Almost 80 years after Holocaust, 245,000 Jewish survivors still alive

government has paid more than $90 billion to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis.

The Claims Conference administers several compensation programs that provide direct payments to survivors globally, provides grants to more than 300 social service agencies worldwide and ensures survivors receive services such as home care, food, medicine, transportation and socialization.

It has also launched several educational projects that illustrate the importance of passing on the Holocaust survivors' testimonies to younger generations as their numbers become smaller and antisemitism is on the rise again.

“The data we have amassed, not only tells us how many and where survivors are, it clearly indicates that most survivors are at a period of life where their need for care and services is growing,” said Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference.

“Now is the time to double down on our attention on this waning population. Now is when they need us the most.”

Winkelmann, the Berlin survivor, didn't talk to anyone for decades about the horrors she endured during the Holocaust, not even her husband.

But in the 1990s, she was one day approached by a stranger who looked at her necklace with a Star of David pendant, asked if she was a Jewish survivor and whether she could talk about her experience to her daughter's school class.

“When I started talking about the Holocaust for the first time, in front of those students, I couldn't stop crying,” Winkelmann told The Associated Press last week. “But since then I've talked about it so many times, and every time I shed less tears.”

While she said there can never be any closure for the terror she and all the other survivors lived through, Winkelmann has now made it her mission in life to tell her story. Even at 95, she still visits schools across Germany — and has a message for her listeners.

“I tell the children that we all have one God, and although we gave him different names and have different prayers for him, we shouldn't look at what separates us, but what unites us,” she said.

In this 1943 file photo, a group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by German troops after an uprising in the Jewish quarter ghetto by German soldiers on April 19, 1943. Almost 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries, according to the report by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.