Anne Frank’s family were discovered and arrested only a few months before the Nazis withdrew from Holland. They came so close to surviving the war by hiding. The father did survive the concentration camp. Typhus killed the mother and daughters just before the camp was liberated.
I’ve often wondered how many Jewish families did emerge from hiding after the Germans were gone? I’m sure there were others besides the Frank family that created hidden rooms or perhaps lived out in the countryside.
Is there any historical information on families that successfully hid from the Germans? Any books written by survivors?
This site has stats on percentages of Jews killed by country, around 12% of Jews in Austria and Germany survived.
As for books written by survivors, there are plenty but one of the most famous is Dresden Jew Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Will Bear Witness. There were even Jews being hidden in Berlin (!). Those who helped hide Jews are recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial as Righteous Among the Nations which gives you an idea of how many people were putting their necks on the line. My favourite is Leopold Socha who used his knowledge of the sewer systems of Lwow to save Jews.
It is? Your OP asks how many Jews successfully hid from the Nazis, whereas the tables Mr. Kobayashi linked to show only the proportion of Jews that were killed. Not all the Jews who survived did so by hiding (in fact, I suspect they would be a small minority of survivors), and not all those who successfully hid survived. I imagine most of the survivors managed to escape Germany and German-occupied territory rather than hide, or to remain alive in concentration camps until the end of the war. In some cases they were able to live openly without being interned (albeit in constant fear of it).
Well, I thought it a start. I’ve not been able to find a categorical breakdown of Jewish survivors be it emerging from a hiding place, being on the run when the war ended, liberated in a camp etc. (although the Anne Frank Museum page states that of 25,000 Jews who went into hiding in Amsterdam, 8,000 were discovered). The answer is made especially tricky since in areas taken by the Red Army no notice was made of Jews being unique targets of extermination as Stalin thought it would detract from the Russian sacrifice, just ‘victims of fascism’ so records in the east would be hard to get.
Categorisation might also be difficult, for instance someone like Victor Klemperer whose family was about to be deported until Bomber Command and the USAAF leveled Dresden. He ripped his yellow star off and dived for cover with the throngs of refugees, hiding in plain site. Did he ‘emerge from hiding’ when he made it to American lines? Likewise the partisan ‘forest Jews’ (who emerged from the forest when the Soviets took the area only to regret it), would they be classed as ‘in hiding’?
Its a start. I’ve read a little and saw Defiance the movie about the The Bielski partisans that rescued and saved Jews in the Polish forest. They were quite a bit more proactive than just hiding.
We may never know about the families that quietly went into hiding and simply reemerged after the war. Continuing their lives as before. Or assimilated Jewish families that weren’t arrested because the religious investigations didn’t reveal their background. For example Christian families that had a Jewish grandparent.
