The Number Of Holocaust Survivors

In this brief note I will describe a mathematical method that I have used to determine the number of holocaust survivors who were alive immediately after the war in 1945.

My calculations are totally based on mathematics and a report of Professor Sergio Dellapergola, Head, Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics of the A. Harmen Institute of the Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In his report, Professor Dellapergola informs us of two major facts according to his study: 1. the number of Jewish holocaust survivors alive World Wide in 2003 was 1,092,000 and 2. a table that gives us the number of holocaust survivors in Israel who are alive, or expected to be alive, in the years from 2002 to 2020.

I entered his data from the table in my calculator and I used second degree regression analysis. I found the number of Jewish survivors living in Israel in 2003, to have come originally from a 1945.5 group of survivors, numbered 1,586,300.

I then used this number, the number of known world wide survivors, and the number of survivors alive in Israel in 2003 and a simple ratio to calculate the total number of holocaust survivors (alive) in 1945.5.

I thus created two equal fractions, a ratio: the number of holocaust survivors alive living in Israel in 2003 over the number of these soon to be Israeli survivors who were alive in 1945.5 = to the number of total holocaust survivors alive world wide in 2003 over the total number of holocaust survivors alive in 1945.5.

I used the Professor's numbers and this new ratio 265,000/1,586,300=1,092,000/x, where x is the total number of holocaust survivors alive in 1945.5, to find x.

I found the total number of holocaust survivors alive in 1945.5, x, to be about 6,540,000.

I think this number will surprise some people who have been trained to believe that the Nazis killed almost every Jew in Europe except for the relatively few who escaped to Israel.

Barrington James