Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country

Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. The American Jewish Yearbook placed the total Jewish population of Europe at about 9.5 million in 1933. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population, which was estimated at 15.3 million. Most European Jews resided in eastern Europe, with about 5 1/2 million Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union. Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a dynamic and highly developed Jewish culture. In little more than a decade, most of Europe would be conquered, occupied, or annexed by Nazi Germany and most European Jews—two out of every three—would be dead.

Mordecai Gebirtig, born in 1877 in Krakow, Poland, was a Yiddish folk poet and songwriter. Gebirtig had three daughters, for whom he wrote and performed his poems. The words were set to improvised melodies, and most of his songs resemble entries in a diary. Many of Gebirtig's poems contain themes of eastern European Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s. The lullaby "Your Kitten is Hungry" dates from the early 1920s. The lyrics, addressed to a hungry child, evoke the themes of hunger and deprivation.

Gerda was raised in a religious family in the small town of Ansbach, Germany, where her father was the Jewish butcher. She attended German schools until 1936, and then moved to Berlin to attend a Jewish school. She returned to her hometown after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Her family was then ordered to move to Munich, and in July 1939 her father left for England and then the United States. He was unable to arrange for the rest of his family to join him. Gerda moved to Berlin in 1939 to study nursing. She worked in the Jewish hospital there for two years. Her mother was deported to Riga, Latvia, and her sister, also a nurse, was transported to Auschwitz; neither survived the war. In 1943, Gerda was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto where she continued to work as a nurse. She left on a transport to Switzerland in February 1945 and was reunited with her father in the United States in April 1946.

Eduard, Elisabeth, and Alexander Hornemann. The boys, victims of tuberculosis medical experiments at Neuengamme concentration camp, were murdered shortly before liberation. Elisabeth died of typhus in Auschwitz. The Netherlands, prewar.

Portrait of the family of Mushon and Rebeka Kamchi in Bitola. Isak Kamchi is pictured in the front row at the right. Isak was born in Bitola. Several of his siblings and cousins left Macedonia for Palestine and North America before the war. During World War II, Isak served as the leader of a partisan unit operating in Croatia. He established a safehouse at his parent's home in Zagreb where partisans could rest and recuperate. His mother ran the safehouse, cooking for the men and nursing them back to health. When the Germans discovered the safehouse, they offered Isak protection in exchange for his surrender. However, when he did surrender, he was arrested and later killed. He may have been publicly hanged. Photograph taken in Bitola, ca. 1932.