It seems your % for France is pretty much spot on Brian, which I confess surprises me, as I'd often read and heard far worse estimates; but your % for Belgium is an underestimate. It's hard to find reliable data on the web, but I did bring up this page - which is part of the Anti-Defamation League site - with book refs [numbers in square brackets, titles below] after a bit of googling around:
<< While exact numbers of the killed are elusive and existing estimates ought to be viewed with caution, they do point to an unprecedented human destruction. Prewar Europe had a Jewish population of a little less than 9 million. Initial estimates of the Jews killed during World War II amounted to 5.7 million. These figures had come from the 1945 Nuremberg trials. More recent estimates fluctuate between 5 and 6 million, with most sources citing the 6 million figure, or 67 percent.
In Nazi-occupied Europe, the prewar Jewish child population came to about 1.6 million. Of the 6 million Jews killed, there were an estimated 1.5 million children, leaving only 6 to 7 percent of them alive at the end of the war. If to this group of child survivors are added children who were repatriated after the war from the U.S.S.R. to Poland and Romania, then the number of child survivors rises to 170,000 or 11 percent. [3]
Even with this addition, the survival rate of children lags behind the survival rate of all the Jews, 11 percent children to 33 percent adults. Such differences are not surprising. Within the German plan of Jewish annihilation, children became special targets. Indeed, in line with these policies, upon reaching a concentration camp, all Jewish children were sent to their deaths. On rare occasions, a healthy-looking teenager slipped through the system. For example, from a French police roundup of Jews in July 1942, 9,000 were shipped to Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland. In this transport of 9,000, there were 4,000 children. After the war, of the entire group, only 30 returned. None were children. [4]
German preoccupation with the destruction of Jewish children suggests that most of the child survivors were hidden children. Efforts to protect Jewish children arose out of a battle between those who wanted to kill and those who wanted to save. It was an uneven struggle, a struggle that left many victims and very few survivors.
In every European country under German occupation, the survival rate of children was much lower than that of the overall Jewish population. Thus, prewar Poland had an estimated 1 million Jewish children. Of these children, from infancy to age 14, an estimated 5,000, or half a percent, made it till the end of the war. [5]
In Holland, Jews made up 1.6 percent of the Dutch population, which amounted to 140,000 individuals. They were relatively well integrated into the society. 6 Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews, an estimated 75 percent perished. Among the 35,000 survivors, 3,500 were children. [7]
In occupied Belgium, the German army was in charge of the country and not particularly eager to destroy the Jews. Nevertheless, the army complied with the Nazi plans and, by May 1942, it began transporting Belgian Jews to concentration camps in Poland. [8] At the end of the war, of the 65,000 Belgian Jews, about 40 percent had survived. Among them were 3,000 children. [9]
The situation in France was different from that of the other European countries. The Germans divided France into an occupied and an unoccupied zone. The unoccupied section had a French government known as the Vichy government. Not directly under German control, the Vichy government was unusual. Of all the Western European countries, it alone initiated and adopted virulent anti-Semitic policies. [10]
In the occupied part of France, the French police were very active in rounding up Jews. Specifically too, the French police took the initiative in allocating Jewish children to convoys that were leaving for the Auschwitz concentration camp. [11]
Out of 350,000 French Jews, an estimated 90,000, or 26 percent, were killed. Figures for child survivors range from 5,000 to 15,000, with most of them identified as orphans. [12] >>
Refs:
3. Deborah Dwork, Children With a Star (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 174-175 in note 27; Mordechai Paldiel, "The Rescue of Jewish Children in Poland and the Netherlands," in Alice L. Eckardt, ed., Burning Memory: Times of Testing and Reckoning (New York: Pergamon Press, 1993), p. 120. 4. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1975), p. 362. 5. Dwork, Children With a Star, pp. 274-275, in note 27. 6. Henry L. Mason, "Jews in the Occupied Netherlands," Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (Summer 1984): pp. 330-339. 7. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 p. 403; Josef Michman, "The Problem of the Jewish War Orphans in Holland," in She'e Rit Hapletah, 1944-1948, Rehabilitation & Struggle (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), p. 190. 8. Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, p. 382-390. 9. Philip Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), p. 69. 10. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France & the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), p. 359. 11. Ibid., p. 265. 12. David Weinberg, "The Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community After World War II," in She'e Rit Hapletah, 1944-1948, pp. 172-173.
