagged with

The gate into the Auschwitz concentration camp in WWII Nazi-occupied Poland. Translated, the words say "Work sets you free." Frederick Wallace via Unsplash

Piotr Cywiński

“ Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human ,” a 2022 book by Piotr Cywiński, tries to address that abyss. He does so not by working his way along the boundaries around Auschwitz — the dates and architecture of genocide that swallowed more than a million people , the overwhelming majority of them Jewish — but instead dives into the emptiness itself, gathering details from hundreds of memoirs and official testimonies, along with trial minutes and questionnaires. Chronology doesn’t serve as the organizing principle; instead, the book is divided into themes of human emotion and experience, such as “Decency,” “Hierarchy,” and “Fear” that emerged from looking at the survivors’ accounts as a whole.

Cywiński is a historian and has been the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland for more than 16 years. His polyphonic approach of bringing in hundreds of voices to tell one overarching story struck me as an answer to the question of how to write about something as vast as incomprehensible as Auschwitz.

This focus made me think of Pulitzer winner Katherine Boo who, in talking about her book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” balked at the idea of the journalistic impulse to make an individual a symbol of a place or an event. In a 2012 interview Poynter.org, she warned of the    dangers of using one person’s story to represent a bigger concept:

“Nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they’re still people. Making them representative loses sight of that.”

Cywiński’s Auschwitz monograph illustrates this idea elegantly, gathering related observations with care then ceding nearly all his book to camp prisoners themselves, letting their archival testimonies converse with one another, with minimal interpretation and explanation.

Last December, more than 80 years after Nazis first sent prisoners to the small town of Oświęcim in Poland, Cywiński sat for a public interview with me at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. We spoke about why some stories went untold for decades, why understanding life at Auschwitz remains almost impossible and why it’s important to include a multitude of perspectives to even begin to glimpse the real story of Auschwitz.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation, which have been condensed and edited for clarity:

Train tracks that lead from the entry to the Birkenau concentration camp to the gas chambers. Birkenauwas an extension of the Auschwitz camp in WWII Nazi-occupied Poland. Andrea Pitzer

Y ou mention several times in the book the experience of prisoners entering a different world on arrival at Auschwitz. This is extremely important, and I think that this was maybe the main reason why so many survivors started to speak about Auschwitz so late. And still, 95 percent of survivors didn’t speak, didn’t give testimonials, didn’t write any memoirs. I think that they were afraid that using words from our normal world would never give the sense of the reality of the camp.

When I’m hungry, it doesn’t mean the same as when you are hungry in the camp. It’s completely different, and it’s like this with many other emotions, because they are at an extreme that we can’t imagine in our world. You’re put in a situation when the most important factors, like space and time, are completely different. You don’t know how long you will survive.  When you’re speaking about hope, it means some plans for the future, but in the camp it means to survive for the next five or ten minutes. And at every moment, somebody is dying around you. That means you will also die, perhaps in a few minutes or in one hour. It’s a completely different kind of time than we experience in normal life.

At the beginning, I was thinking that I would speak about death at the end of the book. This was an error. In Auschwitz death did not happen at the end; it was present at all times and everywhere.

One of the essays in the collection is on death. There’s a quote from a survivor: “not only is life and human dignity violated here but human death counts for nothing.” For us, death is so tragic. It’s a big mystery. We will arrive all of us at one moment to face our death, but it’s something that we consider with a religious or para-religious approach, with a philosophical approach, even if we if we don’t want to organize our lives according to this destination.

In the camp death was everywhere and could arrive at every moment. Maybe the only thing that they were sure of was death. It’s also completely different when it’s an inverse point to our way of thinking about death. If I ask what you’re sure about in the immediate future, you would tell me about how you will go back home and get dinner or do something with your family. But nobody would be thinking about death as something that we can be sure of happening in the present moment.

One quote from another testimony says: “Among the Auschwitz prisoners who wrote their memoirs none of them claims the camp ennobled people.” Yet it’s woven into a lot of fabric of society before and after Auschwitz that suffering brings a kind of nobility, that there is something inherent in suffering that makes us pure or better. I think it’s important that is not what’s reflected in most of these testimonies. Yes, this perspective is present in very few testimonies. What we consider as a moral system in our society was completely different when it was recreated inside the camp. I think it was also a factor in the incapacity to speak about Auschwitz for many survivors because they begin to justify themselves, and they don’t want to justify themselves. They knew that their choices inside the camp — daily choices, I do not speak about dramatic choices — the daily choices were how to survive, to have one or two or three or days more to stay alive.

The position where you stand at the queue in order to have your soup: If you go at the starting point of the distribution of the soup, you will receive only water; if you go at the end, you’ll be beaten by some very well-positioned prisoners, some kapo or some people from the blocks, because they know that at the end, there will be some potatoes. So you have to find your own position, not too quickly and not too late. But that means you will take this place from some other prisoner. And with every choice you made, that means somebody else did not get this choice.

You also address the Sonderkommando — these people who were drafted into being active participants in the murder of other prisoners at Auschwitz. It’s perhaps the most tragic history in the camp, the story of the Sonderkommando . They were in general young men taken from different transports and put to work around the gas chambers and the crematoria. They had to burn corpses, to make all this machinery function. A clear majority were Jews, and many of them were coming from Jewish Orthodox families, and cremation of course was something they couldn’t have imagined. For decades after the war, they were considered maybe not as perpetrators but as collaborators of perpetrators, except two or three, like Shlomo Venezia or Filip Müller . Many of them stayed silent for years.

We are all very proud of our culture, our education and our sense of values. We feel really prepared to confront difficulties. Those people also, certainly they were thinking like this. But a few days were enough to change a person arriving from a normal world to a person completely acting according to the camp rules, thinking in a different way, approaching other humans in a different way, considering himself as a completely different person.

Another example of a theme that we in our world might think of quite differently than the voices we hear in the book is this idea of sacrifice. I want to speak specifically about Father Kolbe , because many people have heard about this story, and he was canonized later for switching places with a condemned person. Here’s what one of the survivors said about him: “I must stress that what impressed us was not that he gave up his life for someone else, for life wasn’t worth much in the camp. We were impressed that in front of so many SS men and prisoner functionaries, he had broken discipline and dared to step out of rank.” It’s quite different than what we might think. I heard many words like this. “If you give your life for another, that does not mean you give your life. You give your last few days or a few weeks, it’s not something exceptional. But breaking the rules, it is something, yes.”

And there were, of course, different levels of sacrifice. You can share, for example, your bread. So you have some bread. Your kid or your friend for some reason has no more bread, and maybe he’s in deeper need. You can give him the half of your bread; it seems nothing. But what was the remark of the prisoners?  “Oh, look at him he’s starting to share his bread. He has no will to survive. He will be finished very quickly.” It’s not like a sacrifice, it’s like suicide. This is why I am speaking about an entire axiology that is completely different in the camp than in our perception.

A prisoners' room at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Auschwitz memorial, Poland.

You note that some of those people wo were most deeply tied into their communities actually were a tremendous disadvantage in the camp. Those who had the easiest time adapting to the camp were people coming from very low socioeconomic levels from big cities, people who had very hard childhoods with many problems in their lives. They’ve got ideas on how to adapt to those difficulties.

But at the opposite end, you get for example people from the countryside, normal people without any education, unable to understand or to speak German, unable to imagine a different world than their own, living all the time in cyclical time according to the seasons. They found themselves in the camp and were completely unable to adapt. In general they did not leave testimonies after the war, because if you finish two grades in the schools or even not two, you are unable to write your testimony.

But many other prisoners themselves tried to enter in contact with them and describe them, and this was something incredible. Many times you think it’s those people coming from very traditional settings with centuries of culture and systems of ethics who will be the strongest in a difficult time. Not really. Not really.

One of the things the general public forgets today about the enormity of the death camps and the Holocaust was that it took many years to frame even the basic understanding that we have today of what happened. It was not understood in the immediate postwar time, so survivors didn’t have that space to speak, because what they experienced was in some ways quite different than what was first said about what had happened in the camps. The situation of somebody captured in 1940 in Warsaw because he prepared some anti-Nazi, anti-German action, as a scout or something like this, was completely different than somebody who was taken from their house for nothing. The latter was unable to know why he was in this camp. It was difficult to create a definite narrative after the war if you were taken for no reason from your house or from the street and sent to the camp. If somebody was involved in some unusual actions, it was different. He was able afterward to say, “Yes I suffered a lot. It was inhuman, but I was fighting against something.”

This psychological difference was huge in the postwar narratives.

A question from the audience, from a woman whose father spent years in Auschwitz, asks about the difference between the reception of Christian and Jewish narratives. In Poland, especially after 1968, the camp narrative was more organized by Christian prisoners. In the Western world it was more organized by Jewish survivors. It was a very clear difference between the two narratives.

I remember in the ’90s when Communism ended, it became possible to travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz. The two communities of remembrance met in the same place and did not recognize each other. It was like they were speaking about some completely different history. There were different symbols, words, approaches. It created tensions, it created emotions.

It took time, even a whole generation — up until 2010 or later — for those different worlds not only to accept each other but to understand that, yes, they’re all attached to the same story, to the same place. It was very, very difficult.

And at the same time, in the late ’90s, some new history arrived. The genocide of the Roma and Sinti — so-called gypsies — was discovered by the larger public. Then Russia started to speak about the Soviet prisoners of war who were put in Auschwitz.

I think we are headed in a good direction. We are learning to understand each other and all these stories.

Andrea Pitzer is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction that explore untold histories. She was the editor of Nieman Storyboard from 2009-2012.

Featured Clinical Reviews

• Screening for Atrial Fibrillation: US Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement JAMA Recommendation Statement January 25, 2022
• Evaluating the Patient With a Pulmonary Nodule: A Review JAMA Review January 18, 2022
• Download PDF
• Share X Facebook Email LinkedIn
• Permissions

Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust

University of Illinois Medical Center Chicago

This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.

This book delineates the social setting and the process of organizing the extermination of millions according to National Socialist philosophy. As Hamburg notes in his foreword, the "level of sophistication in modern organization and technology" that the Germans brought to this work was unique—railway schedules, euphemisms for murder, classifications of Gypsies, Jews, Poles, and political prisoners, the architectural design and chemistry of mass murder. Also detailed are the use of inmates as cards for political negotiation and the resistance of some Italian Fascists and German clergymen.

There is a section on the victims, telling how survivors coped in the camps and afterwards, and about the psychotherapy of survivors and what happens to their children. A general model of stress and coping under extreme conditions is developed by Benner, Roskies, and Lazarus.

A final section deals with the perpetrators. There are diaries and autobiographical material from guards and prominent Nazis, as

Bernstein NR. Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. JAMA. 1982;247(22):3138. doi:10.1001/jama.1982.03320470078043

Manage citations:

© 2024

Artificial Intelligence Resource Center

Cardiology in JAMA : Read the Latest

Browse and subscribe to JAMA Network podcasts!

Others Also Liked

Select your interests.

Customize your JAMA Network experience by selecting one or more topics from the list below.

• Academic Medicine
• Acid Base, Electrolytes, Fluids
• Allergy and Clinical Immunology
• American Indian or Alaska Natives
• Anesthesiology
• Anticoagulation
• Art and Images in Psychiatry
• Artificial Intelligence
• Assisted Reproduction
• Bleeding and Transfusion
• Caring for the Critically Ill Patient
• Challenges in Clinical Electrocardiography
• Climate and Health
• Climate Change
• Clinical Challenge
• Clinical Decision Support
• Clinical Implications of Basic Neuroscience
• Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Consensus Statements
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Critical Care Medicine
• Cultural Competency
• Dental Medicine
• Dermatology
• Diabetes and Endocrinology
• Diagnostic Test Interpretation
• Drug Development
• Electronic Health Records
• Emergency Medicine
• End of Life, Hospice, Palliative Care
• Environmental Health
• Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
• Facial Plastic Surgery
• Gastroenterology and Hepatology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Genomics and Precision Health
• Global Health
• Guide to Statistics and Methods
• Hair Disorders
• Health Care Delivery Models
• Health Care Economics, Insurance, Payment
• Health Care Quality
• Health Care Reform
• Health Care Safety
• Health Care Workforce
• Health Disparities
• Health Inequities
• Health Policy
• Health Systems Science
• History of Medicine
• Hypertension
• Images in Neurology
• Implementation Science
• Infectious Diseases
• Innovations in Health Care Delivery
• JAMA Infographic
• Law and Medicine
• Leading Change
• Less is More
• LGBTQIA Medicine
• Lifestyle Behaviors
• Medical Coding
• Medical Devices and Equipment
• Medical Education
• Medical Education and Training
• Medical Journals and Publishing
• Mobile Health and Telemedicine
• Narrative Medicine
• Neuroscience and Psychiatry
• Notable Notes
• Nutrition, Obesity, Exercise
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Occupational Health
• Ophthalmology
• Orthopedics
• Otolaryngology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Care
• Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
• Patient Care
• Patient Information
• Performance Improvement
• Performance Measures
• Perioperative Care and Consultation
• Pharmacoeconomics
• Pharmacoepidemiology
• Pharmacogenetics
• Pharmacy and Clinical Pharmacology
• Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
• Physical Therapy
• Physician Leadership
• Population Health
• Primary Care
• Professional Well-being
• Professionalism
• Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
• Public Health
• Pulmonary Medicine
• Regulatory Agencies
• Reproductive Health
• Research, Methods, Statistics
• Resuscitation
• Rheumatology
• Risk Management
• Scientific Discovery and the Future of Medicine
• Shared Decision Making and Communication
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports Medicine
• Stem Cell Transplantation
• Substance Use and Addiction Medicine
• Surgical Innovation
• Surgical Pearls
• Teachable Moment
• Technology and Finance
• The Art of JAMA
• The Arts and Medicine
• The Rational Clinical Examination
• Tobacco and e-Cigarettes
• Translational Medicine
• Trauma and Injury
• Treatment Adherence
• Ultrasonography
• Users' Guide to the Medical Literature
• Vaccination
• Venous Thromboembolism
• Veterans Health
• Women's Health
• Workflow and Process
• Wound Care, Infection, Healing
• Register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles
• Access PDFs of free articles
• Manage your interests
• Save searches and receive search alerts

Articles on Holocaust survivors

Displaying all articles.

Gabor Maté claims trauma contributes to everything: from cancer to ADHD. But what does the evidence say?

Nick Haslam , The University of Melbourne

For Australian Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, remembering the Holocaust meant fighting racism and colonialism

Max Kaiser , The University of Melbourne

By policing history, Poland’s government is distorting the Holocaust

Jan Grabowski , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Holocaust survivor stories are reminders of why we need to educate against antisemitism

Carson Phillips , Gratz College

A brief history of Babi Yar, where Nazis massacred Jews, Soviets kept silence and now Ukraine says Russia fired a missile

Jeffrey Veidlinger , University of Michigan

LGBT+ history: The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman – how theatre gave voice to a queer Holocaust survivor

Erika Hughes , University of Portsmouth and Anna Hájková , University of Warwick

Canadian writing about the Holocaust is haunted by the grim past

Ruth Panofsky , Toronto Metropolitan University

5 websites to help educate about the horrors of the Holocaust

Jennifer Rich , Rowan University

How to fight Holocaust denial in social media – with the evidence of what really happened

Adam G. Klein , Pace University

Nazis murdered a quarter of Europe’s Roma, but history still overlooks this genocide

Barbara Warnock , University of Cambridge

How will generations that didn’t experience the Holocaust remember it?

Timothy Langille , Arizona State University

From the St Louis to the Aquarius: the history of refugee boats as archipelagos of misery

Simone Gigliotti , Royal Holloway University of London

Why we need to rethink how to teach the Holocaust

Alan Marcus , University of Connecticut

Why remembering matters for healing

Nancy Berns , Drake University

Poland is trying to rewrite history with this controversial new holocaust law

Svenja Bethke , University of Leicester

What Trump’s every-country - for-itself rhetoric gets wrong about Davos

Stephen D. Smith , USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Why we still need to teach young people about the Holocaust

Michael Richards , Edge Hill University ; Anna Bussu , Edge Hill University , and Peter Leadbetter , Edge Hill University

Could there be a link between genocide and suicide?

Colin Tatz , Australian National University

The story of an Englishman in Auschwitz

Andy Pearce , UCL and Ruth-Anne Lenga , UCL

Why it’s hard to ‘just get over it’ for people who have been traumatized

Joan M. Cook , Yale University

Related Topics

• Holocaust education
• Holocaust Memorial Day
• Holocaust museum
• International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Top contributors

ANU Visiting Professor, Politics and International Relations, Australian National University

Professor of Sociology, Drake University

Associate Professor of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick

Professor, Yale University

Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Pace University

Senior Lecturer in Applied Health and Social Care, Edge Hill University

Associate Professor in Holocaust and History Education, UCL

Head of Academic Programmes, UCL

Senior Lecturer in Applied Health & Social Care, Edge Hill University

Lecturer in the Psychosocial Analysis of Offending Behaviour, Faculty of Health and Social Care, Edge Hill University

Director of Shoah Foundation, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Leicester

Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Connecticut

Senior Lecturer / Reader in Holocaust Studies, Royal Holloway University of London

Associate Professor of Sociology, Rowan University

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Auschwitz Photos
• Birkenau Photos
• Mauthausen Photos
• Then and Now
• Paintings by Jan Komski – Survivor
• Geoffrey Laurence Paintings
• Paintings by Tamara Deuel – Survivor
• David Aronson Images
• Haunting Memory
• Holocaust Picture Book – The Story of Granny Girl as a Child
• Birkenau and Mauthausen Photos
• Student Art
• Photos – Late 1930s
• Holocaust Photos
• Lest We Forget
• Carapati – a Film
• Warsaw Ghetto Photos
• Nordhausen Liberation
• Dachau Liberation
• Ohrdruf Liberation
• Gunskirchen Lager Pamphlet
• Buchenwald Liberation
• Chuck Ferree
• Lt. Col. Felix Sparks
• Debate the Holocaust?
• Books by Survivors
• Children of Survivors
• Adolf Eichmann – PBS
• Adolf Hitler’s Plan
• Himmler Speech
• Goebbels Diaries
• Letter on Sterilization
• Letters on Euthanasia
• Nazi Letters on Executions
• Page of Glory
• Homosexuals
• Gypsies in Auschwitz I
• Gypsies in Auschwitz 2
• Babi Yar Poem
• Polish Citizens and Jews
• Harold Gordon
• Sidney Iwens
• I Cannot Forget
• Keep Yelling! A Survivor’s Testimony
• A Survivor’s Prayer
• In August of 1942
• Jacque Lipetz
• Walter Frank
• Helen Lazar
• Lucille Eichengreen
• Judith Jagermann
• Filip Muller
• Holocaust Study Guide
• Holocaust Books A-Z
• Anne Frank Biography | 1998 Holocaust Book
• Help Finding People Lost in the Holocaust Search and Unite

• Holocaust history and stories from Holocaust Photos, Survivors, Liberators, Books and Art
• Remember.org Origins

Return to Women Writing the Holocaust  

Joan Miriam Ringelheim asks, “Did anyone really survive the Holocaust?” It is a question more difficult to answer than it might at first appear. The Holocaust breaks down the definitions of words such as “survival.” Memoirist Charlotte Delbo wrote after the war’s end, “I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.” And as idealistic as it may sound, there is some truth to the notion that Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon manage, despite their brutal and meaningless murders, to live on after death. They wrote, after all, with that possibility in mind.

