That is absurd. That would make everyone who lived in Britain at the time, and survived the war, holocaust survivors. That would include my parents, so I am the son of holocaust survivors by that logic. My uncle, who is still alive served in the RAF through WW2, and is Jewish. I am pretty sure he does not think of himself as a holocaust survivor, though.
I would say that a holocaust survivor is someone who was living in Nazi occupied lands at a time when the Nazis were in control there, and belonged to one of those groups, most notably Jews, who the Nazis singled out for elimination. It is not a particularly complicated definition.
Well I do. Millions of people throughout history have survived wars their country was in. The point about the holocaust was that it was not a matter of people being killed in war, but that certain types of people were systematically killed just for being who they were.
As far as mass killing as part of the conduct of warfare as such goes, the British and American bombing campaigns on Germany and Japan probably killed more people than the Nazis did. Does that make them worse than the holocaust (and thereby the British and Americans worse than the Nazis)? I don’t think so.
Nope. You are forgetting how many civilians were killed in the USSR. But even if we ignore that, fewer German and Japanese civilians dies than the 7M+ killed as part of the Holocaust.
There are also people who claim to be traumatized because they are reincarnation of holocaust survivors, or who claim survivorship by proxy through parents, grandparents, uncles or friends of friends or whatever. I consider anybody who says they’re holocaust survivor but not actually themselves from a concentration camp to be frauds.
I think one can hardly survive (vive came from the french word vivre, “to live”, sur- = to be above something), if one isn’t alive, or at least in existence, prior to the event in question.
To survive an event, you actually have to live THROUGH the event, having one’s ancester living through it shouldn’t count, neither is living far away from it.
But on the other hand, language is a ever mutating thing, its definition change with time, and varies from sub-group to sub-group. If sufficient amount of folks take up a new meaning for it as, say, any folks who was in the nazi concentration camp instead of just the jews (homosexuals, political prisoners, gypse, etc), among these folks, holocaust survivors would be understood as more than just the jews who were at one point in Nazi concentration camp.
I guess i’d go for the strictest definition - if you weren’t in the camps or other confined areas (like, say, the Warsaw Ghetto) (or actually just rounded up in your own village to be shot), then you’re not a Holocaust survivor, you’re a Holocaust…avoider? dodger? No, we need a word with a positive connotation here: escapee? refugee? In order to be a survivor, to me, you need to first have been taken into the machinery of death, and come out the other side. Avoiding the machine altogether isn’t quite the same thing, to me. So for example, Anne Frank, had she remained in hiding until the end, would have escaped the Holocaust. Primo Levi, on the other hand, survived it.
“I’m a Holocaust escapee”.
This doesn’t communicate anything to me, sorry. It could describe someone bunkered down in an attic for years, living in constant fear. Or it could describe someone who, as soon as the Brownshirts started goose-stepping down their street, packed up their stuff and jumped on the first thing steaming.
I would have absolutely no problem calling someone like Anne Frank (prior to being captured) a Holocaust survivor. The Holocaust wasn’t just the concentration camps.
As such, it’s no different that how, using your definition of “survivor”, we have no way of distinguishing between hiding in an attic and living through a Todeslager.
Which is why I cited Warsaw and the Einsatzgruppen.
Yeah, it burns me up too.
Sure there is. You can simply ask the person using the term to provide context, if you are that curious.
Then you can decide if the term is an exaggeration, fraudalent, or accurate.
If you chatted up someone who had a experience similar to Anne Frank’s and they called themselves a Holocaust survivor, would you correct them? If they wrote an essay in the paper called “I am a Holocaust Survivor”, would you write a letter to the editor expressing your opinion that the title was incorrect?
I guess I can’t get hung up on details like this. For every person who misuses a label for personal benefit, there’s another person who wants to play the semantic pedantic role to needlessly downplay the seriousness of someone’s experiences. I guess I’d rather risk some of the former than give in to the latter.
This is why I don’t want to draw any lines. I’ve seen too much of this. Being a Holocaust survivor isn’t some kind of award. It doesn’t warrant a mark of honor per se, some survived by their own efforts, some by nothing but luck, and some in ways that shouldn’t be mentioned.
I agree that there are people who claim to be Holocaust survivors who are frauds, who were never really in peril. But I still don’t find any need to question the particulars of any one person who could have been killed and wasn’t. It serves no purpose.
The exact same argument holds with an “escapee”
No, but more because I don’t generally confront people or write letters over trivial stuff.
But I would think “Naah, you didn’t really survive as much as you dodged a bullet” - it’s the difference between being shot in the chest and surviving, versus being (unsuccessfully) shot at.
Oh, in real life it wouldn’t matter to me much, I don’t really meet many Holocaust survivors - but perhaps I should explain why the pedant in me is stirred: In South Africa, there are lots of people who call themselves “struggle veterans” when all they did was live through Apartheid, they never played any active role in fighting it. That kind of gets my goat.
Similarly, I think the term for all the people who actually were attacked in the Holocaust should distinguish that from those people who were lucky enough not to be.
Of course, even more preferable would be specifics like “camp survivor” or “Ghetto survivor” or “somehow survived the bullet when my whole village was shot” or “Hopped on a boat to NY in '33”, and I agree with you that our hypothetical Uncaught Anne Frank is much closer to the first three than the last and it’s better to err on inclusiveness on that point.
So I wouldn’t quibble too much that, say, all people in active hiding are also survivors. but it’s not my first instinct to include them.
If someone was a kid who lived under Jim Crow or Jim Crow-like policies here in the US, and they saw relatives lynched for trying to vote, attended segregated schools, and dealt with racial harrassment on a daily basis, I would have no problem saying they “survived” Jim Crow. Because literally–if we must be pedants–they did.
