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Of these some 44 percent perished, most deported to Auschwitz. With help, some 25,000 Belgian Jews hid from the Germans. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945.

In the wake of the pogrom in Kielce, Poland on July 4, 1946, when 42 Holocaust survivors were murdered, a large number of Jews, around 95,000, fled Poland. This flood overwhelmed the Bericha organization.

Jewish Holocaust survivors grew up in Poland in the 1920’s and 1930’s and survived in Poland of the 1940’s. Their memories in the present are based on what were current events back then.

In 1981, there was the First World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. It was organized by an Auschwitz survivor, Ernest Michel. I met Ernst Michel in New York in 1977.

In 1952 the Holocaust survivors who had settled in New Orleans pose on the steps of the Jewish Community Center facing St. Charles Avenue. They are going on a tour of the city sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women Service to the Foreign Born Program.

Conditions in Auschwitz I were superior to the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Many of the brick barracks of Auschwitz I were originally single-story buildings, and they were given a second story and a spacious attic to accomodate an early expansion of the camp.

From “The Auschwitz Album”, the only photographic documentation of the entire extermination process at Auschwitz, the photographer has climbed on top of a boxcar to show the people with their bundles. On the left of the train tracks is the Lagerstrasse, the main camp street at Birkenau.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Jewish survival is the success achieved by those who emigrated to these shores. Approximately 140,000 Holocaust survivors came to America after 1948, when Congress passed a new immigration law. Most settled in the New York area.

A few hundred Jewish survivors returned after the war to settle in Radom, but soon left the city. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. city archives and removed the photographs shown here, which had been taken for identity cards.