If to survive means to come through unscathed, the answer to Ringelheim’s question must be no. But if to survive means to live through an experience of such horror still be able to desire connection with the world–to create, narrate, innovate, to invoke the voices of the dead and of the living–then the answer is yes. To survive: “sur”–over, “vive”–live; the verb implies both to surmount an event, to live through it, and to relive it, live it over. Perhaps the simplest and somewhat tragic truth is that the one necessarily involves the other.

I find some sense of closure in Felstiner’s loving exploration of Charlotte Salomon because it is one which treats both the creator and the creation with equal care. What distinguishes Lucille E. from Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon, of course, is that only the first survived the Holocaust. Yet all three have created voices which seek to bear witness to the Shoah, if only the world will let them. The skill which it would benefit the world to develop is that of simultaneously recognizing the fundamental point that memoirs of female Holocaust witnesses are authored by women, and that they each nevertheless are not utterly circumscribed by that fact. To neglect the first point contributes to an artificial universalization of men’s experience and a silencing of painful but important questions. To neglect the second points to essentialism and dogmatic discourse. These women have taken a great step in creating a stand-in, a memorial protagonist, which can continue to tell their story after their own ends. They have invested the memoir with a certain autonomy; that autonomy needs to be acknowledged by the rest of us.

Go to the Top of the Page || Return to Women Writing the Holocaust

Remember. Zachor. Sich erinnern.

Remember.org helps people find the best digital resources, connecting them through a collaborative learning structure since 1994. If you'd like to share your story on Remember.org, all we ask is that you give permission to students and teachers to use the materials in a non-commercial setting. Founded April 25, 1995 as a "Cybrary of the Holocaust". Content created by Community. THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT . History Channel ABC PBS CNET One World Live New York Times Apple Adobe Copyright 1995-2024 Remember.org. All Rights Reserved. Publisher: Dunn Simply

APA Citation

Dunn, M. D. (Ed.). (95, April 25). Remember.org - The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivors' History. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from remember.org

MLA Citation

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Neurobiol Stress
• v.14; 2021 May

Lifelong impact of extreme stress on the human brain: Holocaust survivors study

Monika fňašková.

a Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC), Brain and Mind Research Program, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

c First Department of Neurology, St. Anne's Hospital and School of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Pavel Říha

Marek preiss.

d University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic

Markéta Nečasová

Eva koriťáková.

b Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Ivan Rektor

Associated data.

All data are available upon request at the Repository CEITEC Masaryk University, MAFIL CF.

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

We aimed to assess the lifelong impact of extreme stress on people who survived the Holocaust. We hypothesised that the impact of extreme trauma is detectable even after more than 70 years of an often complicated and stressful post-war life.

Psychological testing was performed on 44 Holocaust survivors (HS; median age 81.5 years; 29 women; 26 HS were under the age of 12 years in 1945) and 31 control participants without a personal or family history of the Holocaust (control group (CG); median 80 years; 17 women). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using the 3T Siemens Prisma scanner was performed on 29 HS (median 79 years; 18 women) and 21 CG participants (median 80 years; 11 women). The MRI-tested subgroup that had been younger than 12 years old in 1945 was composed of 20 HS (median 79 years; 17 women) and 21 CG (median 80 years; 11 women).

HS experienced significantly higher frequency of depression symptoms, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and posttraumatic growth, and lower levels of well-being. The MRI shows a lifelong neurobiological effect of extreme stress. The areas with reduced grey matter correspond to the map of the impact of stress on the brain structure: insula, anterior cingulate, ventromedial cortex including the subgenual cingulate/orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus. HS showed good adjustment to post-war life conditions.

Psychological growth may contribute to compensation for the psychological and neurobiological consequences of extreme stress.

The reduction of GM was significantly expressed also in the subgroup of participants who survived the Holocaust during their childhood.

The lifelong psychological and neurobiological changes in people who survived extreme stress were identified more than 70 years after the Holocaust. Extreme stress in childhood and young adulthood has an irreversible lifelong impact on the brain.

1. Introduction

The Holocaust was the most traumatic man-made event in European history. In the former Czechoslovakia, the entire Jewish population suffered from this large-scale genocide, which lasted from 1938 to 1945. It started with social and professional exclusion, humiliation, and suppression of basic rights, followed by deportation to concentration camps, forced labour, and exposure to horrific atrocities, or by illegally hiding or joining partisan groups under constant threat of discovery and execution. All of the holocaust survivors (HS), independently of their age, experienced massive trauma and the post-war shock of having lost family members, including parents, children, and siblings, and the necessity of adjusting to new and difficult life circumstances.

The first studies of the effect of this extreme stress on the health of the HS noted the mental impact but focused on physical health ( Helweg-Larsen et al., 1952 ). The term ‘concentration camp syndrome’ for symptoms including emotional instability, poor concentration, and fatigue was introduced in the 1960s ( Eitinger, 1962 ).

Levav and Abramson ( Levav and Abramson, 1984 ) showed that 30 years after the war emotional distress had a higher prevalence in the former concentration camp inmates than in other European-born members of the community. Barel et al. performed a meta-analysis of 71 studies with 12,746 participants elucidating the long-term psychiatric, psychosocial, and physical consequences of the Holocaust. They found higher-level posttraumatic stress symptoms in HS but also adaptation (cognitive function, physical health, etc.) combining psychological growth with defense mechanisms ( Barel et al., 2010 ). They marked this combination of chronic stress symptoms and resilience as ‘characteristics of the symptoms of Holocaust survivors’.

Traumatic stress is manifested by changes in brain structure. The hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate, prefrontal cortex ( Arnsten et al., 2015 ; Bremner, 2003 ), and insular cortex ( Paulus and Stein, 2006 ) are often mentioned as structures that are vulnerable to the effects of stress ( Ansell et al., 2012 ; Bruce et al., 2013 ; Cohen et al., 2006 ; Kasai et al., 2008 ; Kuo et al., 2012 ; Lupien and Lepage, 2001 ; McEwen et al., 2016 ; McEwen and Morrison, 2013 ; Paulus and Stein, 2006 ; Roozendaal et al., 2009 ; Yaribeygi et al., 2017 ). Neurobiological modifications caused by stress can be linked with the development of diseases like depression ( Bremner et al., 2000 ) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ( Bremner et al., 1995 ; Logue et al., 2018 ; Villarreal et al., 2002 ). Increased vulnerability to PTSD was observed in Holocaust survivors ( Yehuda et al., 1998 ). In this study, we explored the lifelong impact of stress on brain structure using structural MRI.

The timing of stress exposure is a critical factor for the impacts of stress on brain structure and functions. A younger age during the traumatic period is linked to greater damage to personality development ( Keilson and Sarphatie, 1992 ). During development (prenatal period, childhood, adolescence) and age-dependent changes (ageing), the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of stress hormones ( Lupien et al., 2009 ). Childhood adversities are typically associated with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and early childhood trauma can cause long lasting neurobiological and psychological deficiencies ( Dye, 2018 ).

To explore the impact of stress during development, we investigated a subgroup of HS who were under 12 years old at the end of the war in 1945. Dividing the research set at the age of 12 makes sense from a developmental point of view; according to Erikson and Erikson, the fourth stage of human life ends at the age of 12. This is the last stage before adolescence ( Erikson and Erikson, 1998 ).

The goal of this study is to assess the lifelong psychological and neurobiological impact of long-lasting extreme stress. The combination of psychological testing with brain MRI more than 70 years after the war provides unique data about the impact of extreme trauma.

Given the ages of survivors, this data probably reflects the last chance to explore the lifelong impact of this extreme trauma and directly learn from the survivors about their evaluations of a life marked by extreme stress. Data from the genetic part of this study have been partially published, including results about telomere length and mitochondrial DNA ( Cai et al., 2020 ; Konečná et al., 2019 ).

The study is based on two hypotheses: 1. We hypothesised that Holocaust survivors have had a lifelong impact on stress-related brain areas combined with psychological consequences of stress as well as signs of posttraumatic growth, identifiable despite the complicated and often stressful life in Central Europe after the war.

2. We hypothesised that the lifelong consequences of extreme stress trauma would also be expressed in people who survived the Holocaust as children, despite the fact that children have a limited ability to cognitively process life-threatening situations ( Sigal and Weinfeld, 2001 ) and the children were not exposed to direct threats of being killed, as most of them survived the Holocaust hidden in other families or institutions.

2.1. Participants and recruitment

2.1.1. research and recruitment.

The study was conducted at the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) Neuroscience Centre, at Masaryk University in Brno between 2015 and 2020. Part of the data was obtained at the National Institute of Mental Health (NÚDZ) in Klecany. The data were obtained according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The research was approved by the ethics committee at Masaryk University; informed consent was obtained from all participants.

All of the participants were of Czech or Slovak origin, i.e. people with a similar geopolitical background. The two countries formed one state – Czechoslovakia – until 1993, and the close connections between the citizens continue; the Czech and Slovak languages are mutually comprehensible.

The participants were recruited through the cooperation of local Jewish communities (the Holocaust survivors group), announcements in the media, and postings on the university website. For HS and CG recruitment, we also used personal invitations from members of the research team and the snowball sampling method. The CG was completed when the composition of HS was already clear and the CG could be matched with HS.

2.1.2. Participants characteristics

Exclusion criteria: a history of treatment for severe psychiatric disorders (such as psychosis), any kind of severe brain impairment (brain injury, tumours, neurodegenerative diseases), and significant cognitive decline (all participants scored over 26 points in the Mini-Mental State Examination) ( Solomon et al., 1998 ). Contraindications for MRI were metal implants, pacemakers, and claustrophobia.

The HS and CG groups were not significantly different in age, sex, and education; this was verified using Mann-Whitney U test. The groups were 44 HS with median age 82 (71–95) years, 29 women (66%) and 31 Czech and Slovak non-Jewish control participants not exposed to war-related trauma with median age 80 (73–90) years, 17 women (55%). Higher education had been attained by 46% of HS and 36% of CG.

The subgroup under 12 years old in 1945 was composed of 26 HS with median age 78.5 (71–84) years, 17 women (65%) and 24 control participants with median age 78 (73–84), 12 women (50%). Table with demographic group characteristics is in the supplementary material.

Participants who could not participate in MR scanning because of contraindications or who underwent MR scanning with insufficiently quality scans were excluded from the final brain images analysis.

The neuroimaging cohort was composed of 29 HS with median age 79 (72–95), 18 women (62%), and 21 control participants median age 80 (73–86), 11 women (52%). Their psychological profile resembled the profile of the whole cohort ( Table 2 ).

Psychological questionnaires: differences between Holocaust survivors (HS) and the control group (CG).

TSC: Trauma Symptom Checklist; PCLC – C: PTSD Checklist – Civilian Version; PTGI: Posttraumatic Growth Inventory; SOS – Schwartz Outcome Scale.

The neuroimaging subgroup under 12 years old in 1945 was composed of 20 HS with median age 78 (72–84), 12 women (60%), and 21 control participants median age 80 (73–86), 11 women (52%).

No gender-associated effects were found using a two-sample t -test comparing male and female data.

2.1.3. Background of examined groups

2.1.3.1. holocaust survivors group characteristics.

During the Holocaust, 24 HS were in hiding, e.g. living with a non-Jewish family in a small village, in a farmhouse, in an evangelist orphanage, or in a secret room, in their childhood or adolescence. Five HS lived under a false identity or were hiding in the mountains; some of them joined the partisan army.

Fifteen HS were imprisoned in a ghetto (most often Terezín - Theresienstadt) and/or in concentration camps (Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, or Mauthausen). Several participants had survived a death march. The persecution increased over six years; the immediate danger of execution, whether after being discovered for people who were hiding or after being imprisoned in a concentration camp, lasted from six months to four years.

Most of them experienced trauma at critical developmental phases; 26 HS were aged under 12 years by the end of the war in 1945. Nineteen of them were in hiding (nine with their parents and ten without them). Seven were imprisoned in the ghetto Theresienstadt.

2.1.3.2. Control group characteristics

The Czech Republic was occupied by Nazi Germany as the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren. There was a strong oppression of the Czech population, but its majority was not directly exposed to the war events. Participants in CG were civilians and did not participate in military action or resistance; during the war, they were not under direct life-threatening danger.

Post-war life conditions under the communist regime from 1948 to 1989 were difficult and differed from the conditions in Western democracies. The regime was oppressive and often anti-Semitic, in particular in the 1950s, with a series of political processes followed by executions and long-term imprisonments. Jews experienced direct oppression, as did other groups, e.g. private farmers and entrepreneurs, Christians, intellectuals, etc. After a liberalisation period in the 1960s, ended by the Soviet army intervention in 1968, a general suppression of human rights followed for 20 years. Based on individual interviews, we can state that none of our study participants advanced their career based on membership in the Communist Party. In principle, the HS and CG suffered from the communist oppression in a more or less similar way.

2.2. Initial screening

For the initial screening, all participants were tested with the 7-min screen test ( Solomon et al., 1998 ).

The protocol consisted of interviews, psychological questionnaires, and MR scanning. In addition, participants completed the Geriatric Depression Scale test as a part of the initial screening (participants with major depression were not included in the study).

2.3. Interview

All participants, HS and CG, were asked about their life before, during, and after the war. HS were also asked how they survived the Holocaust and how long they were persecuted. In the self-report part, the HS answered a short questionnaire focused on the self-evaluation of their personal life and professional career as affected by the Holocaust.

2.4. Psychological measures

Four questionnaires testing the hypothesis of the lifelong impact of extreme stress were chosen for this study. Two tests explored the negative impact of stress, specifically posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and actual stress symptoms (PCL-C and TSC-40 respectively); one test explored the positive impact of stress (PTGI); and one test explored the subjective appreciation of actual quality of life (SOS-10).

All psychological questionnaires are summarised in detail in Table 1 .

Psychological tests.

2.4.1. Statistical analysis

The results of the psychological questionnaires were summarised using median, minimum, and maximum. For statistical testing of differences between HS and GC, a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was used. The significance level for all statistical tests was set to p < 0.05. The statistical analyses were performed using STATISTICA 12. The effect of age was tested by multiple regression.

2.5. MR imaging

2.5.1. data acquisition.

MR examinations were performed on a 3T scanner Siemens Prisma using a 64-channel head coil. The MRI protocol for voxel-based morphometry included 3D T1-weighted magnetisation prepared rapid gradient echo (MPRAGE) sequence with TR = 2.3 s, TE = 2.33 ms, TI = 0.9 s, FA = 8°, isometric voxel size 1 mm in FOV 224 × 224 mm and 240 slices.

Part of the data was obtained at a partner workplace, NÚDZ Klecany, with the same type of 3T Prisma scanner, multichannel coil, and protocol sequence.

Data from all participants were manually checked for artifacts and pathology was checked by an experienced radiologist. Participants who did not meet our quality criteria (scans without technical artifacts or lower SNR; scans without significant movement artifacts; participants with brain pathology; and scans without successfully finished segmentation and normalization into MNI space) were excluded from the study.

2.5.2. Data processing

Anatomical MRI data were analysed using SPM12 ( www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk ) and CAT12 toolbox ( www.neuro.uni-jena.de/cat ) running in Matlab R2017b.

Individual data were adjusted for spatial inhomogeneity with an intensity normalization filter and then denoised with the Non-Local Means (SANLM) denoising filter. High resolution data were then segmented into grey matter using the SPM Tissue Probability Map (TPM) and registered into common MNI space using shooting template IXI555_MNI152_GS. Finally, spatially normalised and modulated GM maps were smoothed with 6 mm FWHM isotropic Gaussian kernel.

2.5.3. Statistical analysis

Group statistics for stress effects were calculated with a second-level model using SPM12. The modulated GM images were multiplicatively corrected with total intracranial volume and then analysed. A two-sample t -test comparison of GMV files between stress group (respectively stress subgroup under 12 years of age) and the control group was performed; sex, age, and MRI machine were included as nuisance variables.

Resultant t-statistic maps were initially thresholded at a P value of <0.005 uncorrected and then only significant clusters at P < 0.05 FWE cluster level were picked.

2.5.4. Grey matter volume and PTSD checklist scale correlation

Based on the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) atlas ( Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002 ), we selected the mean GM volume in an area consisting of the ACC, OFC, and insula, which are constantly repeated stress areas in the literature ( Ansell et al., 2012 ; Bolsinger et al., 2018 ; Kasai et al., 2008 ). These GM volumes and PCL-C values were correlated using Pearson correlation in HS to examine the relationship between brain morphology and posttraumatic stress manifestation.

3.1. Interview

In the interviews with the Holocaust survivors, respondents from the focal group typically cited war events (e.g. death of parents, war as a whole, hiding during the war, transport to and stay in a concentration camp, loss of a loved one), as well as topics related to communism (e.g. secret police interrogations, anti-Semitism) and health problems (e.g. ventricular fibrillation, partial disability, accident, illness) as dominant life events. The control group was typically dominated by lifetime losses (e.g. parents, spouse) and health problems (e.g. heart attack, broken arm).

3.1.1. Self-report

All HS participants were asked how they evaluate their current life in relation to the Holocaust. The questions were as follows: 1. Was the Holocaust the worst experience of your life? (84.1% answered yes or rather yes); 2. Did the Holocaust have a lifelong negative influence on your life? (70.5% answered yes or rather yes); 3. Are you satisfied with your personal life (lifelong view)? (79.6% answered yes or rather yes); 4. Are you satisfied with your career (lifelong view)? (86.4% answered yes or rather yes).

3.2. Psychological measures

3.2.1. depression symptoms.

Depression symptoms were screened using the GDS. The prevalence of depression symptoms was significantly higher in HS (p < 0.001): depression symptoms were experienced by 15 HS (34.1%) and by 3 participants of CG (9.7%).

3.2.2. Psychological testing

The results of the psychological testing ( Table 2 ) significantly differed between HS and CG in all questionnaires. PCL-C showed higher rates of lasting symptoms of chronic stress in HS (in 21; 47.7%) than in CG (2; 6.5%). PTGI presents a higher rate of posttraumatic growth in HS, in 31 (70.5%), than in CG, in 11 (35.5%). SOS-10 displays a lower rate of well-being in HS, who could be classified as ‘maladjusted’ (9; 20.5%) than in CG (3; 9.7%). The effect of age was not statistically significant when used as covariate.

The results of the psychological testing in a subgroup of participants who were under the age of 12 in 1945 ( Table 3 ) significantly differed between HS and CG in all questionnaires. PCL-C showed higher rates of lasting symptoms of chronic stress in HS (in 13; 50%) than in CG (1; 4.2%). There is a higher rate of posttraumatic growth in HS, in 18 (69.2%) than in CG, in 9 (37.5%). SOS-10 displays a lower rate of well-being in HS (6; 23.1%) than in CG (1; 4.2%).

Psychological questionnaires: differences between HS under age of 12 in 1945 and age-matched CG.

3.3.1. Neuroimaging group characteristics

The neuroimaging cohort psychological profile resembled the profile of the whole cohort ( Table 4 ). No gender-associated effects were found using a two-sample t -test comparing male and female data.

Psychological questionnaire results of participants participating in the neuroimaging part of this study.

Psychological test results are similar to those in the entire HS group: a greater rate of chronic stress symptoms (significantly in PCL-C) and a lower rate of well-being in HS. Posttraumatic growth is stronger in the HS group but with a borderline p-value of 0.0504.

3.3.2. GMV reduction in holocaust survivors

VBM showed a significant GM volume reduction in HS in regions described in Table 5 and Fig. 1 .

Holocaust survivors vs control group: Structural MRI, clusters with significant GM reduction compared control group. Initial threshold 0.005 uncorrected, 0.05 FWE cluster level significance.

