History of Sorts

Below are the estimated numbers of the Holocaust victims. The keyword is estimated because an exact number is not known.

I believe the actual number is higher when you take in consideration the numbers of victims who died on the transports, not all of them will have been recorded. Women who were late in their pregnancies whose babies may have been born on the trains or shortly after arriving, many of those babies would have died and not have been recorded.

I have no evidence of this but it only makes sense that this would be the case.

The numbers

Jews:6 million

Soviet civilians:5.7 million

Soviet prisoners of war: 3 million including 50,000 Jewish soldiers.

Non-Jewish Polish civilians:1.8 million

Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina):312,000

People with disabilities living in institutions: 250,000

Roma: 196,000–220,000

Jehovah’s Witnesses: around 1,900

Repeat criminal offenders and so-called a-socials: at least 70,000

Homosexuals: several thousand

Then there are an undetermined number of political activists, Spanish republican soldiers,Esperanto speakers,freemasons.

But those numbers on their own really mean nothing. They are merely statistics. What we need to remember is not so much the numbers but that there is a story behind each of those millions of deaths.

Stories like Sophia Viool-Soesman

She was born in Rotterdam on January 28,1895 in a family of 8 children , one of her siblings died at birth.Three other siblings died before World War 2. Sofia was killed on 23 April 1943 in Sobibor, aged 48.

Her brother Leo was blind but survived the war, he died on May 4th,1970.

We should never ever forget the stories behind all the victims and when we know their stories or part of it we have to tell those stories,

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Sources

USHMM

Yad Vashem

The drawing at the start of the blog is by Alfred Glück (1921-2007)