# What qualifies someone as a Holocaust survivor? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 14, 2010, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-qualifies-someone-as-a-holocaust-survivor/560605 "2010-11-14T01:01:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 50
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2010, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-qualifies-someone-as-a-holocaust-survivor/560605/50 "2010-11-26T04:07:08Z")
> [@handsomeharry](#): > > I think it is shameful for somebody that wasn’t in a death camp to call themselves a HC. So, my maternal grandmother, who saw the Nazis break into her home and drag her father and brother out into the night, came home several days later to find that her mother had hanged herself, and then managed to escape (eventually) to the United States should’ve been ashamed to consider herself a survivor of the Holocaust? > [@handsomeharry](#): > > It would be like me calling myself survivor of 9/11 because I was alive when it happened, and it involved targeting ‘my people.’ No, it wouldn’t. Do you not grok the difference between a one-off terrorist attack and years upon years of systemic brutality, concentration camps and death camps? If Anne Frank hadn’t been discovered and had emerged into daylight at the end of the war, she’d be ashamed to call herself a Holocaust survivor? For serious? > [@handsomeharry](#): > > Also, the term Holocaust, as used, doesn’t mean living in an occupied country. Nobody said it did, ever. Surviving the Holocaust in one of the occupied countries in which it was being carried out means that one survived the Holocaust. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-qualifies-someone-as-a-holocaust-survivor/560605)._