Structural MRI. Holocaust survivors vs control participants thresholded at 0.005; axial slices.

Significant results up to p = 0.05 FWE cluster level. Larger clusters overlap several structures and can be divided into substructures for interpretation purposes. R – right, L – left, R and L – cluster covering bilateral medial cortices. Coordinates indicate the location with the maximum cluster value.

3.3.3. GMV reduction in holocaust survivors under 12 years in 1945

VBM showed a significant GM volume reduction in HS under 12 years in regions described in Table 6 and Fig. 2 .

Holocaust survivors, age under 12 years in 1945. Structural MRI, clusters with significant GM reduction compared to control group. Initial threshold 0.005 uncorrected, 0.05 FWE cluster level significance.

Significant results up to p = 0.05 FWE cluster level. Larger clusters overlap several structures and can be divided into substructures for interpretation purposes. R – right, L – left, R and L – cluster covering bilateral medial cortices. Coordinates indicate the location with the maximum cluster.

Structural MRI. Holocaust survivors younger than 12 years in 1945 vs control participants, thresholded at 0.005; axial slices.

Structural MRI map of Holocaust survivors younger than 12 years in 1945 vs control participants with a liberal initial threshold of p = 0.01 is presented in Supplementary Material. The comparison of the subgroups of HS under 12 years did not yield a qualitatively different pattern from the comparison of the entire groups of participants when lowering the threshold to compensate for the small group sizes.

3.3.4. Correlation between GMV and PTSD symptoms

We found a significant correlation r = 0.395, p-value = 0.034, between grey matter volume in the stress-related network comprising ACC, OFC, and the insula and PCL-C test score.

4. Discussion

Extreme stress in childhood and young adulthood has an irreversible lifelong impact on the brain. More than 70 years after World War II, it is possible to identify lifelong psychological and neurobiological changes in people who survived the Holocaust as compared to a control group without a similar trauma history. There are apparent persistent differences in the frequency of depression symptoms, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and posttraumatic growth, in levels of well-being, and in GM volume in the brain.

Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) displayed a significant GM volume reduction in the HS as compared to CG. The areas of reduced grey matter correspond to the map of the impact of stress on the brain structure: insula, anterior cingulate, ventromedial cortex including the subgenual cingulate/orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus. The reduced structures were reported in connection with stress, emotions, affective disorders, autobiographical memory cognition, and behaviour.

The massive reduction of insular volume is of particular note. The insula is functionally linked with other structures that showed volume reduction in HS, in particular with anterior cingulate (ACC), ventromedial prefrontal, and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) ( Perez et al., 2017 ; Phillips et al., 2003 ). The anterior insula may be critical for processing emotions, self-awareness ( Stevens and Jovanovic, 2019 ), and in disorders of mood and anxiety ( Rolls et al., 2018 ).

The ACC is a limbic region associated with a multitude of cognitive and affective processes ( Perez et al., 2017 ) including fear regulation Diekhof et al. (2011) ( Drevets et al., 2008 ); and social behaviour ( Devinsky et al., 1995 ). The medial prefrontal cortex includes the pregenual/subcallosal ACC, subgenual cingulate, and OFC and is associated with the processing of emotions, emotional behaviour, and memory ( Noriuchi et al., 2019 ). The subgenual cingulate (BA 25) is being used as a target for deep brain stimulation therapy for major depression ( Rolls et al., 2018 ).

The temporal pole (TP) is a paralimbic region involved in the regulation of emotion ( Holland et al., 2011 ). A GM reduction in the left medial temporal gyrus and right superior frontal gyrus, possibly associated with autobiographical memory retrieval, was described in PTSD ( Li et al., 2014 ). The angular gyrus is linked to several cognitive functions including self-referential processing ( Stevens and Jovanovic, 2019 ). In a combat veteran PTSD study, the burden of psychological trauma across the lifespan correlated with reduced cortical thickness in limbic/paralimbic areas and in the medial precentral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices ( Lindemer et al., 2013 ).

It can be summarised that the regions with reduced GM volume are associated with functions that could have been influenced by extreme stress. Sustained stress exposure leads to persistent changes in brain circuits regulating behaviour and emotion ( Arnsten et al., 2015 ). This appears even more evident when looking at these regions from the network perspective. The insula is a core region of the salience network that is involved in dynamic prioritising of internal and external stimuli and is implicated in mood/anxiety disorders ( Perez et al., 2017 ). The reduced volume of the insula, ACC, and OFC is considered a sign of increased vulnerability to stress ( Bolsinger et al., 2018 ). Cumulative lifetime adverse events were associated with reduced insular, subgenual ACC, and medial prefrontal volumes ( Ansell et al., 2012 ). The regulation of emotions and of self-awareness are processed in a network composed of the insula and perigenual ACC/ventromedial prefrontal cortex ( Perez et al., 2015 ). The map of reduced GM volume in HS is nearly identical with the set of regions involved in social cognition ( Stevens and Jovanovic, 2019 ).

The affected regions belong to the three core neurocognitive systems crucial for cognitive and affective processing: the salience network, the default mode network, and the central executive network. Deficits in the three networks are associated with a wide range of stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder ( Menon, 2011 ).

Extreme trauma experienced in childhood has demonstrably lifelong consequences. The reduction of GM was significantly expressed in the young HS, who were under the age of 12 years in 1945. The brains of children are vulnerable despite the fact that children have a limited ability to cognitively process life-threatening situations ( Sigal and Weinfeld, 2001 ). The GM volume reduction in children is probably a consequence of maladaptive experience-dependent neuroplastic changes that are more expressed in a developing brain ( Thomason and Marusak, 2017 ). A lower GM volume in the ACC was found in individuals with prenatal stress ( Marečková et al., 2019 ). Early-life adverse events have been associated with smaller insula, ACC, and OFC ( Dannlowski et al., 2012 ; Rolls et al., 2018 ).

There were no observable changes in the hippocampus and amygdala. The volume reduction of the two structures has been reported in PTSD and affective disorders ( Bremner, 2006 , 2007 ; Teicher et al., 2003 ) but findings are not consistent. Earlier studies also did not find a reduction of the two structures in HS with PTSD ( Cohen et al., 2006 ; Golier et al., 2005 ).

Several hypotheses explain the mechanisms of the alterations in brain structure induced by stress. Activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis leads the increased release of corticosteroids which can exert a negative effect on neurogenesis and an increase in apoptosis ( Li et al., 2014 ). However, a decrease in GM volume associated with a reduction in glia, with no loss of neurons, was described in ACC ( Drevets et al., 2008 ). In a stress model in mice, the GM reduction was explained by the loss of dendrites ( Blais et al., 1999 ; Kassem et al., 2013 ).

The GM reduction in our study is very probably the consequence of major psychological trauma. It is not explained by the effects of malnutrition on the brains of the survivors, as the majority of surviving children (with significant GM reduction) were hidden in non-Jewish families and did not experience extreme malnutrition. We found a significant correlation between grey matter volume in structures forming the stress network (insula, ACC, OFC) and PCL-C test score. This means that there is a clear link in our data between the grey matter volume and the psychological manifestations of posttraumatic stress symptoms.

To summarise the MRI part of our study: it shows an enduring lifelong effect of extremely stressful trauma on brain structure. The GM reduced areas correspond to the map of the impact of stress on the brain. The published studies mostly report the impact of stress on the human brain after a limited time period and do not address the question of whether the structural changes are reversible. Our data showing the lifelong consequences more than 70 years after extreme stress indicate that the GM reduction is irreversible. On the other hand, it is evident that the consequences of extreme stress can be compensated on a psychological level.

The psychological testing and HS interviews confirmed the profile corresponding to this structural map; however, the life course and other psychological signs display a more complicated and more positive pattern. After World War II, the psychopathology that characterised Holocaust survivors were described as a combination of chronic anxiety, depression, feelings of guilt, emotional instability, memory disturbances, and personality problems, alongside unresolved mourning and sadness ( Barel et al., 2010 ; Chodoff, 1963 ; Graaf, 1975 ; Helweg-Larsen et al., 1952 ; Prager and Solomon, 1995 ; Sagi-Schwartz et al., 2003 ).

In our study, the HS, when compared to CG, presented a more frequent occurrence of symptoms of chronic stress and depression and lower levels of well-being scores. On the other hand, the HS presented signs of resilience that probably considerably influenced their post-war life ( Heitlinger, 2011 ). They presented higher posttraumatic growth than the CG, and their self-estimation of their lives over the more than 70 years since the Holocaust showed a surprisingly positive pattern. The HS declared that they were satisfied with their lifelong personal life (in 79.6%) and with their professional careers (86.4%). That means that most of HS had productive and successful lives despite the atrocities they endured.

Surviving the Holocaust led to different reactions, including frequent suicides after the war. Those who were available for investigations for several decades after the Holocaust showed successful adaption capacities, similar to our study. The meta-analysis by Barel et al. elucidating the long-term consequences of the Holocaust for survivors suggested that alongside profound sadness there is room for growth ( Barel et al., 2010 ). Several studies have provided support for resilience in survivors of other genocides and persecutions, such as in Bosnia and Cambodia ( Ferren, 1999 ; Rousseau et al., 2003 ).

Holocaust survivors are not a homogeneous group and they vary in their post-trauma adjustment. Our study surpasses other published studies in the time that elapsed since the Holocaust – 70 to 75 years. The HS were up to 95 years old. We can speculate that surviving the Holocaust and living to a very advanced age could reflect a personality profile. It has been shown that Polish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the British Mandate for Palestine after 1945 lived longer than the Polish Jews who immigrated before 1939, i.e. before the Holocaust ( Sagi-Schwartz et al., 2013 ). The results of a study of Holocaust survivors aged 75 and older revealed almost no differences regarding the sociodemographic and interpersonal variables when compared to a control group. Nevertheless, survivors were found to be more vulnerable ( Landau and Litwin, 2000 ).

Based on our data, we suggest that the combination of depression and chronic stress symptoms with GM reduction in critical areas and posttraumatic growth with good adaptation to life present characteristics of Holocaust survivors. It appears that the strong motivation of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives manifested itself primarily in raising families, becoming involved in social activities, and showing achievements on a wide spectrum of social functioning ( Joffe et al., 2003 ; Krell, 1993 ). The neurobiological consequence of extreme stress, i.e. reduction of GM in areas related to stress symptoms, may be compensated by resilience and psychological growth. The lifelong consequences of the Holocaust on survivors may help to understand the adaptational challenges for survivors of more recent wars and catastrophic events.

A brief conclusion of our study is that Holocaust survivors continue to show neurobiological and psychological signs of having been traumatised even more than 70 years after the extreme stress. Extreme stress in childhood and young adulthood has an irreversible lifelong impact on the brain.

5. Limitations

• • The fact that the study was conducting with older participants limited the time available for testing. A selection of brief psychological tests was chosen. The investigation lasted from 3.5 to 5 h. Participants were evaluated for depression symptoms but emotions were not otherwise tested; they were partially revealed in the interview.
• • We did not detect lifetime symptom stresses. The gold standard for posttraumatic stress disorder (CAPS; Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5) was not used, as it is time consuming.
• • The old age of the participants also limited the number of participants with MR data in sufficient quality.
• • The control group was composed of people with no Jewish heritage. In Central Europe, it is not possible to find Jewish participants who were not affected by the Holocaust. Otherwise, the geopolitical background of all participants was similar.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Monika Fňašková: Project administration, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Pavel Říha: Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation. Marek Preiss: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation. Petr Bob: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation. Markéta Nečasová: Investigation, Formal analysis. Eva Koriťáková: Formal analysis. Ivan Rektor: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – original draft.

Declaration of competing interest

Acknowledgement.

The authors wish to thank Alena Damborská, Marie Dračková, Veronika Juričková, Alice Prokopová, and Nikola Vaseková for their participation in collecting data; Irena Rektorová and Klára Marečková for valuable advice; and Anne Johnson for grammatical assistance. We thank the MRI team at NÚDZ Klecany (led by Filip Španiel) for recording part of the data and the Jewish Community of Prague for providing financial help for this recording. We thank the Jewish communities in Brno and Prague and the Foundation for Holocaust Victims for their support and help with the recruitment of Holocaust survivors.

We acknowledge the core facility MAFIL of CEITEC MU, supported by the Czech-BioImaging large RI project (LM2015062 funded by MEYS CR), for their support with obtaining scientific data presented in this paper.

Appendix A Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2021.100318 .

Supported by a grant from the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic, grant no. AZV NV18-7 04-00559.

Data availability

Appendix a. supplementary data.

The following are the Supplementary data to this article:

