IN FEBRUARY 1945, six months before the official end of the war in Europe, a writer in a newspaper published in Lyons described the condition of his fellow Jews: ‘We are like the inhabitants of a city that has been devastated by an earthquake; we survey the ruins and act instinctively [naturellement].’The experience in the French city was repeated throughout the Continent. The Jewish population of Europe had been reduced by nearly two-thirds in the Final Solution. Fewer than 2 million Jews remained in formerly Nazi-occupied areas outside the Soviet Union. In addition to Great Britain, the only intact Jewish populations were the small settlements in Switzerland, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey. Of the twenty-one countries conquered by the Germans during the war, the Jewish communities of six had suffered losses of over 80 per cent, and the communities of five others were reduced to between half and three-quarters of their pre-war numbers. The relative percentage of Jewish losses was almost six times greater than that of the Russians, nearly eight times greater than that of the Poles, and ninety times greater than that of the British.

East European Jewry suffered the greatest devastation. Numbering 5 million in 1939, the Jewish population of eastern Europe (excluding Russia) had shrunk to 915,000. Approximately 90 per cent of pre-war Polish, Baltic, and Czech Jewry had been slaughtered or were scattered across the globe. Over two-thirds of Hungarian Jewry and half of the Jews of Romania had lost their lives. Entire communities were wiped out and the future of countless others remained in serious doubt. Among the victims of the Holocaust were the rabbis, poets, teachers, and intellectuals who had provided the intellectual leaven for the vibrant Jewish cultures of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. With the death of nearly two-thirds of its adherents and speakers, the Yiddish language would cede its dominant place in Jewish cultural life to English and Hebrew.

In the countries of western Europe, on the other hand, there was wide variation in Jewish mortality figures. This was due in large part to the significant differences in the size of the communities, the attitudes of citizens towards Jews, the accessibility of escape routes, and the response of government officials to Nazi policies.