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Number
of "survivor accounts" in late 1950s
Reply-To: H-NET List for History of the Holocaust
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Sender: H-NET List for History of the Holocaust
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Sun, 10 May 1998
Author: Alan
Jacobs
Idea, A Journal of Social
Issues
http://www.bravenewweb.com/idea
e-mail [email protected]
HENRY Greenspan wrote:
In his essay, "I Was Not There," included in Berel
Lang's collection, Writing and
the Holocaust (1988), Raul Hilberg
states:
"Sometime during the second half of the late
1950s, the historian and bibliographer Philip
Friedman, a survivor himself, told me that
survivors' accounts were getting out of hand, that
they were too numerous to list. At last count there
were 18,000. That was thirty years ago."
I am assuming Friedman/Hilberg are referring to
"accounts" of all types -- published, unpublished, all
forms and formats, etc. Still, it strikes me as an
extraordinary number. Can anyone offer data that supports
or challenges the numerical claim? (I realize that
Hilberg's phrase, "getting out of hand," lends itself to
editorial comment, but, personally, I'm just asking about
the number.)
Thanks,
Hank Greenspan U-Michigan
AT one time there were 5,000 survivors of Auschwitz
alone in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The staff
at the Auschwitz Museum, reports 70,000 survived
Auschwitz/Birkenau/Monowitz. There were many, many
transports sent west in the fall and early winter of
1944, to Dora, Dachau, Belsen etc... These journeys were
even more terrible than the ones that had brought people
to Auschwitz in the first place; no food, water, inmates
extremely weak from months, and sometimes even years, of
camp existence. Let's say another 200,000 -- 300,000 from
other camps survived... This is still a small number if
one thinks of the 11,000,000 people murdered in the
camps.
I think another way to find out how many survivors
there are/were in the States alone is to contact the
people who run the Gathering of Survivors every year.
Alan Jacobs
Author: Allen
Glicksman
[email protected]
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998
If one is asking how many survived, rather than the
number of accounts, then an international count was done
a year ago for the legal action against the Swiss. I did
the estimate for the US and calculated that there are
between 140,000-160,000 survivors living here. There are
about 350,000 in Israel. I don't remember the other
numbers, but can look the table up.
Allen
Glicksman
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