• Ansell E.B., Rando K., Tuit K., Guarnaccia J., Sinha R. Cumulative adversity and smaller gray matter volume in medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and insula regions. Biol. Psychiatr. Endocrinol. Epigenetics, Extinction, and Early Life Traumatization. 2012; 72 :57–64. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.11.022. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Arnsten A.F.T., Raskind M.A., Taylor F.B., Connor D.F. The effects of stress exposure on prefrontal cortex: translating basic research into successful treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. Neurobiol. Stress, Stress Resilience. 2015; 1 :89–99. doi: 10.1016/j.ynstr.2014.10.002. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barel E., Van IJzendoorn M.H., Sagi-Schwartz A., Bakermans-Kranenburg M.J. Surviving the Holocaust: a meta-analysis of the long-term sequelae of a genocide. Psychol. Bull. 2010; 136 :677–698. doi: 10.1037/a0020339. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Blais M.A., Lenderking W.R., Baer L., deLorell A., Peets K., Leahy L., Burns C. Development and initial validation of a brief mental health Outcome measure. J. Pers. Assess. 1999; 73 :359–373. doi: 10.1207/S15327752JPA7303_5. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bolsinger J., Seifritz E., Kleim B., Manoliu A. Neuroimaging correlates of resilience to traumatic events—a comprehensive review. Front. Psychiatr. 2018; 9 doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00693. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bremner J.D. Neuroimaging in posttraumatic stress disorder and other stress-related disorders. Neuroimaging Clin. N. Am., Imaging of the Mind. 2007; 17 :523–538. doi: 10.1016/j.nic.2007.07.003. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bremner J.D. Traumatic stress: effects on the brain. Dialogues Clin. Neurosci. 2006; 8 :445–461. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bremner J.D. Long-term effects of childhood abuse on brain and neurobiology. Child Adolesc. Psychiatr. Clin. N. Am. 2003; 12 :271–292. doi: 10.1016/S1056-4993(02)00098-6. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bremner J.D., Narayan M., Anderson E.R., Staib L.H., Miller H.L., Charney D.S. Hippocampal volume reduction in major depression. Am. J. Psychiatr. 2000; 157 :115–118. doi: 10.1176/ajp.157.1.115. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bremner J.D., Randall P., Scott T.M., Bronen R.A., Seibyl J.P., Southwick S.M., Delaney R.C., McCarthy G., Charney D.S., Innis R.B. MRI-based measurement of hippocampal volume in patients with combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder. Am. J. Psychiatr. 1995; 152 :973–981. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bruce S.E., Buchholz K.R., Brown W.J., Yan L., Durbin A., Sheline Y.I. Altered emotional interference processing in the amygdala and insula in women with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. NeuroImage Clin. 2013; 2 :43–49. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2012.11.003. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Burke W.J., Roccaforte W.H., Wengel S.P. The short form of the geriatric depression scale: a comparison with the 30-item form. Top. Geriatr. 1991; 4 :173–178. doi: 10.1177/089198879100400310. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cai N., Fňašková M., Konečná K., Fojtová M., Fajkus J., Coomber E., Watt S., Soranzo N., Preiss M., Rektor I. No evidence of persistence or inheritance of mitochondrial DNA copy number in holocaust survivors and their descendants. Front. Genet. 2020; 11 doi: 10.3389/fgene.2020.00087. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chodoff P. Late effects of the concentration camp syndrome. Arch. Gen. Psychiatr. 1963; 8 :323–333. doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.1963.01720100013002. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen R.A., Grieve S., Hoth K.F., Paul R.H., Sweet L., Tate D., Gunstad J., Stroud L., McCaffery J., Hitsman B., Niaura R., Clark C.R., MacFarlane A., Bryant R., Gordon E., Williams L.M. Early life stress and morphometry of the adult anterior cingulate cortex and caudate nuclei. Biol. Psychiatr. 2006; 59 :975–982. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.12.016. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Conybeare D., Behar E., Solomon A., Newman M.G., Borkovec T.D. The PTSD Checklist-Civilian Version: reliability, validity, and factor structure in a nonclinical sample. J. Clin. Psychol. 2012; 68 :699–713. doi: 10.1002/jclp.21845. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dannlowski U., Stuhrmann A., Beutelmann V., Zwanzger P., Lenzen T., Grotegerd D., Domschke K., Hohoff C., Ohrmann P., Bauer J., Lindner C., Postert C., Konrad C., Arolt V., Heindel W., Suslow T., Kugel H. Limbic scars: long-term consequences of childhood maltreatment revealed by functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging. Biol. Psychiatr. Mech. Compromised Stress Resilience During Develop. Aging. 2012; 71 :286–293. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.10.021. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Devinsky O., Morrell M.J., Vogt B.A. Contributions of anterior cingulate cortex to behaviour. Brain. 1995; 118 :279–306. doi: 10.1093/brain/118.1.279. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Diekhof E.K., Geier K., Falkai P., Gruber O. Fear is only as deep as the mind allows: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on the regulation of negative affect. Neuroimage. 2011; 58 :275–285. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.073. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dragomirecka E., Lenderking W.R., Motlova L., Goppoldova E., Šelepova P. A brief mental health outcomes measure: translation and validation of the Czech version of the Schwartz outcomes scale-10. Qual. Life Res. 2006; 15 :307–312. doi: 10.1007/s11136-005-1389-y. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Drevets W.C., Savitz J., Trimble M. The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in mood disorders. CNS Spectr. 2008; 13 :663–681. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dye H. The impact and long-term effects of childhood trauma. J. Hum. Behav. Soc. Environ. 2018; 28 :381–392. doi: 10.1080/10911359.2018.1435328. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Eitinger L. Concentration camp survivors IN the postwar world*. Am. J. Orthopsychiatry. 1962; 32 :367–375. doi: 10.1111/j.1939-0025.1962.tb00283.x. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Elliott D.M., Briere J. Sexual abuse trauma among professional women: validating the Trauma Symptom Checklist-40 (TSC-40) Child Abuse Negl. 1992; 16 :391–398. doi: 10.1016/0145-2134(92)90048-V. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Erikson E.H., Erikson J.M. W. W. Norton & Company; 1998. The Life Cycle Completed (Extended Version) [ Google Scholar ]
• Ferren P.M. Comparing perceived self-efficacy among adolescent Bosnian and Croatian refugees with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. J. Trauma Stress. 1999; 12 :405–420. doi: 10.1023/A:1024749118463. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Golier J.A., Yehuda R., De Santi S., Segal S., Dolan S., de Leon M.J. Absence of hippocampal volume differences in survivors of the Nazi Holocaust with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychiatry Res. Neuroimaging. 2005; 139 :53–64. doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2005.02.007. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Graaf T.D. Pathological patterns of identification in families of survivors of the Holocaust. Isr. Ann. Psychiatry Relat. Discip. 1975; 13 :335–363. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Heitlinger A. Transaction Publishers; 2011. In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews since 1945. [ Google Scholar ]
• Helweg-Larsen P., Hoffmeyer H., Kieler J., Thaysen E.H., Thaysen J.H., Thygesen P., Wulff M.H. Famine disease in German concentration Camps : complications and sequels with special reference to tuberculosis, mental disorders and social consequences. Acta Med. Scand. 1952; 144 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holland A.C., Addis D.R., Kensinger E.A. The neural correlates of specific versus general autobiographical memory construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia. 2011; 49 :3164–3177. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.07.015. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Joffe C., Brodaty H., Luscombe G., Ehrlich F. The Sydney Holocaust study: posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychosocial morbidity in an aged community sample. J. Trauma Stress. 2003; 16 :39–47. doi: 10.1023/A:1022059311147. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kasai K., Yamasue H., Gilbertson M.W., Shenton M.E., Rauch S.L., Pitman R.K. Evidence for acquired pregenual anterior cingulate gray matter loss from a twin study of combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder. Biol. Psychiatr. 2008; 63 :550–556. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.06.022. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kassem M.S., Lagopoulos J., Stait-Gardner T., Price W.S., Chohan T.W., Arnold J.C., Hatton S.N., Bennett M.R. Stress-induced grey matter loss determined by MRI is primarily due to loss of dendrites and their synapses. Mol. Neurobiol. 2013; 47 :645–661. doi: 10.1007/s12035-012-8365-7. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Keilson H., Sarphatie H.R. Magnes Press; Jerusalem, Israel: 1992. Sequential Traumatization in Children: A Clinical and Statistical Follow-Up Study on the Fate of the Jewish War Orphans in the Netherlands, Sequential Traumatization in Children: A Clinical and Statistical Follow-Up Study on the Fate of the Jewish War Orphans in the Netherlands. [ Google Scholar ]
• Konečná K., Lyčka M., Nohelová L., Petráková M., Fňašková M., Koriťáková E., Sováková P.P., Brabencová S., Preiss M., Rektor I., Fajkus J., Fojtová M. Holocaust history is not reflected in telomere homeostasis in survivors and their offspring. J. Psychiatr. Res. 2019; 117 :7–14. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2019.06.018. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Krell R. Child survivors of the holocaust — strategies of adaptation. Can. J. Psychiatr. 1993; 38 :384–389. doi: 10.1177/070674379303800603. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kuo J.R., Kaloupek D.G., Woodward S.H. Amygdala volume in combat-exposed veterans with and without posttraumatic stress disorder: a cross-sectional study. Arch. Gen. Psychiatr. 2012; 69 :1080–1086. doi: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2012.73. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Landau R., Litwin H. The effects of extreme early stress in very old age. J. Trauma Stress. 2000; 13 :473–487. doi: 10.1023/A:1007737425260. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Levav I., Abramson J.H. Emotional distress among concentration camp survivors – a community study in Jerusalem. Psychol. Med. 1984; 14 :215–218. doi: 10.1017/S003329170000324X. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li L., Wu M., Liao Y., Ouyang L., Du M., Lei D., Chen L., Yao L., Huang X., Gong Q. Grey matter reduction associated with posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic stress. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 2014; 43 :163–172. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2014.04.003. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lindemer E.R., Salat D.H., Leritz E.C., McGlinchey R.E., Milberg W.P. Reduced cortical thickness with increased lifetime burden of PTSD in OEF/OIF Veterans and the impact of comorbid TBI. NeuroImage Clin. 2013; 2 :601–611. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2013.04.009. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Logue M.W., van Rooij S.J.H., Dennis E.L., Davis S.L., Hayes J.P., Stevens J.S., Densmore M., Haswell C.C., Ipser J., Koch S.B.J., Korgaonkar M., Lebois L.A.M., Peverill M., Baker J.T., Boedhoe P.S.W., Frijling J.L., Gruber S.A., Harpaz-Rotem I., Jahanshad N., Koopowitz S., Levy I., Nawijn L., O'Connor L., Olff M., Salat D.H., Sheridan M.A., Spielberg J.M., van Zuiden M., Winternitz S.R., Wolff J.D., Wolf E.J., Wang X., Wrocklage K., Abdallah C.G., Bryant R.A., Geuze E., Jovanovic T., Kaufman M.L., King A.P., Krystal J.H., Lagopoulos J., Bennett M., Lanius R., Liberzon I., McGlinchey R.E., McLaughlin K.A., Milberg W.P., Miller M.W., Ressler K.J., Veltman D.J., Stein D.J., Thomaes K., Thompson P.M., Morey R.A. Smaller hippocampal volume in posttraumatic stress disorder: a multisite ENIGMA-PGC study: subcortical volumetry results from posttraumatic stress disorder consortia. Biol. Psychiatr. 2018; 83 :244–253. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.09.006. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lupien S.J., Lepage M. Stress, memory, and the hippocampus: can't live with it, can't live without it. Behav. Brain Res. 2001; 127 :137–158. doi: 10.1016/S0166-4328(01)00361-8. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lupien S.J., Mcewen B.S., Gunnar M.R., Heim C. Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. Lond. 2009; 10 :434–445. doi: 10.1038/nrn2639. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Marečková K., Klasnja A., Bencurova P., Andrýsková L., Brázdil M., Paus T. Prenatal stress, mood, and gray matter volume in young adulthood. Cerebr. Cortex. 2019; 29 :1244–1250. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy030. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• McEwen B.S., Morrison J.H. The brain on stress: vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron. 2013; 79 :16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• McEwen B.S., Nasca C., Gray J.D. Stress effects on neuronal structure: Hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2016; 41 :3–23. doi: 10.1038/npp.2015.171. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Menon V. Large-scale brain networks and psychopathology: a unifying triple network model. Trends Cognit. Sci. 2011; 15 :483–506. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.08.003. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Noriuchi M., Kikuchi Y., Mori K., Kamio Y. The orbitofrontal cortex modulates parenting stress in the maternal brain. Sci. Rep. 2019; 9 :1658. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-38402-9. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Paulus M.P., Stein M.B. An insular view of anxiety. Biol. Psychiatr. 2006; 60 :383–387. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.03.042. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Perez D.L., Dworetzky B.A., Dickerson B.C., Leung L., Cohn R., Baslet G., Silbersweig D.A. An integrative neurocircuit perspective on psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and functional movement disorders: neural functional unawareness. Clin. EEG Neurosci. 2015; 46 :4–15. doi: 10.1177/1550059414555905. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Perez D.L., Matin N., Barsky A., Costumero-Ramos V., Makaretz S.J., Young S.S., Sepulcre J., LaFranceJr W.C., Keshavan M.S., Dickerson B.C. Cingulo-insular structural alterations associated with psychogenic symptoms, childhood abuse and PTSD in functional neurological disorders. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry. 2017; 88 :491–497. doi: 10.1136/jnnp-2016-314998. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Phillips M.L., Drevets W.C., Rauch S.L., Lane R. Neurobiology of emotion perception I: the neural basis of normal emotion perception. Biol. Psychiatr. 2003; 54 :504–514. doi: 10.1016/S0006-3223(03)00168-9. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Prager E., Solomon Z. Perceptions of world benevolence, meaningfulness, and self-worth among elderly israeli holocaust survivors and non-survivors. Hist. Philos. Logic. 1995; 8 :265–277. doi: 10.1080/10615809508249378. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rolls E.T., Cheng W., Gong W., Qiu J., Zhou C., Zhang J., Lv W., Ruan H., Wei D., Cheng K., Meng J., Xie P., Feng J. Cereb. Cortex N. Y. N; 2018. Functional connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex in depression and in health. 1991. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Roozendaal B., McEwen B.S., Chattarji S. Stress, memory and the amygdala. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2009; 10 :423–433. doi: 10.1038/nrn2651. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rousseau C., Drapeau A., Rahimi S. The complexity of trauma response: a 4-year follow-up of adolescent Cambodian refugees. Child Abuse Negl. 2003; 27 :1277–1290. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2003.07.001. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sagi-Schwartz A., Bakermans-Kranenburg M.J., Linn S., IJzendoorn M.H. van. Against all odds: genocidal trauma is associated with longer life-expectancy of the survivors. PloS One. 2013; 8 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069179. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sagi-Schwartz A., van IJzendoorn M.H., Grossmann K.E., Joels T., Grossmann K., Scharf M., Koren-Karie N., Alkalay S. Attachment and traumatic stress in female holocaust child survivors and their daughters. Am. J. Psychiatr. 2003; 160 :1086–1092. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.160.6.1086. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sigal J.J., Weinfeld M. Do children cope better than adults with potentially traumatic stress? A 40-year follow-up of holocaust survivors. Psychiatr. Interpers. Biol. Process. 2001; 64 :69–80. doi: 10.1521/psyc.64.1.69.18236. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Solomon P.R., Hirschoff A., Kelly B., Relin M., Brush M., DeVeaux R.D., Pendlebury W.W. A 7 minute neurocognitive screening battery highly sensitive to alzheimer's disease. Arch. Neurol. 1998; 55 :349–355. doi: 10.1001/archneur.55.3.349. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Steffens R.F., Andrykowski M.A. Posttraumatic growth inventory: overview. In: Martin C.R., Preedy V.R., Patel V.B., editors. Comprehensive Guide to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Springer International Publishing; Cham: 2015. pp. 1–14. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stevens J.S., Jovanovic T. Role of social cognition in post-traumatic stress disorder: a review and meta-analysis. Gene Brain Behav. 2019; 18 doi: 10.1111/gbb.12518. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tedeschi R.G., Calhoun L.G. The posttraumatic growth inventory: measuring the positive legacy of trauma. J. Trauma Stress. 1996; 9 :455–471. doi: 10.1007/BF02103658. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Teicher M.H., Andersen S.L., Polcari A., Anderson C.M., Navalta C.P., Kim D.M. The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev., Brain Develop. Sex Diff. Stress: Implicat. Psychopathol. 2003; 27 :33–44. doi: 10.1016/S0149-7634(03)00007-1. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thomason M.E., Marusak H.A. Toward understanding the impact of trauma on the early developing human brain. Neurosci. Early Adversity and Brain Develop. 2017; 342 :55–67. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2016.02.022. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tzourio-Mazoyer N., Landeau B., Papathanassiou D., Crivello F., Etard O., Delcroix N., Mazoyer B., Joliot M. Automated anatomical labeling of activations in SPM using a macroscopic anatomical parcellation of the MNI MRI single-subject brain. Neuroimage. 2002; 15 :273–289. doi: 10.1006/nimg.2001.0978. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Villarreal G., Hamilton D.A., Petropoulos H., Driscoll I., Rowland L.M., Griego J.A., Kodituwakku P.W., Hart B.L., Escalona R., Brooks W.M. Reduced hippocampal volume and total white matter volume in posttraumatic stress disorder. Biol. Psychiatr. 2002; 52 :119–125. doi: 10.1016/S0006-3223(02)01359-8. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Yaribeygi H., Panahi Y., Sahraei H., Johnston T.P., Sahebkar A. The impact of stress on body function: a review. EXCLI J. 2017; 16 :1057–1072. doi: 10.17179/excli2017-480. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Yehuda R., Schmeidler J., Giller E.L., Siever L.J., Binder-Brynes K. Relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder characteristics of holocaust survivors and their adult offspring. Am. J. Psychiatr. 1998; 155 :841–843. doi: 10.1176/ajp.155.6.841. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Young J.L., Waehler C.A., Laux J.M., McDaniel P.S., Hilsenroth M.J. Four studies extending the utility of the Schwartz Outcome scale (SOS-10) J. Pers. Assess. 2003; 80 :130–138. doi: 10.1207/S15327752JPA8002_02. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

To bookmark items, please log in or create an account.

Advanced Search Filters

In addition to or instead of a keyword search, use one or more of the following filters when you search.

Experiencing History Holocaust Sources in Context

• Create Account

1 of 14 Collections in

Jewish Perspectives on the Holocaust

Holocaust diaries.

Jewish diaries offer unique, personal accounts of the Holocaust. Motivated to record their experiences for a variety of reasons, these authors all had different identities, national traditions, education levels, faiths, politics, and ages. The sources collected here reflect this diversity and show the value of diaries for the study of the Holocaust.

Jewish diaries were not always recognized as critical sources for the study of the Holocaust . Due to an early focus on perpetrators and official documents when the field of Holocaust studies first began, researchers tended to dismiss Jewish diaries as subjective and unreliable. 1  But in recent decades, many scholars have shown how these concerns about personal diaries can be used to add valuable details to official accounts of events. The sources featured in this collection add personal details from a wide range of different Jewish experiences of the Holocaust. 2

Many different types of personal records that Jewish people kept under Nazi persecution can be considered to be forms of Holocaust diaries. Soon after the end of World War II , people's ideas of Holocaust diaries were shaped by the publication of Anne Frank’s diary—a personal account of a Jewish girl hiding with her family in occupied Amsterdam . 3 But the sources in this collection show that there are many other kinds of Holocaust diaries. The examples included here demonstrate that first-person writing from the period of the Holocaust takes different forms. 4

All of the authors in this collection were targeted by antisemitic Nazi racial laws for being Jewish. Whether or not they identified as Jewish or framed events in their diaries as Jewish experiences, their lives were threatened because they had been labeled Jewish by others. It is this common experience of persecution that links these very different sources. 5

Individual motivations for writing a diary—and the conditions of writing—varied considerably from case to case. Some authors kept a diary throughout their lives and started writing before the time of the Holocaust. Many others—from children like Peter Feigl to adults like Jechiel Górny —were inspired to write by the traumatic events they experienced. Some authors were driven to write by a desire to bear witness to the injustices and crimes commited against their communities. Other writers like  Moryc Brajtbart  wrote only for themselves with no other readers in mind. It is likely that many people recorded their experiences not only to document their persecution, but also to help work through their personal trauma.

Difficult and often deadly living conditions in camps and ghettos influenced the form these diaries took. During the Holocaust, very few Jewish people were able to note down events as they were happening. In the various camps in which Jews lived and died, writing was forbidden. The demands of work and survival also robbed the prisoners of the energy, time, and materials necessary to document their experiences.

Outside camps and ghettos, writing could still be extremely dangerous. If one was in hiding, anything that could give away a person’s true identity was an unnecessary risk. It took enormous courage and energy for many Jewish people to write. This means that many texts from the Holocaust that we think of as diaries actually represent an array of different writings on a wide range of forms and topics. Many diary writers went through periods in which they were not able to write. When they found the time and energy to do so—often after fleeing a ghetto to hide in a so-called  "Aryan" part of a town or village—what they wrote was more like a memoir in terms of style and narrative. 6

The authors of Holocaust diaries varied widely in terms of their personal biographies, religious traditions, and educations. The authors' motivations for writing were all different as well. The unique primary sources gathered here explore some of the wide variety of Jewish experiences of persecution during the Holocaust—and show how different kinds of Holocaust diaries can add to our understanding of these events.

Raul Hilberg, a founding contributor to the field of Holocaust studies and author of the first comprehensive study of the Holocaust, based his 1,000-page study exclusively on primary sources left by German agencies and institutions, as well as the occasional memoir by a high Nazi official. Hilberg's landmark study was published in 1961. For the authoritative edition, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

Many of the sources presented here are also featured in the book series, Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946, published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The first translation of Anne Frank's diary into English was published in 1952. For a revised critical edition, see Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

For more on Holocaust diaries as a genre of sources in scholarship, see the related online lecture from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

The definition of "Jewishness" in this context—often based on Nazi criteria—has been criticized and debated. See for example the essay by historian Isaac Deutscher, "Who Is a Jew?" in Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1981).

Memoirs are typically written after the events they depict, while diaries are generally written about current events. For an introduction to the many aspects of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust, see Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 

All 21 Items in the Holocaust Diaries Collection

Diary of Đura Rajs

tags: aging & the elderly belongings children & youth deportations forced labor health & hygiene

type: Diary

Diary of Peter Feigl

tags: belongings children & youth family health & hygiene hope money refugees & immigration religious life

Diary of Susi Hilsenrath

tags: children & youth children's diaries family health & hygiene refugees & immigration religious life

Diary of Elisabeth Ornstein

tags: belongings children & youth children's diaries family homesickness religious life

Diary of Jacques Berenholc

tags: children & youth depression food & hunger friendship health & hygiene refugees & immigration

Diary of Aharon Pick

tags: fear & intimidation ghettos health & hygiene humiliation

Diary of Jechiel Górny

tags: black market deportations forced labor ghettos group violence

Diary of Mirjam Korber

tags: depression Displaced Persons friendship ghettos health & hygiene homesickness letters & correspondence money

Diary of Elvira Kohn

tags: food & hunger health & hygiene hope liberation women's experiences

Diary of Saartje Wijnberg

tags: family gender health & hygiene liberation living underground loneliness women's experiences

Anonymous Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto

tags: children & youth community food & hunger health & hygiene living underground

Deposition of Pesakh Burshteyn

tags: aging & the elderly children & youth deportations family fear & intimidation forced labor ghettos

type: Report

Diary of Herzl Mazia

tags: food & hunger leisure & recreation letters & correspondence

Diary of Abraham Frieder

tags: bureaucracy community deportations depression fear & intimidation

Diary of Adolf Guttentag

tags: aging & the elderly deportations family ghettos health & hygiene suicide Theresienstadt

Diary of Moryc Brajtbart

tags: children & youth deportations depression family homesickness living underground loneliness

Memoir of Fryderyk Winnykamień

tags: children & youth family fear & intimidation ghettos hope humiliation living underground

type: Memoir

Diary of Michal Kraus

tags: children & youth family

Memoir of Calel Perechodnik

tags: antisemitism ghettos Judaism law enforcement religious life Zionism

Diary of Irene Hauser

tags: children & youth depression family food & hunger gender health & hygiene women's experiences

Diary of Janusz Korczak

tags: children & youth deportations depression health & hygiene

Thank You for Supporting Our Work

We would like to thank The Alexander Grass Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for Experiencing History. View the list of all donors and contributors.

Learn more about sources for your classroom

Search the Holocaust Encyclopedia

• Animated Map
• Discussion Question
• Media Essay
• Oral History
• Timeline Event
• Clear Selections
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Português do Brasil

Featured Content

Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics

Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically

For Teachers

Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust

Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust

Timeline of Events

Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Introduction to the Holocaust

• Women during the Holocaust
• Nazi Territorial Aggression: The Anschluss
• Ravensbrück
• The Enabling Act
• The Rhine Crossings in World War II
• Antisemitism
• How Many People did the Nazis Murder?

The Aftermath of the Holocaust: Effects on Survivors

For survivors, the prospect of rebuilding their lives after the Holocaust was daunting. Many feared to return to their former homes. 

Following the liberation of Nazi camps, many survivors found themselves living in displaced persons camps where they often had to wait years before emigrating to new homes. 

Many feared returning to their former homes due to postwar violence and antisemitism.

F inding refuge in other countries was frequently problematic or dangerous. Initially, immigration abroad was very difficult.

• aftermath of the Holocaust
• displaced persons
• Jewish Brigade Group
• antisemitism

This content is available in the following languages

After liberation , many Jewish survivors feared to return to their former homes because of the antisemitism (hatred of Jews) that persisted in parts of Europe and the trauma they had suffered. Some who returned home feared for their lives. In postwar Poland, for example, there were a number of pogroms (violent anti-Jewish riots). The largest of these occurred in the town of Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews and beat many others.

With few possibilities for emigration, tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors migrated westward to other European territories liberated by the western Allies. There they were housed in hundreds of refugee centers and displaced persons (DP) camps such as Bergen-Belsen in Germany. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the occupying armies of the United States, Great Britain, and France administered these camps.

A considerable number and variety of Jewish agencies worked to assist the Jewish displaced persons. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided Holocaust survivors with food and clothing, while the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) offered vocational training. Refugees also formed their own organizations, and many labored for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

The largest survivor organization, Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew for "surviving remnant"), pressed for greater emigration opportunities. Yet opportunities for legal immigration to the United States above the existing quota restrictions were still limited. The British restricted immigration to Palestine. Many borders in Europe were also closed to these homeless people.