If they were trying to get a NAACP award for fighting for civil rights, that’s one thing. But if they were just talking about their life, I’d have no problem with them using the a turn of phrase that fits well enough for me to understand what they’re talking about. If I doubted them, I’d just ask for context and then (inwardly) judge for myself if they’re fraudsters.
No one says “Jim Crow survivor” though.
Understand that there’s a difference between “survived apartheid” and “struggle veteran” - the struggle wasn’t a passive thing. It’d be like your Jim Crow survivor calling themselves a “Civil rights activist” just for being there.
Now, to me, the Holocaust doesn’t just mean “the conditions active in German-occupied territories”, like Apartheid and Jim Crow. It means those actions actively wrought by the Germans and their allies in order to kill Jews and other undesirables. It’s harder to make precise comparisons because the US situation wasn’t a unified organised program, but e.g. “I’m a Rosewood survivor” would come closer to what I’d expect “I’m a Holocaust survivor” to convey. IMO, of course
I wanted to address some of the replies:
Absolutely not. He’s an intelligent person who knows when WWII occurred. I didn’t ask him directly, but I have no doubt in my mind that he knew that his grandfather was not escaping Nazis. I will, if the moment is right, ask him some more pointed questions the next time I see him in person. However my initial conversation was non-confrontational and I let it go. There is a time and place for most things, and if he truly believes this (my feeling is he does), he could be emotionally invested in this. I will address this at a more appropriate time. And it will be a conversation, not confrontation.
Agreed.
Is it your experience that Jewish folks use the term to refer to all people who escaped Europe from the Nazis or just Jewish people?
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That’s your opinion and you are entitled to it. However, I personally feel a tighter definition should be adhered to, to honor and remember those people (Jews and non-Jews) who actually survived the holocaust.
This is an interesting stretch of reasoning. Depending on who you spoke to, I guess this could be considered legitimate, although I’m guessing you yourself wouldn’t.
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I tend to agree with this in principle, but I think it must be taken on a case by case basis. For example, the Polish-Jew (Wladyslaw Szpilman) depicted in the movie “The Pianist”, in my eyes, was a HS. He was hiding or on the run the entire time he was outside the Warsaw ghetto. He was never out of danger, was close to starvation, and lived like an animal just to stay alive. Just because he didn’t have the experience of a concentration camp does not diminish what he personally went through. As I understand it, Anne Frank and family did not live as badly as Szpilman, however they remained in hiding in a very small space for a extended period of time. If they had lived, I think you could say they survived the Holocaust.
However, someone who was not in imminent danger, even if they were a member of one of the groups chosen for persecution, did not survive the Holocaust. They survived WWII; something millions of other people had. In my mind, you just can’t compare the experiences. If, for example, a Jewish person was able to live undetected in Nazi Europe, and was able to live and sleep like other non-Jews, I cannot see that person as a HS. WWII survivor, yes.
No argument. In fact, I wouldn’t think ANYONE would or could question your uncle’s experience. Especially since he had a special, numbered tattoo on his arm thanks to the Nazis.
I agree with your statement and agree thst it is not and should not be a complicated definition.
As mentioned above, I think cases like Anne Frank’s should be taken on a case by case basis. I don’t know how difficult it was to live like Anne Frank and her family. Clearly it was stressful, but I’m guessing it was a picnic compared to those in a concentration camp. Still, the emotional stress of being “hunted” and in fear for your life if someone heard you make a sound at the wrong moment has its own set of difficulties, and I wouldn’t dismiss their experience out of hand until I learned more about it. Clearly they “escaped” the Holocaust. But I think an argument could be made that they “survived” it also. My example of Szpilman is a clear case of survival. Depending on how much help someone hiding out received, if they were in imminent danger of being discovered vs. not being discovered, etc… Makes it not such a cut and dry situation. Einstein, as I mentioned before, lived out the war years abroad, and he wasn’t living in a stressful environment. He is/was a WWII survivor, not a HS (IMO, of course).
I’m not sure if the Jim Crow experiences can be used as an example to better understand the situation of those subjected to extermination by the state. If it helps clarify something for folks, fine, but I think it confuses the issue… The fundamental premise is different. Jim Crow laws were not Federal, but US state laws, meant to oppressed colored people in America, and in particular the American south. But Jim Crow was NOT an organized program at the federal level to eliminate an entire race of people. Although many blacks were lynched and otherwise killed, they were not rounded up by the hundreds of thousands for extermination. This is a significant difference.
My grandmother, who was a very talented artist (and still is, though she’s in her 90s now) managed to alter the documentation of her and her German Jewish family, and they escaped in 1939 through Europe, ending up in Canada sometime in 1940. Many of her extended family did not make it out. Oddly enough, I’ve never thought of my grandmother as a Holocaust survivor- they certainly escaped by the skin of their teeth, and had to live “low” for a while as they escaped through Europe, but they were never actually in the custody of Nazis.
Perhaps she is. Thinking back on family lore (my great-grandfather, a great storyteller, claimed that he had sixteen “escapes” from Nazi capture throughout Europe, including coming face-to-face with Adolph Hitler) they probably all fit the definition.
Being Jewish, we were usually speaking about Jews. I’ve never heard of now Jews who escaped not being eligible for the term.
Perhaps the woman my nephew spoke to was a Gypsy. 
I understand. It is my personal feeling that drawing comparisons between tragedies does not serve that purpose. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but I do so to honor the dead who suffered as a result of the imaginary lines drawn between people.
Same here. Just always assumed that was what people meant with the term.
However, children of genocide survivors in general (not especially the Holocaust) are known to sometimes face specific psycologic/psychiatric issues, especially when the parent(s) were unwilling to communicate about their experience.
(By the way, I had a much stricter definition of “Holocaust survivor”. I wouldn’t have included people who hide and never were arrested, for instance)