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The drive to survive was so powerful among male Holocaust survivors that decades later, they showed a longer life expectancy than those who did not suffer during the Nazi era.
That is the central finding of a new study at the University of Haifa and Leiden University (the Netherlands) that examined more than 55,000 Polish Jewish men who immigrated to Israel before and after World War II.
Prof. Avi Sagi-Schwartz of the University of Haifa’s psychology department and head of its Center for the Study of Child Development, led the research. The findings were just published in the PLoS One journal.
The researchers compared a population of Holocaust survivors who were between four and 20 years old in 1939 and made aliya between 1945 and 1950 with a population of Polish immigrants of the same age group who immigrated before the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The findings showed a life expectancy in the entire survivor population of six-anda- half months longer than that of the immigrant population that did not experience the Holocaust.
When the researchers examined the data according to gender, they found that within the entire female population of Polish immigrants, there was no significant difference in life expectancy between female survivors and women who didn’t survive the Holocaust.