The Jewish Brigade Group (a Palestinian Jewish unit of the British army) was formed in late 1944. Together with former partisan fighters displaced in central Europe, the Jewish Brigade Group created the Brihah (Hebrew for "flight" or "escape"). This organization that aimed to facilitate the exodus of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. Jews already living in Palestine organized "illegal" immigration by ship (also known as Aliyah Bet ). British authorities intercepted and turned back most of these vessels, however. In 1947 the British forced the ship Exodus 1947 , carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors headed for Palestine, to return to Germany. In most cases, the British detained Jewish refugees denied entry into Palestine in detention camps on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus .

With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees began streaming into the new sovereign state. Possibly as many as 170,000 Jewish displaced persons and refugees had immigrated to Israel by 1953.

In December 1945, President Harry Truman issued a directive that loosened quota restrictions on immigration to the US of persons displaced by the Nazi regime. Under this directive, more than 41,000 displaced persons immigrated to the United States. Approximately 28,000 were Jews.

In 1948, the US Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act. The act provided approximately 400,000 US immigration visas for displaced persons between January 1, 1949, and December 31, 1952. Of the 400,000 displaced persons who entered the US under the DP Act, approximately 68,000 were Jews.

Other Jewish refugees in Europe emigrated as displaced persons or refugees to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, western Europe, Mexico, South America, and South Africa.

I was 18, but I was, in fact, only 13 because those years were nothing. Those were erased from my life.  —Madeline Deutsch

Series: After the Holocaust

Liberation of Nazi Camps

Displaced Persons

About Life after the Holocaust

Postwar Trials

What is Genocide?

Genocide timeline, critical thinking questions.

• What challenges immediately faced survivors of the Holocaust?
• How did countries respond to the plight of the survivors? What obligations, if any, do countries have to the survivors of genocide and mass atrocity?

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors .

• High contrast
• Reverse contrast (yellow over black)
• Accessibility statement
• Educational Materials in other Languages
• Login / Sign-in Remember me Sign in
• Accessibility

• Reserve your Visit
• About the Holocaust
• The Holocaust Resource Center
• This Month in Holocaust History
• Video Lectures
• Video Testimony Resource Center
• The Middle East Conflict, Antisemitism and the Holocaust
• Shoah Names Database
• The Photo Archive
• Righteous Database
• The Documents Archive
• Survivor Testimonies
• Deportations Database
• The Artifacts Collection
• The Library
• Online Film Catalog
• About the Archives
• Reference and Information Services
• Hall of Names
• Gathering the Fragments
• About the Institute
• Publications
• Yad Vashem Studies
• Events of the Intl Institute
• Postdoc Fellowships

Educational Materials

• Educational Videos
• For Educators in Jewish Frameworks
• Online Courses
• e-Newsletter
• International Projects
• International Conferences
• Echoes & Reflections
• The Holocaust History Museum
• The Art Museum
• Exhibitions Pavilion
• ready2print Exhibitions
• Online Exhibitions
• "Shoah"- Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Holocaust Remembrance Day 2024
• Holocaust Remembrance Day Through the Years
• Online Torchlighter Film Archive
• Int. Holocaust Remembrance Day
• Download Pages of Testimony
• Survivor Forms
• Bar/Bat Mitzvah Twinning Program
• The Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project
• About the Righteous
• About the Program
• "I Am My Brother's Keeper". A Tribute to the Righteous
• Featured Stories
• Names of Righteous by Country
• We Seek Your Help
• How to Apply
• Opening Hours
• Reserve Your Visit Online
• Transportation and Parking
• Plan Your Visit

Sunday to Thursday: ‬09:00-17:00

Fridays and Holiday eves: ‬09:00-14:00

Yad Vashem is closed on Saturdays and all Jewish Holidays.

Entrance to the Holocaust History Museum is not permitted for children under the age of 10. Babies in strollers or carriers will not be permitted to enter.

• The Holocaust
• Digital Collections
• Exhibitions
• Remembrance
• General Articles
• The Survivors of the Holocaust

An Overview

A Zionist demonstration being held in a DP camp in Landsberg, Germany, November 1947

David Ben-Gurion during a Visit with Members of the Jewish Agency, Munich, Germany

Buchenwald survivors from the illegal immigrant ship Meteora, July 1945

Registering the Population of the DP Camp, Feldafing, Bavaria, Germany

• Survivors' Return to Life - Part 1
• Survivors' Return to Life - Part 2

Learning Environments and Teacher's Guides

• Poetry At Liberation

Historical Overview

• The Anguish of Liberation and the Surviving Remnants
• Survivors Testimony Films Series

Spring was never as beautiful as in 1945: six years of the most terrible of wars had come to an end; the Nazi regime had been beaten and defeated. Allied soldiers from the West and the East met over the smoking ruins of Berlin. Throughout Europe, people celebrated the victory and the end of the war. On both sides of the line that was soon to be called the “Iron Curtain,” a popular burst of joy and spontaneous brotherhood heralded the end of the nightmare of war, and brought, for a fleeting moment, hope for a new start to humanity.

One people did not share in the general euphoria: the Jews of Europe. They were a party to the war against  Hitler , but they were not a party to the victory. For them, victory had come too late: most of European Jewry had been exterminated. The Jewish community in Poland, the largest in Europe, had been almost entirely destroyed: of the 3,500,000 Jews living in Poland before 1939, only 250,000 were still alive, most of them in the Soviet Union; 93 percent had perished. The picture for Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkan States was nearly the same. Eastern European Jewry, the center of the Jewish people ever since the expulsion from Spain, had been liquidated in gas chambers. The Jews of Western and Southern Europe also suffered a fatal blow, though the proportion of those exterminated was lower. It is therefore no accident that the survivors make little mention of V-E Day in their awareness of the extent of the tragedy, and the beginning of an almost superhuman effort to pick up the fragments of a shattered life and start anew.

In all of Europe, not counting the Soviet Union, there were at the end of the war about 1,500,000 Jews (the figures are estimates, for no census was taken because of the general chaos), the majority in Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, France, Italy and the Low Countries. In Germany itself, there were about 60,000 Jews on V-E Day, most of them prisoners liberated from concentration camps. In Poland, there were about 70,000 Jews; some of them were survivors of the camps, others had gone into hiding during the war or found refuge on the “Aryan side” by means if false papers; there were also surviving ghetto fighters, partisans and other others who had fled to the forests. One by one, they began to emerge from their hiding places and from the forests, to the surprise and annoyance of their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors, who had already taken possession of their homes and property. At the same time, survivors of concentration camps began returning to Poland, in search of home, family, and friends. Each thought that the bitter cup had been his lot alone, and that loved ones had surely been spared. The revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, the ruins of the Jewish ghetto in  Warsaw , the Jewish quarters in cities and towns now emptied of Jews, was a terrifying experience. The homeland of Jews for a thousand years had become a graveyard. The hostility of the populace added to the feeling of terrible tragedy. A struggle was taking place in Poland between the forces of the Right, concentrated around the “Armia Krajowa”, the underground organization affiliated to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and the forces of the Left, concentrated around the temporary government established under the aegis of the Soviet occupation authorities in  Lublin . The Jews were considered allies of the Left. The majority of the Polish populace did not particularly care for the Russian occupation, which superseded the Nazi occupation. The Catholic Church had its reservations as well. The only ones who greeted the Red Army with undiminished joy were the Jews, who viewed it as their savior. Before long, not a few occupied respectable positions in the new regime, which regarded them as a loyal contingent in a hostile population. The traditional antisemitism of the Poles and the Ukrainians, which had received legitimation and encouragement during the period of the Nazi regime, now found a new ideological justification. In addition, they feared losing the economic benefits gained by looting the Jews’ property. Antisemitism was further abetted by the general insecurity that prevailed in the chaos of the transition period. Gangs of Ukrainian nationalists rampaged through the country, torturing and murdering Jews and Communists. Traveling by train meant endangering one’s life. Jews who journeyed to their home town in search of relatives or information about their fate were sometimes attacked and murdered on their way or upon arrival, by their ex-neighbors. In Poland more than 500 Jews were killed during the first year after  liberation  (November 1944 to October 1945), while the government was too weak to prevent the carnage. Before 1947, the Communist government exercised full control only in the large cities; in the rest of the country lawlessness reigned.

Thus for the remnants of Polish Jewry, V-E Day did not bring the relief they had hoped for. Nevertheless, the force of life was stronger that anything else, and the seeds of Jewish life began to develop hesitantly, on a temporary basis and under continuous tension. Emergency relief had to be provided to ensure survival; medical aid had to be administered to the sick; arrangements had to be made for the care of orphans; children had to be taken out of convents and Christian homes which had given them refuge during the Holocaust; schools and other institutions for children had to be organized; and a network had to be set up to help people search for relatives. All these efforts led to the renewal of the Jewish community. The authorities helped them to establish a Central Jewish Committee, under the leadership of Emil Sommerstein. The Committee included Jews loyal to the new regime, who represented the Communist position that Polish Jewry should take part in the rehabilitation of Poland and its reconstruction as a progressive, peace-loving country, along with Zionists like  Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman , who saw their function as providing immediate aid and relief for the war refugees.

In June 1945, the repatriation agreement between the Polish and Russian governments, permitting Polish citizens who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union during the war to return to their homeland, went into effect. Most of those affected were Jews. According to various estimates, between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews returned to Poland from Russia. This is much lower than the previous estimates of the number of Jews who survived by flight to the Soviet Union. In many cases, repatriation dashed last hopes held by refugees that their loved ones might have been spared. At the same time, it gave new life to Polish Jewry: the returnees brought with them the appearance of normalcy, with the arrival of whole Jewish families, including children and old people, a phenomenon which had disappeared several years before the Polish scene. The Communist regime devoted considerable effort to rehabilitating the returnees. In Lower Silesia, east of the Oder-Neisse Line, cities, villages and towns were left desolate after the Germans, who had inhabited the area for generations, were expelled in the wake of annexation to Poland. The Jews were invited to settle there and take advantage of the wealth left behind by the Germans. Members of the Jewish section of the Communist Party carried out a propaganda campaign in which they appealed to the survivors to rebuild their lives in Poland, with the help of the new regime. And indeed the urge to live and the desire for security and a normal life pushed them in the direction of Silesia. Community life began to develop, educational and cultural institutions were established, and economic activity was renewed, with the emphasis on productivity, especially in agriculture. For a moment, it seemed as if the situation of Polish Jewry had been stabilized.

The Flight from Poland

However, in the summer of 1946, there was a terrible pogrom, shocking in its cruelty, in the city of  Kielce . It took place in broad daylight, under the gaze of the local police (and some say with their participation). Jews who had managed to survive the German occupation now found their death in the city of Kielce and its environs, at the hands of Polish murderers. More that 70 Jews were killed; the government was too weak to prevent the catastrophe. The axe blows in the heads of the Kielce victims reverberated throughout Poland; Jews who had hoped to return and to rebuild their lives in that country experienced a rude awakening. After Kielce, there was no longer any hope for Polish Jewry except in flight. The great “Escape Movement” ( bericha ) began to take on mass proportions.

The “Escape Movement” started as the spontaneous reaction of activist groups amongst the survivors, who already in the days of German occupation had come to the conclusion that the Holocaust spelled the end of hundreds of years of coexistence between Jews and other inhabitants of Eastern Europe. This was the conclusion of  Abba Kovner  and the group of surviving fighters from the  Vilna  Ghetto holding out in the surrounding forests. The same conclusion was reached by a group of Jewish partisans, led by the Lidovsky brothers, hiding in the forests around Rovno, in Volhynia. At the same time that they gave aid to the survivors who began emerging from the forests and other hiding places, these groups made efforts to contact representatives of the  Mossad le-Aliyah Bet  (the organization which directed the “illegal immigration” to Eretz Israel, usually called the Mossad) in Romania, in order to create a southern escape route to the Mediterranean Sea. Contact was established among the various groups, and soon their activities were centered in Lublin, the seat of the provisional Communist government of Poland. Simultaneously, almost by miracle, contact was made with a third organized and active group of 300-400 halutzim (Zionist pioneers), most of them members of the “Hashomer Hatzair” youth movement and a minority of members of the “Dror” movement. At the outset of the war they had fled to Soviet Asia, with the intention of finding their way to Eretz Israel. This hope did not materialize, but the group was spared the fate of those who remained in Poland and the Baltic States. Their stay in the Soviet Union strengthened and consolidated the group. And now, after sending emissaries to make contact with the Lidovsky and Kovner groups, they hastened to Lublin, driven by the same hope that motivated the other two: to reach Eretz Israel through the southern gates of Poland.

During the same period, in January 1945, leaders of the surviving Warsaw Ghetto fighters arrived in Lublin: Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman,  Zivia Lubetkin  and Stephan Grayek. Thus it was that the remaining prewar leadership of the  Zionist youth movements  was concentrated in Lublin. As usual in times of upheaval, the young people took the initiative and assumed responsibility and leadership. The westward and southward movement of Jews began spontaneously, as a result of individuals’ determination not to rebuild their lives on the ruins of the past and the graves of their loved ones. For them, Eretz Israel was not only a land of refuge in which surviving kin might be found, but also the only place in the world where a Jew could control his own fate. The survivors of the Zionist youth movements took over the organization and direction of this spontaneous immigration, believing that the responsibility for the fate of their people was in their hands.

However, disagreements broke out among them: Abba Kovner wanted to direct their steps immediately to Eretz Israel. He had two aims: aliyah (immigration to Eretz Israel) and revenge. Yitzhak Zuckerman, on the other hand, thought that the organization should stay in Poland to organize Jews and help them escape. It was his opinion that Polish Jewry should not be left without leadership; he therefore demanded that the leaders of the youth movements remain in Poland until an alternative leadership cadre should develop. He also rejected the idea of revenge. The “Asians” took the same stand. Abba Kovner’s group continued on its way to Romania, and from there to Italy and Eretz Israel. Antek Zuckerman and his followers stayed in Poland.

At first, the “Escape Movement” consisted of a thin stream of several thousand persons a month, some organized and others not, who crossed the borders of Poland on their way west by three main routes: the northern route – through Stettin, which led to Germany; the southwestern route through Wroclaw, which led mainly to Czechoslovakia, and the southeastern route through Katowicz, which led southward. The movement was basically illegal; it took advantage of the general chaos still prevailing in the country and at its borders. In the period immediately following the war, Europe teemed with the movement of refugees; in the summer of 1945, millions returned to their homes: forced laborers now liberated, refugees who had fled from the terror of the war, captives and prisoners of war. They were joined by eight million Germans expelled from the areas of the Oder-Neisse Line. The news formed a part of this great migration; on the southern route, they disguised themselves as weeks returning to their homeland. At the Czechoslovakian border, they took advantage of the sympathy of the Czechs and the ruling Democratic-Communist Coalition government for the suffering of the Jews. At the Polish border, the “escapees” were subject to the arbitrariness of the border guards, who were often happy to look the other way in return for a watch or a pair of stockings and just as often sent them back to Poland. Whenever official border crossings were crossed, organizers of the “underground railroad” opened alternative routes through mountain passes and along hidden paths; such routes where the going was rough were referred to as “the green border.”

After the Kielce pogrom, the “Escape Movement” changed abruptly. The thin stream became a heavy current and the flight became a semi-legal. In the wake of the pogrom, Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was respected by the Polish authorities – they regarded him as the spokesman of the Polish Communist movement – succeeded in reaching a secret agreement with the Polish Minister of Defense, Marshall Marian Spychalski: in view of the authorities’ inability to cope with antisemitism and to ensure the safety of the Jews, they deemed it preferable to solve the “Jewish Problem” by giving Jews the semi-legal possibility of emigration. It was decided that Jews would be allowed to leave Poland to certain border stations, although to all appearances, it remained illegal to cross the border. This arrangement remained in effect until February 22, 1947, when the border was closed. In the interim, between 75,000 and 100,000 Jews were able to flee Poland.

In an ironic twist of fate, Germany now became a haven for Jews. When Germany was defeated by the Allied forces in 1945, the Western world was shocked and shaken by the revelation of the horrors of the concentration camps. Even though it had heard about the death camps in Eastern Poland, when the latter was liberated by the Red Army, it tended to slough off these reports as products of Soviet propaganda. With the defeat of Germany, the truth had to be faced, and it was worse than any nightmare. The liberated camps held about 60,000 Jews, mere shadows of human beings hovering between life and death. Some of them were already beyond the hope of rescue. At  Bergen-Belsen , more than 13,000 Jews died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the devoted care of the Allies’ medical teams, who did everything in their power to save them.

After the first shock of liberation had passed, the dead were buried, the sick hospitalized, and the survivors began to look for their families. Some of them had been cut off for years from the world beyond barbed wire fences and they cherished the hope that their loved ones had been spared. In pursuit of this hope, many joined the “great migration” that took place in Europe in the summer of 1945. Tens of thousands of Jewish survivors returned to their homes. Those from Western Europe, France, Italy and the Low Countries were reabsorbed into their native lands. For them, the odyssey of the Second World War was over. Such was not the case for most of the survivors from Eastern Europe. They soon discovered that the Jewish world they had known was desolated and lost, that their native lands had turned into graveyards for loved ones, and that they themselves were regarded as unwelcome guests. Eastern Europe vomited the Jews from its midst. Bereft of home, family, and country, the survivors turned round and made their way back through Poland to the same camps they had left. At least there they were assured of a morsel of bread and the friendship of others in a similar plight.

In the fall of 1945,  David Ben-Gurion , Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, made a tour of the camps in Germany. He was received with tears of joy and with a burst of enthusiasm, for the survivors he was a symbol of hope, of the continued existence of the Jewish people, and of the security that leadership arouses among those who feel lost and abandoned. The flag of Zion that he proudly carried and the idea of a Jewish state which he propounded were adopted by the survivors with unbounded love, as a kind of compensation that the world would give them for their suffering. From then on, Eretz Israel would be the last and only safe hope of redemption, and they grabbed onto it with the frenzy of drowning men on the verge of death.

For his part, Ben-Gurion saw the survivors as the great historical opportunity for Zionism. He immediately understood the unique situation that had been created in Germany: under the aegis of the Western occupation forces, especially the Americans, it would be possible to amass Eastern European refugees. These would constitute the most effective weapon in the Zionist struggle. He had already lost hope of Britain changing its Eretz Israel policy, as set down in the  White Paper  of 1939. During the war, some Zionists had hoped that after the victory Britain would renew its covenant with the Jewish people, open the doors of Eretz Israel to mass immigration, and settle the question of the political status of the country by establishing a Jewish state. Those hopes evaporated when the Labor government came into power in 1945. It became clear that Britain would continue to follow its pro-Arab policy, and that it was determined to separate the question of European Jewry, now focused on the problem of the refugees and the  “displaced persons”  (DPs), from the question of Eretz Israel. Ben Gurion thought that by increasing American involvment in the question of Eretz Israel, he would be able to create the impetus for changing the status quo. Though the British were victors in the war, they were now in debt to the Americans, beholden to them politically as well as economically, and he hoped through the latter to induce Britain to arrange its policy. It was his belief that the Jewish DPs in the American occupation zone would bring pressure to bear on the American government, so that it would urge Britain to open the doors to Eretz Israel to Jewish immigration. Therefore, even before he returned home, Ben-Gurion instructed Mossad representatives to encourage the flight of Jews from Eastern Europe, to direct them to the American occupation zone in Germany, and, at a later stage, to organize large-scale legal immigration” to Eretz Israel in spite of Britain.

