Holocaust survivor

Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew: שארית הפליטה‎, lit. 'the surviving remnant'‎) is a biblical (Ezra 9:14 and I Chronicles 4:43) term used by Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust to refer to themselves and the communities they formed following their liberation in the spring of 1945.

Hundreds of thousands of survivors spent several years following their repatriation in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. The refugees became socially and politically organized, advocating at first for their political and human rights in the camps, and then for the right to emigrate to British Mandate of Palestine, most of which became the Jewish State of Israel where the majority ended up living by 1950.

In an effort to destroy the evidence of war crimes, Nazi authorities and military staff accelerated the pace of killings, forced victims on death marches, and attempted to deport many of them away from the rapidly shrinking German lines. As the German war effort collapsed, survivors were typically left on their own, on trains, by the sides of roads, and in camps. Concentration camps and death camps were liberated by Allied forces in the final stages of the war, beginning with Majdanek, in July 1944, and Auschwitz, in January 1945; Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Mauthausen, and other camps were liberated in April and May 1945.

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