© TOM KISKEN/THE STAR / USA TODAY NETWORK
(Oswiecim, Poland) — Survivors and family members will gather this coming Monday in Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Soviet army. It was the site of unimaginable Nazi atrocities, the murder of a million Jews during the Holocaust and a hundred thousand other victims of fascism. Some three-thousand people are expected for the ceremony, but only 50 are survivors. Ten years ago, 300 survivors were in attendance
As of 2024, there were approximately 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive. Those numbers come from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as the Claims Conference. The average age of the survivors is 86-year-old. 96 percent are “child survivors” meaning they were children during the Holocaust. Nearly half of the survivors call Israel home.
