Holocaust survivors

Yehuda R, Kahana B, Binder-Brynes K, Southwick S, Mason JW, Giller EL (1995b) Low urinary cortisol excretion in Holocaust survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder. Am J Psychiatry 152 982-986... 

Yehuda R, Bierer LM, Schmeidler J, Aferiat DH, Breslau I, Dolan S (2000) Low cortisol and risk for PTSD in adult offspring of holocaust survivors. Am J Psychiatry 157 1252-1259... 

Yehuda R, Halligan SL, Bierer LM (2002a) Cortisol levels in adult offspring of Holocaust survivors relation to PTSD symptom severity in the parent and child. Psychoneimoen-docrinology 27 171-180... 

Jewish organizations launched a vicious smear campaign to destroy not only his reputation, but his ability to make a living. Leading the charge was Shelly Shapiro and her group, Holocaust Survivors... 

The problem of the Holocaust Survivor Syndrome received international attention at the time of the Wuppertal trial. Medical sources told me that the Ukrainian-American psychiatrist Dr. 0. Wolansky was one of the leading experts on this subject today, and I was referred to a seminar he had given on this subject on January 25, 1993, at a Congress held in the Polish Consulate in New York and attended by 150 Polish, White Russian and Ukrainian physicians. To quote an excerpt ... 

According to information from the Israel-based official organization Amcha, which devotes all its activities to taking care of Holocaust survivors, 834,000 to 960,000 Holocaust survivors were still alive in the summer of 1997. The same organization defines a Holocaust survivor as... 

According to a letter from the German section of this organization, roughly V3 of all Holocaust survivors are so-called child survivors ,93 and where child survivors means that the according Holocaust survivors were not older than 16 years at the end of the war.94... 

If the average life expectancy of all age groups of these survivors as well as the statistical distribution of the Jews over these age groups in 1945 were known, it would be possible to calculate approximately how many Holocaust survivors were still alive in 1945, i.e., after the war ended. Unfortunately we do not have such data, but we can on the one hand estimate this age distribution by extrapolating it from the known statistical distribution of the Jews of the 1920s and 1930s,95 corrected by Amcha s statement about the V3 of child survivors . On the other hand we can draw on the life expectancy statistics of another people whose fate from 1945 onwards was at least similar to that of the surviving European Jews of that time. 

Probably the results as shown in the following table may change if we get better data about the death rates of the Jewish survivors and about their age distribution then and today. But certainly our results are likely to at least approximate the truth. If one assumes a more severe fate for the average Holocaust survivor than for the average German - which most scientists tend to do - then this would result in an even higher number of survivors in 1945. 

The number of Holocaust victims would be the difference between our calculated number of survivors, and the number of Jews who were alive in Europe prior to National Socialist persecution. The inflationary definition of Holocaust survivor by Amcha, however, makes our task difficult. Given this definition, it is for example not clear how one should handle the hundreds of thousands... 

Adina Mishkoff, Administrative Assistant Amcha, Jerusalem, E-mail from Wed, Aug. 13, 1997, 16 17 20 CDT, to Multiple recipients of list H-HOLOCAUST E. Spanic, H. Factor, V. Struminsky, Number of Living Holocaust Survivors , Amcha Press Release, PO Box 2930,1-91029 Jerusalem, July 27, 1997. 

Jewish Holocaust Survivors according to Amcha and drawing on German death tables ... 

However, one should be aware that even the published number of Holocaust survivors is a figure likely to be manipulated due to its financial implications for Jewish organizations who are permanently claiming compensations (cf. Note 90). Thus, it was not very surprising that R. Bloch, Jewish head of the Swiss Holocaust fund, the task of which is the collection of money for Jewish Holocaust survivors, announced in early 1998 that there are more than 1,000,000 Holocaust survivors still alive at that time.102 There appears to be a permanent Jewish resurrection nowadays... 

Another Holocaust survivor, Elisa Springer, claimed in her memoirs, which appeared 42 years after the war( ), that the gas chambers and ovens 10 had started to operate in Bergen-Belsen after Josef Kramer had become camp commandant.11... 

Davidson, S. (1980) The Clinical Effects of Massive Psychic Trauma in Families of Holocaust Survivors. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 6 9-21. 

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