r/skeptic • u/Huge-Development-704 • 3d ago
How common was it really for European families to hide Jewish people during World War II?
I see and hear people say this about their families fairly frequently. Mostly on the internet, but also a couple of times in person. Was it really that widespread? Don't get me wrong, I believe that the people making the claim believe it's true, and I believe that many of them would be true, but I also can't help but feel it's probably not in many cases. To me, it smacks of guilt and cope. Thoughts?
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u/Chewbacca_IL 3d ago
There have been around 28,000 recipients of the “righteous among the nations” award up to now. Representing around 10,000 different cases of rescue. That’s not a large number if you take into consideration how many people lived under Nazi occupation during that time. I would understand people trying to highlight those stories even if it was a distant relative of theirs.
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u/tomtttttttttttt 3d ago
I agree with u/Zenigata - never seen/can't find any good numbers, I don't think it was not common but at the same time I would think not common probably translates to some thousands of people who did.
Also through Kindertransport over 10,000 Jewish children went to or passed through various european countries before/at the start of the war, and in the UK anyway lots of people were involved in housing them when they arrived - 10,000 children came to the UK and got housed with families but not just the families where the children ended up with were involved as there were others that helped stage children as they came in and were assigned to their permanent foster family. There were also a few thousand that went to Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden and France (and hopefully ended up in the UK eventually!)
It's possible that their families were involved in kindertransporten in/through other countries, or at the sending end like Czech, Poland etc and that story has got whispered down the generations to hiding jewish families during the war.
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u/HipsEnergy 3d ago
I know several people in Belgium and France who hid Jews. Two examples : My parents' friends lived in a castle near the BE-LUx border, and we met a Jewish guy who'd been one of the 20 or so kids who'd been hidden there. My ex-MIL used to bike 2 hours a day with friends when she was a teenager, to bring food to the Jews hiding in the countryside in southwest France.. One time, at a village fête, everyone was fairly drunk and they mentioned someone who'd "disappeared." Turns out the then teenagers found out he was snitching to the Nazis and took care of the issue.
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u/bonnydoe 3d ago
Netherlands:
During the war, between 300,000 and 330,000 people were in hiding in the Netherlands. Among them were 28,000 Jews. This may not be many relative to the total number of people in hiding, but for a Jewish community of 140,000 people, it was substantial.
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u/pogpole 2d ago
I think you might not be taking into account the fact that "families" tend to increase in size over time. Someone who helped hide Jewish people in the 1940s could easily have a hundred living descendants today. So the number of people who can legitimately make the claim will increase with each generation.
You seem to be basing your skepticism on a gut feeling that you are hearing these stories too often. But this is anecdotal and subjective. Knowing the actual number of families who hid Jewish people wouldn't tell you anything, because you don't have anything concrete to compare it to.
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u/Regular-Ad7438 2d ago
My grandparents didn't hide anyone, but they traded with them when it was illegal to do so.By then, many of the Jewish family businesses had been forced to close, making it difficult for the families to sustain themselves because they were unable to sell their stock. My grandparents had a bakery, a cow, and grew vegetables. They would make butter and trade it secretly at night. They also walked for miles at night with a small handcart to trade butter for fish, and supplied the local families with that too. It seems like at least some ordinary folks tried to find ways to keep their communities from collapsing, at least for a while.
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u/DixieLandDelight1959 2d ago
I suspect it wasn't all that common. Humans love to hate and blame others for their perceived lack of success. If you doubt this, just talk with someone in the MAGA crowd.
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u/YouCanLookItUp 3d ago
Just going by my experience in Europe so far, there are a lot of estates with outbuildings. The place has been inhabited forever. I would reckon that at least some of these stories are elaborations of "we found evidence of someone sleeping in our shed". Because it's difficult not to think about how many abandoned buildings and outbuildings there are just sitting there. And it would have been even more during the war when many families were away fighting and working.
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u/Zenigata 3d ago
I've never seen reliable figures but as I understand it this was not common, and understandably so for the most part.
There are exceptions such as with the Danish resistance with the assistance of many civilians evacuating nearly all Danish Jews.
In most other cases though there wasn't a clear and quick escape route so hiding Jews would be an extremely risky (and logistically difficult) long term project that many balked at.