If it had not been for the survivors’ strong will and their readiness to brave the dangers of the “underground railroad”, there would have been no “Escape Movement”.  The yishuv  (the Jewish community in Eretz Israel) gave this spontaneous movement its organizational skills, its economic sources and the leadership ability of its young people, who had been spared the Holocaust. The combination of the tenacity of the survivors and the determination and devotion of the shelihim (emissaries from Eretz Israel) brought about the consolidation of these unique people’s movement, which will be recorded in the annals of history as one of the forces that brought about the creation of the Jewish state. In 1946, the needs and aspirations of the Jewish refugees agreed with those of the Zionist movement, and from then on the struggle of the homeless for a new life coincided wth the struggle for the establishment of a Jewish state. Miraculously, the 1939 prophecy of Berl Katzenelson was to be fulfilled: “I knew that there were times when even a large state became powerless in the face of the sorrows and suffering of masses of people.”

In the Displaced Persons’ Camps

When Germany was defeated by the Allied forces, about 8,000,000 foreign nationals were living on her soil, most of them forced laborers and prisoners of war. The majority returned to their homes during the summer of 1945. In 1946-1947, about a million displaced persons – those for whom repatriation was considered impossible – still remained in Germany. This population consisted of three main groups: East Europeans who had been torn from their homes by the Nazis and who were afraid to return because of the Soviet conquest and new regime; Nazi liberators, who feared punishment and revenge at the hands of their own people; and Jewish refugees. Jews constituted twenty-five percent of the general population of displaced persons. At the end of the war, Germany and Austria were divided into occupation zones: the British occupation forces were in northern Germany, the French forces in the west, the American forces in the south, and the Russian forces in the east. A small number of Jewish refugees were to be found in the French occupation zone, while more than half of them were located in the British zone in the Bergen-Belsen camp. The second half of 1946 saw increasing movement of refugees from east to west, and at the beginning of 1947, when the number of displaced persons stabilized at 210,000 most of them about 175,000 were in the American zone. This was no accident; rather, it was the result of significant differences n the way the various occupation forces treated the Jewish refugees, differences which developed during the summer of 1945 and became more marked in the course of 1946. Conditions in the camps were improved, food allotments were increased, and regulations were made to assure the smooth running of the camps. These were defined as communities of displaced persons under the protection of the occupation authorities and the direction of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Almost all UNRRA personnel were Jews, and they empathized with the refugees.

The  American Joint Distribution Committee  and other Jewish philanthropic organizations were instrumental in improving the standard of living in the camps, by providing food, clothing, and by organizing educational and relief services. In the autumn of 1945, the American occupation authorities opened their territories in Germany and Austria to Jewish refugees streaming in from the East. This policy remained in effect through the summer and fall of 1946, in spite of British pressures to change it. The “escapees” were therefore directed to the American zone. In the British occupation zone, they received mush harsher treatment; the British did not regard the problem of Jewish refugees as different from that of other displaced persons, and they refused as a matter of principle to accord the Jews special treatment. As a result, living conditions in the camps located in the British zone were worse than those in the American. The British also limited the entrance of “escapees” into their area.

Two separate organizations were created to represent the survivors of the Holocaust: one in behalf of the refu gees in the American zone, and the other, led by Joseph Rosensaft for the refugees in the Bergen-Belzen camp, in the British zone. In June 1945, the “Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Germany” was established, with the participation of these two organizations, and in January 1946, the first Congress was held in Munich. No real power was in the hands of the DP bodies, which served mainly in the capacity of public spokesmen; the means for running the camps remained with the UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee, which were in no hurry to hand over their authority to the DPs.

“To Live Normal Lives”

Leo Srole, who directed the relief activities of UNRRA at Landsberg, one of the largest DP camps in the American zone, described the refugees in these words: “The Jewish refugees have an almost obsessive desire to live normal lives again.” The phrase is indicative of the mental state of the survivors of the Holocaust. In spite of the limitation, life in the camps was full of vitality and intensity; it was as if the survivors were trying to make up all at once for lost time and lost life. More than anything else, they yearned for human relationships. At first this was manifested in heartrending searches for blood relations. The almost desperate seach for familiar faces endeared to the survivor anyone who had had any connection with his former life: individuals who came from the same town or the same city and even chance acquaintances became close friends. People from the same town grouped together, and the group became a substitute for the lost family. The longing for Jewish faces was so great that a chance acquaintance of two Jews in a faraway train station often turned into a meeting of close friends and partners in fate. Clearly, the same feelings of love that were forged in concentration camps and the death camps now formed the basis for the development of new kinships. Everyone hastened to raise a family. The fact that the refugee camps were generally located in abandoned army barracks with their gigantic halls, which allowed no privacy whatsoever, and their crowded conditions which grew ever worse as the “Escape Movement” increased, did not dampen the desire for the warmth of a family. The birth rate in the camps was among the highest in the world. Even if we take into account the fact that most of the survivors were between the ages of 20 and 40, it is impossible not to be impressed by the outburst of the passion for life and the belief in the future which these survivors of the sword revealed in their readiness for renewed emotional involvement and family responsibility. The child became the symbol of a longed-for normalcy, of the renewal of the chain that had been severed with the annihilation of an entire generation of Jewish children. It was as if a child was the personal contribution of each survivor to the continued existence of the Jewish people.

One of the expressions of the yearning for intimacy was the establishment of the “aliyah kibbutzim”. Before long, those refugees who had been members of youth movements became active again; They organized young people into aliyah collectives, groups which lived together in a commune while engaging in extensive educational activities designed to prepare them for life in Eretz Israel. Their “preparation” consisted primarily of the study of Hebrew and Jewish history, and community work. The kibbutzim became centers of cultural activity lectures, community singing, theater performances and the like. For many young people, bereft of mother and father, cut off from Jewish life for years, the kibbutzim served as a substitute family, a source of friendship and a focus of identity. The educational activities carried out in the framework of the aliya collectives encompassed the refugees who were not members. The dynamic atmosphere of the youth movements, with their optimism and their wholehearted belief in Eretz Israel, helped to resocialize these youngsters, underdeveloped in body and overage in spirit, who now discovered, late, the world of youth.

Most of the inhabitants of the camps longed to return to their studies and their books. They carried out intensive cultural activity: schools and kindergartens were organized, as well as courses for adults, which were called “people’s universities.” A Yeshiva (center for religious studies) was not absent from the scene either. The library was a very important institution in the camps. No matter how many books were sent from Eretz Israel and from the United States, they were not enough to meet the demand. Rabbis serving in the American army contributed books that had been confiscated in Germany. The great variety of newspapers produced reflected the process of reconstruction of Jewish life in the camps and the political involvement of the refugees, as well as the limited education of many of them as a result of the war. Yiddish was the spoken language, and it was sometimes written in Latin script and with Polish spelling. Hebrew was a very popular subject of study as it was considered vital preparation for aliyah (immigration) to Israel.

Soldiers from Eretz Israel

Although no real statistical analyses have been made of the socio-economic status of the survivors in the Holocaust, it is estimated that about 75 percent of the adult population of the DP camps came from the lower middle classes: they were artisans, shopkeepers and merchants. About 20 percent were skilled laborers, and only about 5 percent were members of the upper middle class: managers and professionals. These findings, like the fact that a higher proportion of the survivors were men rather than woman, the absence of children and old people, and the fact that more than 50 percent of the survivor population were between the ages of 17 and 39, reflect the Nazi extermination policy. The intellectuals, the potential leadership of the Jewish people, were destroyed in their entirety. The survivors were left without leadership. While it was true that here and there natural leaders, like Dr. Zalman Greenberg from St. Ottilien, or Joseph Rosensaft from Bergen-Belsen, made their appearance, the refugees generally sought strength and support from the Jews who had not been through the war. For leadership and direction, they looked first and foremost to the Jews of the yishuv of Eretz Israel and to those of the United States. The rabbis serving in the American army had a great influence on the survivors. They had connections with the occupation authorities, and more than once opened up routes for “escapees”, or corrected injustices in the authorities’ treatment of the DPs. But by far the greatest part in organizing the refugees and consolidating them socially and politically was played by the yishuv. The first contact between the survivors of the Holocaust and the yishuv was through the Jewish volunteers from Eretz Israel who served with the British Army. Before long, these soldiers took up the task of looking after the survivors. Long before the Jewish Agency delegation arrived in Germany (they did not succeed in breaking through bureaucratic obstacles thrown in their path by the British until December 1945), the Jewish soldiers were engaged in aid and relief activities; they were the ones who supplied the vehicles, the fuel and the provisions for many “escapees” on their way to the DP camps in Germany, or to the coasts of Italy and France. They were the ones who began to organize homes for children and to take them out of convents and Christian homes. They were the ones who began to organize homes for children and to take them out of convents and Christian homes. They were the ones who began the work of organizing life in the camps. However, their most important contribution was in raising the morale of the refugees: the sight of a soldier with the Star of David on his shoulder was both exciting and moving: it aroused feelings of national pride and identification, feelings sorely needed by the survivors. This was heightened when the representatives of the various welfare organizations began to arrive, and the delegation from Eretz Israel stood out because of its identification with the DPs. Its members came from the same lands as the survivors of the Holocaust. They knew the language and the mentality of the refugees, so that for the latter, communication and attachment came naturally and spontaneously. To that was added the aura of hope wich the name “Eretz Israel” carried with it. It seemed natural that, in the absence of leadership, Jews from Eretz Israel should fulfill that function for the refugees.

Life in the camps was characterized by high tension and by the continuous alternation of hope and despair. The great source of hope was Eretz Israel. The lesson of the Holocaust was that life in the Diaspora was full of danger; there was no way of knowing what the morrow would bring, and therefore the Jews needed a homeland of their own. The feeling that the whole world was against the Jews did not disappear at the end of the war; for the DPs, the Jewish struggle for survival continued. The experience of living in a void, and the impermanence and insecurity of life in the camps strengthened this feeling. Intuitively, the survivors turned to Eretz Israel as the last port, the only hope. This was reinforced by the fact that it was the only land whose inhabitants not only expressed willingness to take in the refugees, but were also engaged in a struggle towards this end. The doors of the United States, Canada and the rest of the countries of the West remained closed to the refugees (only 12,000 of them immigrated to the United States before 1948). Thus, even those refugees who hoped to immigrate eventually to the United States, either through the help of relatives or through other means, identified publicly with the aspirations of the majority to make their home in Eretz Israel and with the demand for a Jewish homeland.

The emotional intensity of the refugees’ lives was also manifested in their political activity. Zionist parties sprung up again overnight. The controversies among them increased involvement in public life. Demonstrations, marches, public gatherings, and political meetings were everyday events. To these was added the influence of the delegation from Eretz Israel and the activity of the “shelihim.” It was no wonder that when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and UNRRA took a survey among the refugees (at the beginning of 1946), more than 95 percent expressed the desire to immigrate to Eretz Israel.

As we have noted, life in the camps was characterized by the alternation of hope and desire. The declaration of President  Harry Truman , in the summer of 1945, that 100,000 refugees should be allowed to immigrate to Eretz Israel, aroused a wave of enthusiasm. However, when months passed and it became clear that the British were not going to open the gates of Eretz Israel, despair began to set down. The creation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the preparations preceding its visit and the anticipation of its decisions caused great excitement in the camps. When the Committee reached the unanimous decision that 100,000 immigration permits should be given to displaced persons in the camps, the refugees were sure that this time redemption was at hand. Again they were to be disappointed; British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did not heed the recommendations of the committee, and the gates of Eretz Israel remained closed to immigration. Thus two years after V-E Day, the Jewish refugees were still living in transit camps, still unable to settle down and reconstruct their lives. Their frustrations increased and hopes for the future looked dim. True, their lives were not in danger, but they lived on the charity of the UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee, and most were unable to work for a living. The work they did in the camps (maintenance, building, repairs) was done on a volunteer basis. They had no desire to become part of the German economy. A black market economy was thriving in Germany at the time, mainly supported by Allied soldiers. Not a few of the DPs took part in it and this harmed the reputation of the survivors with the occupation authorities (who usually turned a blind eye to the involvement of the military in the black market), as well as with the mass media. Among the occupation forces, hostility increased towards the refugees as it decreased towards the Germans. [..] Unlike the non-Jewish refugees, no solution had been found for the Jews, and they continued – as the authorities saw it – to disrupt the pattern of life in Germany, which was gradually returning to normal.

To Eretz Israel

In the stifling, frustrating atmosphere of the camps, “illegal” immigration served as a safety valve and as the last resort. In the “illegal” immigration enterprise, as in the “Escape Movement” from Eastern Europe to Germany and Eretz Israel, private concerns coincided with national ones.

The “illegal” immigration to Eretz Israel, in contrast with the immigration sanctioned by the British authorities by means of immigration permits (“certificates”) began before the outbreak of the war and continued until 1941, and was renewed in 1944. When “escapees” began once again to make their way to the coasts of Italy, where they were met by soldiers from Eretz Israel, Aliyah Bet began to organize an extensive network of “illegal” immigration. The scheme was carried out under the leadership of Shaul Meirov (later called Avigur), who had established the central office of Aliyah Bet in Paris. The political and economic uncertainty in Europe following the war facilitated the creaton of a complex Mossad network in Italy, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and other countries. The network took care of purchasing vessels and equipping them, running the ships, boarding the immigrants and bringing them to Eretz Israel. Mossad representatives sailed with the ships and later commanded them. This network was connected with the “escape” network, and although the two were distinct organizations, both actually operated under the direction of Shaul Meirov, and were in effect two arms of the same body. One was responsible for bringing the immigrants to points of embarkation, and the other for their journey at sea. They were joined by a third organization, the Hagana, which was responsible through the naval unit of the Palmach for escorting the ships and disembarking the immigrants on the shores of Eretz Israel.

The route of “escape” and “illegal” immigration was no pleasure trip; often the refugees crossed the border while the guards looked the other way, either out of sympathy for their plight or because they had been bribed. But in other cases, a border crossing involved the danger of being sent back to the country from which they had fled, or making their way over the mountains through rough and dangerous passes. This fact did not deter families, even those with small infants, from embarking on the perilous journey. When they finally reached the coast, and either went to transit camps or boarded ship to Eretz Israel, they still faced many hardships. Even though the organizers tried their utmost to make it easier for the immigrants, living conditions aboard these ships was terrible. The refugees slept in bunks no more than half a meter wide, one on top of the other. They were crammed together, and sanitary conditions were dreadful; food, and worse, water was limited. Under such conditions, the refugees sailed through calm waters and stormy seas, in the heart of the summer and in the cold of the winter. A few days’ journey often turned into a nightmare lasting several weeks. In spite of these hardships, the DPs fought for the right to board the ships. Thus – after all they had been through – the refugees once again set out with the few belongings they had over their shoulders and undertook the perils of the journey to Eretz Israel. Between 1945 and 1948, 66 “illegal” vessels carrying 70,000 immigrants made their way to Eretz Israel. Of these, 64 sailed from Europe and two from North Africa. After the first successful landings in 1945 and at the beginning of 1946, the British tightened their control of the waterways. They attempted to stop the “Escape Movement” by appealing to the governments of Eastern and Western Europe. These fell on deaf ears - whether for reasons of domestic policy, wanting to “embarrass” Britain in the Middle East, or perhaps simply because of sympathy with the refugees, the countries did not comply. Britain appealed to the governments in control of the ports of embarkation to prevent the “illegal” vessels from sailing, but this also failed. They were left with only one course of action: a naval blockade of the coast of Eretz Israel. And so it happened that the most glorious navy in the world was pitted against the wretched vessels carrying the survivors of the Holocaust. Destroyers with the most sophisticated equipment were recruited for the struggle against the “illegal” immigration. The refugees, with nothing on their side but determination and the readiness to sacrifice, were no match for the British navy. Vessel after vessel was intercepted and brought to the port of Haifa or (after the autumn of 1946) to Cyprus. Once again, the odyssey of the DPs ended behind barbed wire, this time in detention camps in Palestine and Cyprus. More than once, boarding parties intercepting the “illegal” ships fired on and killed refugees crowded together on their decks. After July 29, 1946, the “Black Sabbath” when the united armed struggle of the yishuv in Palestine against the British mandate creased, the “illegal” immiration became the main front in the fight against the British. It was also the only strategy on which there was agreement among all circles of the yishuv and the Zionist movement; the justice of the venture was never a subject of controversy in contrast to armed resistance in Eretz Israel, on which opinion was divided.

In the end, Great Britain could not hold out against the tenacity of the survivors. The  “Exodus”  affair made it clear that under the political conditions prevailing in the aftermath of the war, Britain was not able to adequately deal with the problem of the DPs. The immigrants on board the “Exodus”, which sailed from Port-de-Bouc and was intercepted near the coast of Eretz Israel, were returned in the British ships to their port of departure. Their refusal to disembark in France, in spite of the suffering they had undergone on the British ships, demonstrated the valor of the weak against the wickedness of a power insensitive to human suffering. When the same power revealed its heartlessness by sending the immigrants back to Germany (to the British zone, where occupation authorities could disembark them by force), the entire civilized world, including citizens of Britain, was shocked by the unequal struggle in which humane justice was defeated by brute force. Three years after the end of the war, the problem of the DPs, the remnants of the Jewish people who survived the Holocaust, continued to trouble the conscience of citizens of Europe and the United States. When the British persisted in their refusal to open the gates of Eretz Israel to the survivors, it became clearer that a Jewish state would have to be created in order to solve the problem. The first to perceive this fact were the Jewish people themselves, foremost among them, members of the American Jewish community. The national awakening of American Jewry, which began after the Holocaust, was reinforced during the three years between the end of the war and the establishment of the State of Israel by the existence and suffering of the DPs and their unrelenting struggle to immigrate to Eretz Israel. The “underground railroad” and the “illegal” immigration operations exposed the American Jewish public daily to the fate of the survivors of the Holocaust, increasing their awareness of the problem. In this way, Jews in the United States as well as in other parts of the Diaspora began to see that the problem of the refugees could be solved only by the establishment of a Jewish State. The “Jewish State in the making” was created on the tracks of the “underground railroad” and on the routes of the “illegal” immigration. More than any other aspect of the flight for independence, the struggle of the refugees brought into relief the common fate of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and in the yishuv, a fate which found concrete expression in the mission of that generation: the creation of a Jewish State.

The Creation of a Jewish State

The British tried to separate the solution to the “Jewish problem” from the solution of the problem of Eretz Israel. They claimed that the problem of the Jewish refugees would be solved by returning them to their homes in Europe and rehabilitating them here. The problem of Eretz Israel was a political question that would have to be solved in accordance with their Middle East policy. Bevin’s approach was based on the denial of the connection between the Holocaust and Eretz Israel. In contrast, the Zionist leadership, headed by David Ben-Gurion, tried to prove the opposite: that the solution to the problem of the survivors of the Holocaust would be found only in Eretz Israel.

[..] After the establishment of the State of Israel, some ten thousand DPs took part in the War of Independence, and many shed blood in defense of their new homeland. When the doors were opened, about two-thirds of the 250,000 survivors chose to immigrate to Israel, despite the hardships, which followed in the wake of independence. One-third chose to reconstruct their lives in Western Europe or overseas. In 1948, changes were made in the immigration regulations of Canada and the United States, enabling a large part of the survivors to find refuge in these countries. Within a few years’ time, the DPs were fully absorbed in the countries in which they settled.

