When centenarian survivors die, their lucid wartime memories go with them

Those who are 100 years old or older today would have been in their mid- to late teens during the Holocaust – old enough to experience the atrocities with sustained awareness, agency, and lasting memory.

As they pass away, we lose not only the individuals themselves but also a rare body of firsthand recollection formed in full consciousness rather than childhood haze.

According to estimates from the Claims Conference, roughly 1,400 Holocaust centenarian survivors are alive today – a number that continues to shrink even as others reach that milestone.

Born in Poland in 1912, Girone endured Nazi persecution in Europe, including her husband’s imprisonment in Buchenwald, before escaping with her family to Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

After the war, they rebuilt their lives in the United States, where Girone lived independently into her final years.

They were not alone. Others whose deaths were marked this year lived lives that stretched across the full arc of the 20th century – resistance fighters, educators, activists, and artists who endured the Shoah and then dedicated themselves to preserving its memory.

Among the first notable losses of 2025 was Agnes Keleti, who passed away on January 2 at the age of 103. A Hungarian Jewish survivor who escaped deportation by possessing falsified papers, Keleti later became one of the most decorated Olympic gymnasts in history, winning 10 medals and competing into her thirties.

Several of the centenarians who died this year devoted their latter decades to recording their testimonies in writing. Bronislaw Erlich, who died at 102, was one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Switzerland. He documented his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto in his memoir, Enfant juif de Varsovie.

Mordechai Ciechanower, who died at 100, led delegations of Israeli students and IDF officers to Poland, lectured internationally, and published his autobiography, A Star Gleams in the Distance. He determined that future generations encounter the Holocaust as lived experience rather than abstraction.

Selma van de Perre, who died at 103, served as a Jewish resistance fighter, carrying messages under a false identity before becoming a BBC journalist. She returned annually to Ravensbrück, where the German concentration camp for women was located, to speak with students. She published her autobiography, My Name Is Selma, at 98.

Marthe Cohn, who died at 105, worked as a nurse and spied for the French Resistance, keeping her wartime activities private for decades before co-authoring Behind Enemy Lines, a memoir she long believed no one would accept as true.

Rebecca Clifford, professor of transnational European history at Durham University in England, has spent years studying how survivor testimony shapes public understanding of the Holocaust.

For those who were very young during the war, she explained, memory often survives only in fragments.

“They may actually have concrete memories,” she said, “but they don’t make sense. They’re patchy and jagged.”

With no adult willing or able to explain what children were recalling, those memories can feel “almost like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.”

Centenarian survivors, Clifford said, represent a fundamentally different kind of witness. As teenagers or young adults during the war, many survived at higher rates because they were “young and strong enough to work,” often selected for forced labor rather than immediate death.

Their experiences fall within what psychologists call “formative memory,” the period in adolescence and early adulthood when events imprint deeply and permanently.

“Those memories tend to stay etched in the brain,” she explained, even as more recent ones fade.

In her research, Clifford has observed that wartime experiences often remain accessible well into extreme old age, sometimes even in advanced stages of dementia.

While some survivors spoke early and often, others remained silent for decades. Among the latter, Clifford has observed a shift as they approach the end of their lives: a sudden urgency to speak.

“You can push things to one side for a very, very long time as you manage with life,” she said. “But when you’re extremely old and you know you’re near the end, there’s an urgent feeling to tell.”

This year’s losses underscore how important it is to recognize and celebrate the centenarian survivors who are still with us.

The German Embassy in London, in partnership with the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), recently hosted an afternoon tea honoring Holocaust survivors and refugees aged 100 and over. Nine centenarians attended.

AJR Chief Executive Michael Newman described the gathering as deeply moving. Many attendees were visibly frail, he noted, and events like this can exact a physical toll. Still, they were determined to come. According to Newman, for those who had fled Germany and Austria decades earlier, meeting the German ambassador carried particular emotional weight.

“It was profoundly moving to bring together these remarkable centenarians,” Newman said, “people who lived through one of the darkest chapters of history and went on to build rich, full lives.”

For Prof. Clifford, moments like this clarify what is at stake.

“We will always have the oral histories, and those are certainly important,” she said, “but the testimony remains static.

“When the survivors are gone,” she continued, “we cannot ask them different questions – ones that might matter to us now, or ones we didn’t yet know to ask. If we haven’t asked them before they pass away,” she said, “then that’s it. We never get to.”■