Most Jewish communities in occupied Europe were destroyed. A few were not. The communities that came through the war essentially intact are not numerous and the reasons for each one’s survival are particular and unrepeatable. They include the Jewish populations of Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland and Albania, the Jewish populations of British-protected Palestine and the British colonies, the Jewish populations of the unconquered Allied territories (Britain, the Soviet interior, the Americas), and a small number of others. Each is a study in the conditions under which the Holocaust did not happen.
Bulgaria
The Bulgarian Jewish community of around 48,000 native Bulgarian Jews lived through the war essentially intact, despite Bulgaria being a German ally. The Bulgarian government, faced with parliamentary opposition led by Dimitar Peshev, public protest, and the active intervention of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, refused to authorise the deportation of native Bulgarian Jews to the German camps. The story is told in detail on the Bulgaria page. The Jewish population of the territories Bulgaria had occupied in Macedonia and Thrace, around 11,000 people, was deported by the same Bulgarian government and almost entirely murdered. The two facts coexist.
Denmark
The Danish Jewish community of around 7,800 was almost entirely saved through the October 1943 ferry operation across the Oresund to neutral Sweden. The story is told in detail on the Denmark page. Around 470 Danish Jews who were caught and sent to Theresienstadt mostly survived because the Danish government continued to monitor their treatment. Around 7,200 returned in May 1945 to find their homes intact.
Finland
The Finnish Jewish community of around 2,000 lived through the war essentially intact. Finland was a German co-belligerent rather than a German ally, and the Finnish government refused German requests for the deportation of Finnish Jews. Eight Jewish refugees of foreign citizenship were handed to the Germans by the Finnish state police in 1942, of whom seven were murdered; the rest of the community was protected. Finnish Jewish men served in the Finnish army. The story is on the Finland page.
Albania
Albania is the only country in occupied Europe whose Jewish population was larger at the end of the war than at the beginning. The pre-war Albanian Jewish community of around 200 was joined by around 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Yugoslavia, Greece and other German-occupied territories. The refugees were sheltered by Albanian Muslim and Catholic families, in the rural mountainous interior of the country, under a traditional Albanian code of hospitality (besa) that holds the protection of a guest as a sacred obligation. Almost the entire Albanian wartime Jewish population, native and refugee, survived. Italian occupation authorities (Albania was occupied by Italy until 1943, then by Germany) generally tolerated the Albanian protection. The post-war communist Albanian state did not encourage Jewish emigration, and most of the survivors stayed in Albania for decades.
Yad Vashem has recognised dozens of Albanian rescuers as Righteous Among the Nations. The Albanian record stands as the cleanest example of a Muslim-majority country protecting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust at scale. The community today is tiny, around 100 people, since most Albanian Jews emigrated to Israel after the fall of communism in 1991, but the wartime record is intact.
The British-protected territories
The British Empire territories were beyond the reach of the German killing programme except briefly during the German African campaign of 1941 and 1942 in Egypt and Libya, and were never occupied by Germany. The Jewish communities of Palestine (around 450,000 in 1939), of Egypt (around 75,000), of Iraq, Yemen, Aden and the wider British-protected Middle East, were not subject to the Holocaust. They suffered restrictions and harassment during the period of British and Vichy French rivalry in the Levant in 1940 and 1941, and the Jewish community in Iraq suffered the Farhud pogrom of June 1941 in which around 180 Iraqi Jews were murdered, but the wider Holocaust did not reach them.
The British Isles
The Jewish community of Britain, around 350,000 in 1939, was beyond the reach of the German killing programme. Britain was bombed but not occupied. The British Jewish community took in around 70,000 Jewish refugees from continental Europe between 1933 and 1939, including the 10,000 children of the Kindertransport. The British government refused, however, to relax its restrictive immigration quotas to take in additional refugees on the scale required, and the British administration of the Palestine Mandate continued to limit Jewish immigration there throughout the war. The British wartime record on Jewish refugees was, on balance, restrictive.
The Soviet interior and Central Asia
Around 1.5 million Soviet Jews were evacuated east into the Russian and Central Asian interior in 1941, ahead of the German advance, and survived. The cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Alma-Ata received hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in conditions that were difficult but not lethal. The pre-war Soviet Jewish communities of these cities were also spared the killings, since the German army never reached them. After the war, many of the evacuees returned to their pre-war homes; others stayed in the eastern Soviet republics.
The Americas
The Jewish communities of North and South America, including around 4 million Jews in the United States and around 200,000 in Latin America, were beyond the reach of the German killing programme. They are part of the survival story by virtue of geography. The American Jewish community would, after 1948, become the principal home of the post-war Jewish diaspora.
Pockets within occupied territories
A small number of Jewish communities within occupied Europe came through the war substantially intact through particular local circumstances. The Jewish community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the Cévennes mountains region of southern France survived through the protection of the Huguenot Protestant population, with around 5,000 Jewish refugees, mostly children, sheltered there. The Jewish community of Italian-occupied southern France survived until the Italian capitulation of September 1943. The Bulgarian and Italian protection patterns saved several thousand Jewish lives in occupied Croatia and elsewhere.
What these cases teach
The communities that survived intact share a few common features. A small Jewish community in proportion to the wider population. A geography that gave the Jewish population either escape routes (Sweden across the water, the Albanian mountains) or local hiding terrain. A national or local political and religious leadership willing to act decisively at the right moment. The absence of direct German occupation, or a German occupation regime willing to defer to local political pressure. None of these features alone was enough. The combinations that produced full survival were rare. The Holocaust killed two thirds of the Jews of Europe because, in most countries, none of these features came together at the right moment.
See also
- Bulgaria
- Finland
- Denmark and the Rescue of its Jews
- Sweden
- Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
- Righteous Among the Nations
Sources
- Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972
- Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry, Jewish Publication Society, 1969
- Hannu Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust, Holocaust Library, 1987
- Harvey Sarner, Rescue in Albania, Brunswick Press, 1997
- USHMM: Survival