Given what we know about the body’s response to trauma, it’s reasonable to assume that experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust would take a long-term toll on one’s health.
Reasonable, but apparently wrong. New research from Israel, which its authors call “the largest Holocaust study that has ever been conducted,” finds that, on average, male Holocaust survivors outlived their peers who avoided living under Nazi rule.
“Against all odds, survivors are likely to live longer,” reports a research team led by University of Haifa psychologist Abraham Sagi-Schwartz. The study found no such gap among women (who, on average, lived longer than men). But among males, Holocaust survivors lived an average of 6.5 months longer than members of a demographically identical group.
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