Polish Children Survivors

Background

Lucjan Dobroszycki, a scholar at YIVO in New York, collected the information contained in Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York and London, England, 1994) over many years.  His purpose was to describe what happened in the small surviving Polish Jewish community after World War II, a community that was less than one tenth of the community which existed prior to the Holocaust.  His conclusion can be seen in the heading for the book's first chapter, "The Reemergence and Decline of the Jewish Community in Poland 1944-1947."  Most of his book describes in statistical terms where this community was located, how they lived, and what happened to them.

The Database

The extent of information on each child is limited, but includes all that appears in the book with the exception of "Caretaker, remarks".  Information on the source of each list is given in the book and should be consulted there.  The list appears on JewishGen with the permission of the publisher, M. E. Sharpe.

The database includes the names of 1,566 Polish Jewish surviving children, who are listed in Part 5 of Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland.  The names were broken down under the following headings in Part 5:

All the names from the five sources listed in the table above have been merged into a single alphabetical list.

The fields in the database are as follows:

• Family Name
• Given Name
• Alternate Surname (Unknown derivation — in some cases a possible Christian name)
• Alternate Given Name (Unknown derivation — in some cases a possible Christian name)
• Date of Birth
• Place of Birth
• Father's Given Name
• Father's Surname
• Mother's Given Name
• Mother's Maiden Name
• Last Place of Residence
• Comments

Finally, researchers should be aware that this brief list constitutes only a tiny proportion of Polish Jewish survivors resident in Poland in the immediate post-war years.  The far larger collection of names and information — over 200,000 names — is held at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where it is gradually being computerized.  A microfilmed copy of this information is held in the archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. [RG 15.057M].

Researchers are urged to search other databases on JewishGen for Polish survivors, particularly the Pinkas HaNitzolim volumes, http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/0064_PinkasNitzolimI.html and http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/0058_PinkasNitzolimII.html.

Acknowledgements

The information contained in this database was indexed from the book Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York and London, England, 1994).  This information is accessible to you today thanks to the effort of volunteers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Peter Landé
May 2004

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via both JewishGen's Holocaust Database and the JewishGen All Poland Database.