Anita Shapira , Professor of the History of the Jewish People, Dean of Faculty of the Humanities, Tel Aviv University Irit Keynan , Ph.D in the History of the Jewish People and Director of the Hagana Archives

Subscription for e-Newsletter

Thank you for registering to receive information from Yad Vashem.

You will receive periodic updates regarding recent events, publications and new initiatives.

• Plan Your Visit to Yad Vashem
• Explore Our About the Holocaust Resources
• View Our Online Exhibitions
• Access our Resources for Educators
• Yad Vashem Blog
• Shop Our Online Store
• Support Yad Vashem
• Holocaust Remembrance Days
• ready2print exhibitions
• The Museum of Holocaust Art
• Artifacts Collection
• Shoah Victims Name Recovery Project
• Search Our Digital Collections
• Shoah Victims' Names Database
• The Righteous Database
• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy

"The work of Yad Vashem is critical and necessary to remind the world of the consequences of hate"

#GivingTuesday Donate to Educate Against Hate

Interested in receiving information and updates from Yad Vashem?

Worldwide antisemitism is on the rise.

At Yad Vashem, we strive to make the world a better place by combating antisemitism through teacher training, international lectures and workshops and online courses.

We need you to partner with us in this vital mission to #EducateAgainstHate

New Yad Vashem website redirection

The good news:

The Yad Vashem website had recently undergone a major upgrade!

The less good news:

The page you are looking for has apparently been moved.

We are therefore redirecting you to what we hope will be a useful landing page.

For any questions/clarifications/problems, please contact: [email protected]

Press the X button to continue

What are you looking for?

Joel Citron, chair of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors; USC President Carol Folt; USC Life Trustee Steven Spielberg; and Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz (from left) attend the presentation of the University Medallion to the survivors who have shared their stories with the foundation. (USC Photo/Sydney Livingston)

University Medallion recognizes Holocaust survivors who entrusted testimonies to USC Shoah Foundation

USC Life Trustee Steven Spielberg created the foundation three decades ago to preserve the stories of genocide survivors.

For nearly five decades, Celina Biniaz didn’t speak about her experiences during the Holocaust — even with her children. As a girl, Biniaz survived the Krakow Ghetto, the Plaszow concentration camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp before she and her family were saved by German businessman Oskar Schindler when Biniaz was 13.

But after seeing Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List — which tells the story of how Schindler rescued more than 1,000 Jews from death in concentration camps — Biniaz was inspired to come forward to share her eyewitness account of the Holocaust and experiences as one of the youngest people on that list.

This week, 92-year-old Biniaz linked arms with Spielberg to accept USC’s highest honor, the University Medallion, from USC President Carol Folt on behalf of all the survivors whose testimonies have been preserved by USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, which Spielberg established in 1994.

“I believe the human voice speaks louder than history books,” Biniaz said. “We must always remember the power each individual has to transform the lives of others.”

About 265 faculty, university leaders and supporters of USC Shoah Foundation — including more than 30 Holocaust survivors and their families — gathered on Monday at Town and Gown on the University Park Campus for the historic ceremony.

Holocaust survivors join USC President Carol Folt, Steven Spielberg and other attendees at Town and Gown on Monday. (USC Photo/Sydney Livingston)

Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz watches the proceedings. (USC Photo/Steve Cohn)

“Stories are one of our strongest weapons in the fight against antisemitism and racial and religious hatred,” Shoah Foundation creator Steven Spielberg told the audience. (USC Photo/Steve Cohn)

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Robert Williams, left, talks with student-athlete Rae-Anne Serville and Holocaust survivor Shaul Ladany, who attended remotely. (USC Photo/Steve Cohn)

The University Medallion is displayed next to a certificate describing the award. (USC Photo/Sean Dube)

Steven Spielberg and Celina Biniaz share a moment with Joel Citron, chair of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors. (USC Photo/Steve Cohn)

The intergenerational event was at turns joyous and pensive as survivors, Shoah Foundation staff and volunteers reflected on 30 years of the foundation’s accomplishments. USC students embraced survivors and posed for cellphone photos with Spielberg, a life trustee of USC. Leslie Goldberg, a cantorial student at Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion, performed “Ani Ma’amin,” a soaring Hebrew hymn that translates to “I Believe.” One survivor wiped tears from her eyes as another survivor related his story.

“Your testimonies are an irreplaceable record of a dark time in history that the world must never forget,” Folt said, addressing the survivors present at the event and alluding to the Nazi atrocities that killed millions of Jews. “One survivor told me, ‘It’s my duty to speak for 6 million.’ And I say, ‘It’s our duty to ensure your voices are heard by 6 billion.’”

Given only three other times in the university’s history, the gold University Medallion is bestowed upon those who have made a major contribution to society and USC. The previous recipients include Walter Annenberg (1994), Dana and David Dornsife (2011) and Wallis Annenberg (2017).

One survivor told me, ‘It’s my duty to speak for 6 million.’ And I say, ‘It’s our duty to ensure your voices are heard by 6 billion.’ USC President Carol Folt

“The University Medallion is a symbol of USC’s lasting commitment to use these visual and oral histories to educate, enlighten and shape a future without hate,” Folt said.

Using stories as a tool of tolerance

The granting of the University Medallion comes at a time when antisemitism is on the rise globally in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza.

“I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history — to once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish,” Spielberg said. “In the face of brutality and persecution, we have always been a resilient and compassionate people who understand the power of empathy to combat fear.

“We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of Oct. 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” Spielberg added. “This makes us a unique force for good in the world and is why we are here today to celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now than it was in 1994.”

Spielberg, who is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust, spoke about his own experiences as a target of antisemitism, recounting how he was physically and verbally harassed as one of the only Jewish students in his high school in California. He shared that he was inspired to create the foundation when filming Schindler’s List in Krakow, Poland, after a group of Holocaust survivors visited the set. To date, the institute has recorded more than 56,000 survivor testimonies from 65 countries and in 44 languages.

Spielberg entrusted USC with the stewardship of the foundation and its audiovisual archive in 2006. Since then, USC has invested $50 million in the foundation, providing the necessary infrastructure to ensure the permanence of the collection and its use for education and research purposes.

“It is USC’s mission to preserve and protect these eyewitness accounts in perpetuity,” Folt said. “Awarding the University Medallion is one way that we do it. It will forever be a public display of our commitment to ensuring the testimonies from the survivors will be preserved for generations to come. And it honors individuals whose testimonies are preserved in the Shoah Foundation for bringing light in times of darkness.”

While countering antisemitism lies at the core of USC Shoah Foundation’s mission, Spielberg emphasized that the foundation endeavors to inoculate the world from hatred in all its forms. The foundation’s visual history archive contains testimonies from survivors of other mass-atrocity crimes and genocides, including the Armenian genocide, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the killing and expulsion of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar.

Shaping tomorrow’s leaders

USC Shoah Foundation’s visual history archive serves as an educational tool for middle and high school students and those enrolled at USC. Last summer, the foundation sponsored the first Stronger Than Hate Leadership Summit , which sent a group of USC student-athletes to Europe to tour the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and experience Jewish culture in Poland.

One of the survivors who participated in the summit was Shaul Ladany, who joined Monday’s medallion ceremony at USC virtually via Zoom from his home in Israel. The 88-year-old Olympic athlete and world-record holding speed-walker, who gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 2023, is a survivor of both the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Ladany spoke to those at the medallion ceremony about how he was able to survive the Holocaust, emigrate to Israel and become a professional athlete and academic. Afterward, USC fourth-year track and field athlete Rae-Anne Serville, who first met Ladany as part of the Stronger Than Hate summit group, had a poignant question for him.

“How did you find the strength to go through all [your] experiences while still having such a positive outlook?” Serville asked.

“I was born as an optimist,” Ladany replied.

Serville also spoke about the profound impact the trip had on her. Seeing the gas chambers where Jews perished and adjacent towns where Jews’ suffering was ignored drove home the role that bystanders can play in genocide.

“The main takeaway for me is that indifference is just as dangerous as being a perpetrator of hate,” Serville said. “Being indifferent allows hate to continue.”

Visualizing the future

Sponsoring educational trips such as the leadership summit is one way USC Shoah Foundation is evolving.

Robert Williams, the Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, noted that while the foundation is rooted in the model of survivor documentation established by Spielberg 30 years ago, the day when no living Holocaust survivors remain is drawing close.

“Today, we live in a world where there are less than 245,000 Holocaust survivors still with us to share their stories,” Williams said. “And at an average age of 86, I’m sorry to say, the sun is soon setting.”

The foundation is now working to build a collection on antisemitic violence after 1945 that will be used for scholarly pursuits and investigative journalism. It recently launched an initiative to add 10,000 testimonies to its Contemporary Antisemitism collection and has plans for a Countering Antisemitism Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research center. In partnership with schools across USC, the foundation will leverage pioneering technology to tackle online antisemitism.

Today, we live in a world where there are less than 245,000 Holocaust survivors still with us to share their stories. And at an average age of 86, I’m sorry to say, the sun is soon setting. USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Robert Williams

“The fact that we are doing this at a world-class research university, with campuses here in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C., means that we can reach the leaders of tomorrow while engaging with the leaders of today,” Williams said.

As the event concluded, Folt gathered survivors, USC Shoah Foundation staff and the day’s speakers to pose for a group photo on the staircase at the west end of the banquet room. Smiles abounded as each person found their place within the frame and bumped elbows with those standing next to them, demonstrating the web of connections USC Shoah Foundation has fostered during its three decades.

That spirit of connectedness remained even after the room had nearly emptied. Several USC student journalists and survivors lingered, locked in conversation as the survivors shared their stories. As Spielberg had said during his talk, stories are the foundation of history — and they can be unforgettable.

Related Articles

Nea chair to be usc price school’s commencement keynote speaker, ‘a top training ground’: usc school of dramatic arts gets a new home at ribbon-cutting ceremony, in memoriam: usc life trustee john f. king, 91, financial industry leader and homelessness-services advocate.

Submit Your Story

The Museum’s Behind Every Name a Story project gives voice to the experiences of survivors during the Holocaust. It consists of essays describing survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, written by survivors or their families. We encourage all survivors to share their unique experiences to ensure their preservation for future generations.

The essays, accompanying photographs, and other materials, including submissions that we are unable to feature on our website, will become a permanent part of the Museum’s records.

How to Submit an Essay

If you would like to participate in this project, please follow the steps below before submitting your entry.

Register for the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors. Learn how to register.

Read the Submission Criteria below.

Fill out our essay submission form.

​ Submit an Essay

Submission Criteria

Entries should be limited to an essay-length piece (1-5 pages). Entries might be edited for length and reviewed for historical accuracy.

Entries should focus on your experiences during the Holocaust and/or focus on one or two specific events, if desired. You can also include some information about your prewar and postwar experiences.

We encourage you to submit photographs taken before, during, or immediately after the war, as well as a present-day photograph. You may also wish to include images in electronic format of other documents or artifacts, as well as audio clips that would help to illustrate your story.

If you have additional questions, contact us at [email protected] .

This Section

Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.

• Identification Cards
• International Holocaust Remembrance Day
• Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names

• Track SoCal rain with LIVE Megadoppler 7000 HD Watch Now
• Track the rain with the LIVE Megadoppler 7000 HD Full Story

Steven Spielberg, USC honor Holocaust survivor who was on Schindler's List

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Steven Spielberg was on hand as USC honored one of the last living survivors who were rescued from the Holocaust by Schindler's List.

The USC Shoah Foundation - founded by the filmmaker after the release of his film "Schindler's List" - honored Celina Biniaz.

"Oskar Schindler saved my life by adding my name and that of my parents to the list of workers who were to be protected from the Nazi deportation," Biniaz recalled. "And 50 years later you Steven recorded my life by giving me back my voice."

The foundation preserves the history of the Holocaust and records the stories of survivors.

"These 56,000 testimonies that we have recorded are invaluable in teaching new generations what survivors have intoned for 80 years - never again. Never again," Spielberg said.

Biniaz was awarded the university's highest honor, the USC Medallion, given to those who have made extraordinary contributions to the school. Biniaz is only the fourth recipient in the honor's history.

"This is the same medallion warn by the president at commencement and on the most important of our occasions," said USC president Carol Folt. "So now, whenever I put it on, I'm actually going to be feeling very much that I carry your spirit with me and a memory of this beautiful, beautiful day."

Related Topics

• LOS ANGELES
• LOS ANGELES COUNTY
• STEVEN SPIELBERG

Top Stories

SoCal storm timeline: When will the clear skies return?

Pesky potholes on 210 Freeway near Pasadena wreak havoc on cars

Horse airlifted to safety after getting stuck in Santa Ana River in IE

'Shōgun' star Hiroyuki Sanada throws 1st pitch at Dodgers game

• 2 hours ago

Topanga Canyon closure impacts traffic as storm lingers on Easter

KC Chiefs player involved in Dallas crash, police say | Dash cam VIDEO

Shoplifter chased by police on horses in New Mexico: VIDEO

Domestic assault suspect killed in deputy shooting in East LA

USC Presents Prestigious University Medallion in Honor of Holocaust Survivors

U SC President Carol Folt Monday presented a rare University Medallion in honor of Holocaust survivors, whose stories are told and honored by the Shoah Foundation at USC.

Folt presented the honor during a gathering at the USC Town & Gown ballroom, attended by Shoah Foundation founder and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, 92, who is one of the last living survivors saved from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, whose story was told in Spielberg’s film, “Schindler’s List.”

The USC University Medallion, the university’s most prestigious honor recognizing contributions to the institution, has only been presented three times previously — to Walter Annenberg, Wallis Annenberg and jointly to Dana and David Dornsife.

Monday’s presentation honoring Holocaust survivors — more than two dozen of whom were in attendance — is in recognition of their perseverance and the impact of the Shoah Foundation, which has compiled a massive digital archive of interviews with more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors in an effort to teach lessons about the results of hate.

Folt acknowledged that the presentation came at a time when “antisemitism is on the rise,” and amid deadly Israel-Hamas war that arose following an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants in Israel that killed 1,200 people.

Spielberg stressed the importance of learning the lessons of the past.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he said. “I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history, to once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish. In the face of brutality and persecution, we have always been a resilient and compassionate people who understand the power of empathy.

“We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of October 7th and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” he said. “This makes us a unique force for good in the world and is why we are here today celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now it even was in 1994.”

News | Holocaust survivors honored with rarely given…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Investigative Reporting
• Environment

News | Holocaust survivors honored with rarely given USC Medallion

La resident celina biniaz, whose family was saved by oskar schindler, accepts the honor. steven spielberg discusses why telling the holocaust's story is vital..

Steven Spielberg hugs Holocaust survivor Daisy Miller, of Studio City, as they attend a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Rob Williams and student athlete Rae Ann Serville listen to Holocaust survivor Shaul Ladany give his survivor story via Zoom during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

The USC Medallion was given to Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Joel Citron, USC President Carol Folt, Stephen Spielberg and Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz pose with the USC Medallion which was awarded to Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Steven Spielberg visits with Holocaust survivors during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Flanked by Joel Citron and Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, Steven Spielberg hugs USC President Carol Folt during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

USC President Carol Folt speaks during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Steven Spielberg kisses Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz after she spoke during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Steven Spielberg passes the USC Medallion as he approaches the lectern to speak during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Steven Spielberg speaks at a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Steven Spielberg gets his cheek pinched as he visits with Holocaust survivors during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Cantor Leslie Goldberg sings Ani Ma’amin during a USC Medallion event honoring Holocaust survivors and the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles on Monday, March 25, 2024. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg following his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” The foundation has an archive of more than 56,000 testimonies. This is the fourth time the medallion has been awarded in USC’s history. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Los Angeles County resident Celina Biniaz is a Holocaust survivor. She is one of the last living survivors who was on the real-life Oskar Schindler’s list. More than 1,000 Polish families’ stories, including hers, were told in Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.”

Biniaz was symbolically presented with a University Medallion on behalf of all the survivors who have entrusted their testimonies to USC’s Shoah Foundation, which has an archive of more than 50,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

More than 30 Holocaust survivors and around 260 participants attended the event on Monday, March 25 at USC.

Biniaz received a standing ovation ahead of her speech.

“Oskar Schindler saved my life,” she said. “Fifty years later, Steven gave me back my voice.”

For many years, Biniaz said she didn’t talk about being a Holocaust survivor because she didn’t want to relive her trauma, but seeing “Schindler’s List” changed her mind.

“I believe that personal experiences can inspire others to value human beings,” Biniaz said during her speech. “Today, we’re living in a world that is shaken by tremendous divisions and horrible violence.”

USC President Carol Folt presented the medallion for all Holocaust survivors to Biniaz. This award is considered one of the university’s highest honors and has only been given out three other times, according to USC officials.

“We must make sure that the stories of the Holocaust are never forgotten, that the voices would never be silenced,” Folt said as she presented the award.

Thirty years ago, Spielberg founded the Shoah Foundation after being inspired by survivor stories he heard while making his film about a German who saved more than 1,000 Polish families during World War II.

“We see every day how the machinery of extremism is being used on college campuses where now 50% of students say they have experienced some discrimination because they are Jewish,” Speilberg said. “This is also happening alongside anti-Muslim, Arab and Sikh discrimination. The creation of the ‘other’ and dehumanization of any group based on their differences, are the foundations of fascism.”

Los Angeles resident Rochelle Brenner, whose mother Deborah survived the Holocaust by posing as a Russian child and hiding with a Russian family, said she is glad to see her mother’s history being honored.

“I’m amazed by her because had I been in her shoes, I don’t know if I would have survived five seconds,” Brenner said. “I don’t know if I have the strands, because she had so many near misses.”

One near-miss Deborah Brenner had was so close that she was bouncing on a Nazi’s lap. She said the man was saying how cute Brenner was moments after talking about how many Jews he had killed.

“My heart was pounding so hard, I thought he’d hear it,” Deborah, 86, said.

Survivors, like Brenner, were asked to stand as Biniaz was presented with the award, while audience members clapped.

USC will be a caregiver of the Medallion and a plaque honoring survivors will be coming to the campus in the future, according to Robert Williams, the Shoah Foundation’s executive director.

Los Angeles resident Joseph Alexander is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to seven concentration camps over the course of five years.

One of the last camps he was at was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Alexander, 101, said that upon entering Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was originally assigned to a line on the left, with sick people, children and elderly people.

“I snuck back to the other side when the Nazi turned away,” he said. “If I didn’t move back to the right, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

He said the people in the left line later went straight into gas chambers.

He was 19 at the time and 15 when he first entered a Nazi-controlled camp.

Alexander said he still shares his experience with the Holocaust in hopes of reaching the next generation.

“I spoke to hundreds of thousands of kids at high schools and many have never heard about the Holocaust,” Alexander said. “Those of us left, we have to spread the stories and let them know what happened.”

Last summer, the foundation sent USC students on a trip to Auschwitz, where Folt said one of the students found their family’s name in a book of victims’ names.

“It’s a chance for the students to understand that survival can lead to a rebirth of life and the return of a rich history between different communities even in countries that were so destroyed by Nazi Germany,” Williams said.

Other speakers at the event included Spielberg, Joel Citron, who is the son of Holocaust survivors and a panel discussion with USC student-athlete Rae-Anne Serville and Holocaust survivor and two-time Olympian Shaul Ladany.

Ladany, 88, also emphasized the need for the history of the Holocaust to continue to be taught and documented.

“I believe the story of the Holocaust should be told in order to educate the public in order for such an awful situation like the Holocaust to not repeat itself again,” he said. “The roots of it should be told to everyone, every place, and therefore, I’m happy to tell it and to try to educate people about it.”

Before leaving the stage, Spielberg had a reminder for all attendees.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he said.

