Jewish survivors (in numbers)

According to Dr. L. de Jong, more than 5,200 Jews survived deportation. Fewer than 1,200 survivors were liberated from various concentration camps and satellite camps (about 1,150 had survived deportation to Auschwitz, 19 had survived Sobibor), about 1,800 survivors were liberated from Tröbitz (not far from Leipzig), almost 200 from Magdeburg (these two groups were from Bergen-Belsen) and about 1,500 survivors were liberated from Theresienstadt. Furthermore, 110 Dutch Jews had been transported from Bergen-Belsen to Palestine in June and July 1944, and 437 Dutch Jews had been allowed to travel from Theresienstadt to Switzerland in February 1945 (L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War’), vol. 8, pp. 708 and 783, vol. 10b, pp. 1213 and 1215, vol. 12, pp. 54 and 110). Among the Dutch Jews liberated from Theresienstadt was the group of approximately 50 ‘Unknown Children’ (see: Daphne Meijer, Onbekende Kinderen; De laatste trein uit Westerbork (‘Unknown Children; The last train from Westerbork’, Amsterdam 2001)).

The total number of children among the surviving deportees is unknown. In her book Om het joodse kind (‘For the Jewish Child’, Amsterdam 1991), Elma Verhey reports that only four to six thousand Jewish children survived the war in the Netherlands, most of them in hiding (p. 16). According to L. de Jong, about 4,500 Jewish children survived the war in hiding (Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War’), vol. 12, p. 57). These numbers suggest that probably no more than a few hundred children survived deportation. It must be stressed that this is a very vague and somewhat arbitrary estimate.

There were other groups of Jews who survived the war: about 16,000 people in hiding, about 10,000 people in mixed marriages, about 3,000 people who had been accepted by the German Hans Calmeyer as 'Half-Jews', about 1,100 Protestant Jews who were not in mixed marriages, about 3,000 who had managed to flee to Switzerland or elsewhere, and finally about 900 Jews who were in camp Westerbork when it was liberated. The number of Jews in the Netherlands some time after the liberation, when the survivors had returned, will not have been much lower than about 36,000. (L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War’), vol. 12, pp. 54-55).

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