https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust contains a table titled "Annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by prewar country statistics according to Lucy Dawidowicz." While a large majority of European Jews were killed in most countries, a large absolute number survived the war. For example, in Poland, the table suggests that 300,000 of 3,300,000 Jews survived the war. Numbers of survivors from some other countries I'd be interested in learning about are 25,000 from the Baltic States, 30,000 from Germany, 200,000 from Hungary, 600,000 from Ukraine, 130,000 from Byelorussia, 300,000 from Romania, and 260,000 from France. At least for some of these countries, the Nazis had complete control (e.g., Poland, Germany). It's difficult for me to understand how anyone made it as, from my reading about the Holocaust, it seems the Nazi plan was to kill every last Jew.
I can guess at some of the possibilities. I'd assume for many in Ukraine or Byelorussia, they escaped eastwards before the German occupation or were conscripted into the Red Army (itself a daunting survival proposition)? Or, perhaps there were there Jews living in out of the way small farms or villages that the Nazis just somehow overlooked? Perhaps they spent the entire war successfully hiding with sympathetic neighbors? Joined local partisan groups and lived in the woods? Passed for non-Jews in plain sight? Emigrated before the war began? I know some were sent to concentration camps and were liberated from them at the end of the war. Were these Jews that the Nazis meant to use as slave labor until they died from work or were they intended to be gassed but somehow slipped through the cracks?
Apologize for the lack of focus in the question. I also understand that there's probably no hard numbers and that the answers vary by country. Just trying to get a better understanding of how most made it through and what actions or qualities made it possible (or if it was just pure luck of the draw).
Part 1
As you said, it depends heavily on the country we are talking about.
Concerning Poland and the Soviet Union, there is an interesting, under-researched and not well known aspect to Jewish survival that continues to surprise is that the reason a very, very large percentage of those who survived the war was Stalinist policies of forced migration and resttlement.
Atina Grossmann, who worte extensively on Jewish Displaced Persons in Germany after the war discovered that of the 250.000 Polish Jews who came to Germany 75-80% sruvived the war because of voluntary and involuntary deportation in the Soviet Union. She discusses this in her article Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II as well as in this lecture at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Vienna in 2013 (Youtube warning).
Grossmann writes:
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had provided a crucial if extremely harsh and generally involuntary refuge, most importantly in Muslim central Asia, for the majority of tiny surviving remnant of Polish Jewry. Moreover, that only very partial rescue was achieved with the aid of goods purchased and organized throughout the British imperial world from Australia to South Africa, India, and Palestine by an American Jewish relief organization (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; Joint or JDC), operating out of Teheran. In other words: Parcels sent from Teheran to Tashkent, addressed and packed by Polish and German Jewish refugees in Iran, funded by Jews in New York and Tel Aviv, acquired in part with the help of the Bombay Jewish Relief Association, transported by Red Army trucks and ships, and sanctioned by delicate negotiations among the JDC, the Jewish Agency, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Iran helped sustain from 65 to 80 percent of all Polish Jews (altogether perhaps 10 percent of 3.3–3.5 million Jews residing in prewar Poland) who managed to survive World War II. These facts and the multiple questions they raise have been preoccupying me ever since I discovered, while writing Jews, Germans, and Allies, what still seems to me a momentous piece of Holocaust history yet to be adequately addressed in our research. Nor has it been integrated into our own conceptions of what we mean by Jewish eastern European experience during the Holocaust or into our definitions of “survivor” and “survival” that the great majority of eastern European Jews who survived the Nazi Final Solution did so because they ended up in the Soviet Union, first in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet interior and then in Soviet central Asia.
The story of these survivors begins with the joint carving up of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 in accordance to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As is understandable in times of uncertainty and confusion, at first many Jews and other inhabitants of Poland fled the advancing Wehrmacht into what would become the Soviet zone of occupation. Also, the first weeks of the occupation saw a fruther population movement across the border between the two occupational zones. Part of that population movement were Jews from Western Poland who went to join families and relatives in the Soviet zone.
Living in the now Soviet zone of Poland what, in a strange turn of events, save them and a considerable number of Jews who had already lived in Eastern Poland from the later onslaught of the Nazis was Soviet institutional paranoia. Those who had fled the Nazis often found themselves under suspicion by the Soviet authorities, especially if they registered to return to the German side to find family members who had been left behind or because of false rumors that conditions had stabilized and were less harsh than on the Soviet side, sometimes out of fear of being forced to accept Soviet citizenship, sometimes simply because there was no kosher food available in the Soviet territories. Together with local Jews of Eastern Poland who had been denounced as Zionists, capitalist agents or enemies of socialism, they were in large numbers deported to the Soviet interior.
As Grossmann writes:
Large numbers of Polish Jews, no one knows how many, thus found themselves forcibly transported to the Soviet interior. Already by February 1940 some 220,000 Polish citizens had been shipped east, often arrested in the middle of the night or the early morning hours. The deportees were generally given only a few hours to collect their personal belongings before being taken to a waiting unheated train, which transported them eastward under brutal conditions that many – again, there are no accurate figures – did not survive. The major deportations (the numbers are unclear) continued right up until Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. By this twist of history, which intersected in complicated ways with the general mass evacuation (rather than “deportation”) of civilians, including up to two million Soviet Jews, into the vast Soviet interior in 1941, as well as broader deportations of non-Jewish Poles and other suspect “foreigners,” several hundred thousand Polish Jews escaped the exterminatory German onslaught that followed the invasion in June 1941.
While unable to give numbers, Grossmann here mentions another reason for the survival of many Soviet Jews – the sometimes voluntary, sometimes not entirely voluntary evacuation of areas by the Red Army after the start of the war and the resettlement of many Soviet citizens, including a considerable number of Soviet Jews in the interior of the USSR – in many cases under the same conditions as those deported a year earlier.
The conditions these people found themselves in were undoubtedly harsh to a point that lead many of them to perish. But, especially after the Polish government in exile negotiated a general amnesty for Polish citizens in the Soviet Union and in accordance to that they were released from labor camps, the conditions they found themselves under did not differ a lot from what the average Soviet citizen experienced in the war and were not as harsh and life-threatening as the conditions in German occupied Poland and the USSR.
Grossmann makes a point that cannot be emphasized enough:
This forced migration away from the Soviet territories first attacked by the Germans therefore provided—and I keep repeating this fact because it still seems alien to the dominant narrative—the main chance for eastern European Jewry’s survival. The so-called Asiatics who survived the extreme hardships of the Soviet “refuge” constituted the numerical, if not the most visible or articulate, core of the She’erit Hapleta (the core of Eastern European survivors of the Holocaust) Yet we know remarkably little about these Jews’ everyday life, about the political decisions and wartime contingencies that determined their fate, about their numbers, about the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees, about relations with Soviet citizens, Jewish and not. It is astonishing.
Astonishing is indeed the right word in my opinion. Whether one likes to call this ironic or a cruel twist of fate, it remains fact that when inquiring about the majority of Jewish survivors from Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus, and the occupied Russian parts of the Soviet Union, the reason why so many in terms of absolute numbers (not in terms of percentage though since especially in Belarus an overwhelming majority of Jews and in consequence a quarter of the total population was killed by the Nazis) survived is due to Stalinist policies of forced deportation, relocation, and resettlement, in parts driven by general paranoia and unjust politics.