[scorpion]

(01-30-2015 11:44 AM)Deluge Wrote:  

I forgot to include this point in my post, but it's worth mentioning. Of the millions of Jews who lost relatives during the war, if they did not die how come they have been unable to locate each other since? The world's Jewish community is very tight knit for one of it's size and dispersal. For example, most Australian Jews have visited Israel multiple times and the majority take an entire year off to live there after high school, so basically they know dozens if not hundreds of Jews from outside Australia and all around the world. There's a saying that if you pick two typical Jewish families at random, one from Australia and one from Israel or the U.S, they probably won't know each other but they will probably know another Jew who does. My point is, Jews have much fewer degrees of separation from each other than you'd expect of such a widely dispersed group.

Still assuming scorpion is not just blatantly trolling, if most of their lost family members and former neighbours from the shtetl didn't actually die, it boggles the mind how these separated Jews haven't managed to find each other since, especially considering we have the Internet now and that the majority of remaining Jews in the FSU emigrated to the same countries only 30 something years later, especially in Israel itself where there proportion is huge. You'd expect infinitely more reunions to have taken place than there actually has been. You'd have expected a lot the Holocaust survivor descendants in Australia who'd taken a gap year in Israel or made aliyah over the last 70 years to have found long-lost cousins or neighbours while doing so, or found them through other Jews, or found them among the many Soviet Jews who came to Australia. You could also just say they have actually been finding these lost relatives and neighbours for all these years and just hiding it this entire time as part of some conspiracy though.

There are a few simple explanations for this:

1) A lot of Jews did did die during that time. Anywhere from 200,000 all the way up to a million is possible. So there is no denying that many surviving Jews did lose relatives. They just weren't systematically murdered in gas chambers at death camps.

2) People just assumed that missing family members were dead, and thus never put serious effort into locating them after the war.

3) Families that had been separated by the Iron Curtain would have had a much more difficult if not impossible time reuniting.

4) Many people changed their names after re-settling, making identifying them very difficult.

5) It was 1945, not 2015. There was no internet. It was much more difficult at that time to communicate across the world, and much easier for people to fall off the radar.

6) Holocaust survivor reunion stories are incredibly common, especially in recent decades as communication technology improved. Google and you will find hundreds of articles documenting them.