• Newsroom Guidelines
• Report an Error

More in News

Crime and Public Safety | Woman and 2 children killed in head-on crash on 15 Freeway in rainy San Bernardino County desert

Crime and Public Safety | Deputies fatally shoot domestic assault suspect in East Los Angeles

Crime and Public Safety | Parents plead no contest in 4-year-old Palmdale boy’s death

SUBSCRIBER ONLY

News | bass announces more inside safe operations; 20 people brought inside from san fernando valley camp.

• Browse by Subjects
• New Releases
• Coming Soon
• Chases's Calendar
• Browse by Course
• Instructor's Copies
• Monographs & Research
• Intelligence & Security
• Library Services
• Business & Leadership
• Museum Studies
• Pastoral Resources
• Psychotherapy

Speaking the Unspeakable

Essays on sexuality, gender, and holocaust survivor memory, jonathan c. friedman, also available.

Steven Spielberg Calls Shoah Foundation ‘More Crucial Now Than Ever’ in Accepting USC University Medallion on Behalf of Holocaust Survivors

By Jack Dunn

• Olivia Colman Won’t Return for ‘Heartstopper’ Season 3 Due to Scheduling Conflict: ‘I Feel Awful About That’ 3 days ago
• Michelle Obama, Selena Gomez and Sydney Sweeney to be Honored at 49th Annual Gracie Awards 4 days ago
• New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week  4 days ago

Celina Biniaz, who at 93 is the youngest of the 1,200 people saved by Oskar Schindler in 1944, slowly walked her way to the podium as the ballroom fell still. In her presence, the audience of about 265 people who gathered Monday on the USC campus were eager to watch living history unfold on stage, no doubt with memories of friends and family lost during World War II on their minds. The audience at included 30 Holocaust survivors.

Biniaz was on hand at USC’s Town and Gown Ballroom to present Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director and founder of the Shoah Foundation , with the university’s highest honor, the USC University Medallion, bestowed on the famed filmmaker for his work on behalf of Holocaust survivors whose stories have been documented over the past 30 years by the Shoah Foundation.

Biniaz is one of the 56,000 people whose stories have been immortalized by the USC Shoah Foundation. Founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994 on the heels of “Schindler’s List,” the foundation is dedicated to the collection and preservation of personal testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Biniaz continued, “For many years…I didn’t talk about the Holocaust at all. Even my children [did not know] I was a Holocaust survivor, because I didn’t want them to relive my early trauma. That changed after I saw Schindler’s List in 1993. Steven, you gave me my voice back. Thanks to your film, and the Shoah Foundation, I was able to confront my experiences and talk about them.”

On Monday, Spielberg, Biniaz and Joel Citron, chair of the USC Shoah Foundation board of directors accepted the medallion honor from USC president Carol Folt. The kudo has been bestowed only three other times in USC’s 144-year history.

Spielberg took the stage, welcomed by a roar of applause by many survivors who have come to know him through the Shoah Foundation’s work, survivors that recall those who first inspired the foundation’s inception in 1993. When shooting “Schindler’s List,” survivors from Poland offered to share with the director their experiences with the horrors of the Holocaust. These recordings planted the seeds of what became the Shoah Foundation’s principle mission — documenting the stories of those who lived through the Holocaust era.

“By coming forward with courage to share these stories on camera, a permanent record will be preserved for the families, for history, for education and for every future generation. This became my mission. This became our work and this became the Shoah Foundation. And here we are 30 years later, still determined to give those voices every opportunity to be heard,” Spielberg said.

Monday’s gathering was especially significant to participants given the rise of antisemitism that followed the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, which resulted in the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Spielberg did not shy away from denouncing the devastating consequences of war, which include more than 31,000 civilian Palestinian casualties and rising.

“I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history, to once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish. In the face of brutality and persecution, we have always been a resilient and compassionate people who all understand the power of empathy,” Spielberg said. “We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of Oct. 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza. This makes us a unique force for good in the world and is why we are here today to celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now than it ever was in 1994.”

Citron, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, happened to be visiting his mother in Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks. Since then, has led the charge to collect accounts from survivors as part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection, which documents experiences of antisemitism after 1954.

Echoing the sentiments of his fellow speakers, he assured the crowd that the work of the Shoah Foundation would not be deterred by any acts of discrimination and violence against the Jewish community.

“I pledge to you that we will work harder than ever to educate people to become more tolerant and to fight hate in all its forms,” Citron said. “We understand and accept the awesome responsibility that survivors have vested in us through their testimonies and through their stories by relentlessly pursuing a quest to make the world just a teeny, tiny little bit better every single day.”

More From Our Brands

On fiji’s vomo island, warm vibes precede a slice of local life (and luxury), joseph eichler’s personal silicon valley home is up for grabs at $6.4 million, acc to earn the most of any conference from march madness, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, parish premiere: giancarlo esposito exercises his demons for a story he ‘needed to tell’, verify it's you, please log in.

A museum is using AI to let visitors chat with World War II survivors

Margaret Kerry-Boeke, 94, strode into a gallery at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Then she stopped short. Her jaw dropped.

It was as if she were looking in the mirror, at a crystal-clear, almost life-size video of herself.

In the video, Kerry-Boeke sat in an armchair, her legs crossed at the ankles just above her pink ballet-style flats, as she explained her work as a home-front USO dancer during World War II. “I would usually do two tap numbers, and often be called back for a third one,” she said.

Kerry-Boeke is part of what was once called “the greatest generation.” But that generation is vanishing.

Every day, 131 World War II veterans die, the museum estimates. For a new exhibit, called Voices from the Front, the museum filmed the memories of that generation before they’re all gone — and is using artificial intelligence and voice-recognition software to index the memories in a way that will allow visitors to “converse” with World War II-era Americans for decades to come.

Out of the 16.1 million Americans who served in the war, only 119,550 — less than 1 percent — are still living, as of last year’s data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. By 2036, the department projects, only a few hundred Americans who served in World War II will be alive.

“We’re racing against time,” said Peter Crean, a museum vice president and a retired U.S. Army colonel who spearheaded Voices from the Front, which opened this month.

Of the 18 people interviewed and featured in the exhibit, three died before they could see themselves on screen, including Hershel Woodrow “Woody” Williams, the last living World War II-era recipient of the Medal of Honor, earned in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

“Woody was the last one,” Crean said. “So this is now the only place that you can go to have a conversation with a World War II Medal of Honor recipient.”

Thanks to a $1.5 million donation from a supporter, the museum arranged to make volumetric videos of the exhibit’s subjects using 13 cameras, filming from every angle.

When Kerry-Boeke flew to the film studio in Los Angeles from her home in Leland, N.C., the filmmakers, from a company called StoryFile, asked her to arrive with two identical sets of clothing for a two-day interview.

A large brooch in the shape of Tinker Bell — for whom she served as a Disney model after the war — was pinned in the same spot on her sweater each day. When she sat down in the blue armchair, the film’s production team marked where her feet and her hands were and tracked them all through the shoot, for nearly 1,000 questions. That way, whenever the virtual Kerry-Boeke finishes her answer on video, her starting image moves back to the same position. In between questions, her video face looks ahead intently, as if listening to the visitor’s next query, then nods.

With future technological advances, it’s possible the interviews could become holographs, so that visitors entering the museum might find a three-dimensional Kerry-Boeke sitting in a chair, waiting to speak to them.

The exhibit uses voice recognition to process visitors’ questions and AI to search for relevant answers from the subjects’ interviews. The video responses aren’t themselves generated by AI; instead, the AI finds the best clip from the interviews.

Currently, the AI can sometimes take up to 20 seconds to find an appropriate answer and play the corresponding clip. But as more visitors ask questions, the AI will continue to get “smarter,” improving its indexing and shaving down the response time to a few seconds.

Shortly after the Voices from the Front video went live, Kerry-Boeke watched intently, standing off to the side as her video-self answered a visitor’s question about working on an early TV variety show.

When the answer was complete, Kerry-Boeke’s face lit up. “I was magnificent!” she said, linking arms with Robert Boeke, 98, her husband of four years. She stayed on American soil during the war, while he was part of the 86th Infantry Division, serving in both the European and Pacific theaters.

Two of the people interviewed were home-front workers: Kerry-Boeke and Grace Janota Brown, who made parts for Boeing B-17 heavy bombers. The other 16 were deployed World War II military personnel. They included Theodore Britton, who was among the U.S. Marine Corps’ first class of Black recruits in 1942 and would become U.S. ambassador to Barbados and Grenada; U.S. Army nurse Virginia Leeman Wilterdink; U.S. Army German translator Robert Wolf; Holocaust survivor Ben Lesser; Jeep driver Romay Johnson Davis; and Lawson Iichiro Sakal, from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of second-generation Japanese Americans who became the most decorated unit in U.S. Army history.

Kerry-Boeke and her husband first dated in Los Angeles three-quarters of a century ago, several years after the war. Then he graduated from college and moved to San Francisco to work for Mobil Oil; she stayed in Hollywood and spent nine months on a Disney stage in a bathing suit as the reference model for Tinker Bell in the 1953 animated-film version of “Peter Pan.”

That’s been recorded for posterity too.

On the exhibit’s opening day, Crean, the museum vice president, walked up to a Voices From the Front console and scrolled to Margaret Kerry-Boeke’s name on a control panel. Pushing an “ask question” button, he said, “How did you become Tinker Bell?” As the computer’s AI searched her interview for related terms, Kerry-Boeke’s on-screen image appeared to listen and nod. Then it started to tell the story about the fateful day when Disney called, looking for a dancer and actress to serve as a model for a three-and-a-half-inch animated fairy.

As soon as museum officials set out the Voice from the Front consoles, Crean saw families gathering around, with everyone asking questions, sometimes for 30 or 45 minutes at a time. When they left, he said, people would say, “Goodbye!” and wave, as if speaking with a real person.

“They’re talking to a prerecorded interview, listening to answers that were recorded two years ago. But the way the video presents itself allows it to feel real and amazing without feeling phony,” Crean said.

Younger visitors, already accustomed to having long on-screen conversations, interacted easily with the new exhibit, giving curators a preview of how best to engage future generations with the field of history.

To demonstrate the range of questions the video avatars can answer, Crean scrolled to Williams, the Medal of Honor recipient, and asked trivial questions about his favorite color and food. Williams responded immediately.

Then Crean threw him a curveball. “Can you tell me about existentialism?” he asked. “I don’t have an answer to that question,” Williams replied. “Ask me something else.”

Even if some visitors toss out silly inquiries, Kerry-Boeke sees a serious purpose for Voices from the Front. “It can help clear up questions about family members,” she said. “People can ask questions of someone and say, ‘That’s what my grandfather or grandmother did in the war.’”

It was common for family members to hear nothing about World War II from soldiers returning from combat, Kerry-Boeke said. “So many people came home and they would not talk about the war,” she said. “The trauma — that was prevalent.”

A visitor from New Orleans, Devin Dumas, 24, pulled a metal stool up to the console and read through a list of suggested questions for Williams. “What was it like to be a flamethrower operator?” he asked.

Williams, wearing a vintage Marine Corps garrison dress cap and his silver Medal of Honor star on a chain around his neck, explained how, during the fighting on Iwo Jima, he had used his flamethrower to take out Japanese machine-gunners firing from fortified pillboxes. Even though Williams was born 77 years before Dumas and died in 2022, the two men appeared to be having a natural conversation, as Dumas asked about Williams’s childhood in West Virginia and Williams explained how he’d weighed three-and-a-half pounds at birth and wasn’t expected to live.

To Dumas, the experience felt like “sitting in Mr. Woody’s home.”

When Dumas, following the suggested prompts, asked Williams about his best friend, Vernon, Williams’s voice cracked in the video as he recounted how inseparable the two men were, until Vernon was killed on Iwo Jima. Following a promise the two had made, Williams, then 22, slipped a prized ring off his dead friend’s finger and fought the remaining time on the island with Vernon’s ring in his pocket. When he returned home in 1945, Williams borrowed a car and drove the ring to Vernon’s father.

Dumas listened, speechless. The tale reminded him of his bond with his best friend, someone he couldn’t imagine losing, he said afterward.

It’s a reminder that people often connect best to history through other people’s stories — and that what is now at risk of being lost extends beyond veterans’ personal experiences to the memories of many fallen comrades and loved ones, which only live on within this rapidly disappearing generation.

• Documents reveal Abraham Lincoln pardoned Biden’s great-great-grandfather February 19, 2024 Documents reveal Abraham Lincoln pardoned Biden’s great-great-grandfather February 19, 2024
• Two prominent men died on the Titanic. Were they secretly a couple? August 7, 2022 Two prominent men died on the Titanic. Were they secretly a couple? August 7, 2022
• He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life. October 23, 2018 He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life. October 23, 2018

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Martin Greenfield, Tailor to Sinatra, Obama, Trump and Shaq, Dies at 95

He dressed six presidents, coached designers and made thousands of suits for TV shows and movies. But his beginnings were dismal: He learned to sew at Auschwitz.

By Alex Traub

Defying boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection — along with fashion writers and designers — considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.

For years, none of them knew the origins of his expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.

As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.

After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.

The garment transformed his life. Other prisoners thought it signified that Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards allowed him to roam around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was authorized to take extra food.

Max ripped another guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was creating a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”

He never forgot the lesson. “Two ripped Nazi shirts,” he continued, “helped this Jew build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company.”

Mr. Greenfield died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island, his son Tod said. He was 95.

The miseries and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield’s life exemplified the classic tale of immigration to America. He faced agony abroad, then penury in his adopted home. With workaholic energy, he built a business and made a name for himself, gaining fortune and esteem. Late in life, he finally reckoned with the tragedies of his youth that he had tried to leave behind.

The culmination of his hopes and efforts was his business, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. It managed the improbable feat of thriving by doing the opposite of the rest of its industry.

Local garment manufacturing had been declining for decades by the late 1970s, when Mr. Greenfield set up shop in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in a four-story building that had housed clothiers since at least 1917. He refused to manufacture overseas and never changed his standards.

As a result, Greenfield Clothiers was able to offer services that New York’s designers and wealthy suit-wearers could hardly find anywhere else. It is now New York City’s last surviving union clothing factory, Tod Greenfield said in an interview for this obituary in March last year.

There, some 50 garment workers, each with a particular expertise, put together a single suit over about 10 hours. They operate machinery manually, allowing them to customize every press and fold of fabric; to align patterns over suit jacket pockets flawlessly; and to render fabric stitching invisible.

The traditionalism of the shop’s techniques is embodied by several century-old buttonhole-cutting machines still in use. A year ago this month, a rusted dial on one of the contraptions indicated that it had cut about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.

The old factory became a congenial setting for political, artistic and athletic patriarchs. The acknowledgments section of Mr. Greenfield’s 2014 memoir, “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor,” enumerates the people “we have had the privilege of working alongside”: Gerald R. Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, Joseph R. Biden, Colin Powell, Ed Koch, Michael R. Bloomberg, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony — among many, many others.

A hand-sewn Greenfield suit became a low-frequency status signal most of all in New York City. The former police commissioners Raymond Kelly and William J. Bratton have both been Greenfield patrons.

Proximity to power gave Mr. Greenfield a stock of quips and anecdotes. Making a suit for the 7-foot-1 Shaquille O’Neal, he wrote in his memoir, “required enough suit fabric to make a small tent.” When The New York Post in 2016 asked him about Mr. Lansky’s tastes, Mr. Greenfield recalled that mobster’s orders exactly: 40-short, navy, single-breasted suits.

But he knew when to be discreet. “I met him once at the hotel,” Mr. Greenfield said of Mr. Lansky. “He was a very nice guy to me, and I knew he was in charge. That’s all I’m saying!”

Initially, Greenfield Clothiers’ main business was manufacturing ready-to-wear suits for department stores like Neiman Marcus and for brands like Brooks Brothers and Donna Karan. Mr. Greenfield worked directly with designers, including Ms. Karan, who confessed to The Times that he had taught her garment terminology like “drop,” “gorge” and “button stance.” She added, “His genius is in interpreting my vision.”

The business changed direction after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make 1920s-style outfits for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-2014). His shop produced more than 600 suits for 173 characters.

Other film and TV projects followed, including for the Showtime series “Billions” (2016-2023); and the movies “The Great Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what might be Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp red suit and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the title character, the Batman nemesis.

In a testament to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed the early 20th-century comedian Eddie Cantor as well as the actor playing him decades later on “Boardwalk Empire.”

Maximilian Grünfeld was born on Aug. 9, 1928, in the village of Pavlovo, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now in western Ukraine. His family was prosperous: His father, Joseph, was an industrial engineer; his mother, Tzyvia (Berger) Grünfeld, ran the home.

When Max was about 12, the German Army occupied towns around Pavlovo, and he was sent to live with relatives in Budapest. Sensing he was not wanted, he fled the night he arrived and spent about three years living in a brothel — the women there sympathetically took him in — and earning a living as a junior car mechanic.

But after sustaining a hand injury that made it difficult for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. Before long, the Nazis forced him and his family onto a train to Auschwitz. On arrival, he was separated from his mother; his sisters, Rivka and Simcha; and his brother, Sruel Baer. He remained with his father only briefly. All of them died in the Holocaust.

He witnessed many horrors. Building a brick wall once, he worked alongside another boy who was randomly used for target practice and killed.

After a harrowing death march from Auschwitz, followed by a freezing train transfer to Buchenwald, Max was finally freed in the spring of 1945. General Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware that a teenage prisoner there would one day become his tailor. In his memoir, Mr. Greenfield recalled thinking that Eisenhower, an ordinary 5-foot-10, was 10 feet tall.

He immigrated to the United States in 1947, arriving in New York as a refugee with no family, no knowledge of English and $10 in his pocket. Within weeks, he changed his name to Martin Greenfield — an attempt to sound “all-American,” he wrote — and a boyhood friend, also a refugee, got him a job at a clothier called GGG in Brooklyn.

He started as a “floor boy,” ferrying unfinished garments from one worker to another. He studied every job in the factory: darting, piping, lining, stitching, pressing, hand basting, blind armhole work and finishing.

“If the Nazis taught me anything, it was that a laborer with indispensable skills is less likely to be discarded,” he wrote.

Over time, Mr. Greenfield became a confidant of GGG’s founder and president, William P. Goldman, who introduced him to the firm’s clients, including some of the leading tuxedo-wearers of postwar America. He got to pal around with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

In 1977, 30 years after he had started, he bought the factory and renamed GGG after himself.

Decades later, he began discussing his experience of the Holocaust more widely, culminating with the publication of his memoir. Around the same time, he found himself labeled America’s best tailor by GQ , Vanity Fair and CNN .

In recent years he handed off the business to his son Tod and another son, Jay.

In addition to them, Mr. Greenfield is survived by his wife, Arlene (Bergen) Greenfield, and four grandchildren. He lived in North Hills, a Nassau County village on Long Island’s North Shore.

On his first day in Auschwitz, Max’s father, Joseph, told him that he was more likely to survive if they separated, Mr. Greenfield wrote in his memoir. The next day, the camp guards asked which prisoners had skills. Joseph grabbed Max’s wrist, thrust the boy’s hand in the air and announced, “A4406” — Max’s tattooed inmate number. “He is a mechanic. Very skilled.”

Two German soldiers hauled Max away. He did not see his father again.

Before they parted, Joseph said to Max, “If you survive, you live for us.”

The rest of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an attempt to follow that commandment, his son Tod said: “And that’s what he did.”

Alex Traub works on the Obituaries desk and occasionally reports on New York City for other sections of the paper. More about Alex Traub