The Fate of the Jews Across Europe

“In the meantime, I continued as usual going to school, to the Jewish school; and every night children would disappear. Every morning the teacher would open her attendance book, count the children, and as there were fewer children, she would ask: ‘Does anyone know if he’s sick, or has he been taken away?’ Mostly, they were taken away. So the teacher would erase the name from the list of students and continue teaching.”

Elisheva Weiss

Only about 10% of Polish Jewry survived the Holocaust, the majority in the Soviet Union. The fate of the Jews of Western Europe varied depending upon the country. In some of the countries most of the Jews survived (in Italy and France about 25% of the Jews perished), in other countries the Jewish population was partially destroyed (in Belgium 45% of the Jews were murdered), while in others most of the Jews were killed (in Holland, about 80% of the Jews perished during the Holocaust). Most of the Jews of Slovakia, Hungary, Greece and Yugoslavia were murdered by the Germans and their collaborators, while almost 75% of the Jews living under Bulgarian rule survived.