Believe it, I am.
That is interesting from your personal experience, but I am more concerned how the SS personnel of the Third Reich used to recognize the Jews when they were required to captured them.
- Censuses
- personal identification papers or internal passports with entries for religion
- forcible registrations of Jews
- asking men to drop their trousers
- ignoring the protests of non-Jews with big noses
- denunciations by neighbours
- 'Jew hunters' (in Germany and the Netherlands) and szmalcowniki (in Poland), paid to identify Jews
Most European countries conducted censuses which asked for religion, and often had personal ID systems which included such information. The Soviet Union's internal passports specified nationality, and Jews were one of the many Soviet nationalities so recorded.
France, like the US, had not traditionally asked for religion on censuses, but after the German occupation, Jews were ordered to register. This was some time before anyone was deported. Despite exposing themselves immediately to a risk of denunciation or police arrest if found out by some other means. quite a large proportion did not register, which meant that they were harder to catch, but this didn't forestall many from falling into Nazi hands. Foreign-born Jews were more easily rounded up and identified. Overall, only 25% of Jews living in France were deported, the rest escaped into hiding or over the Spanish and Swiss borders. Quite a large proportion of the deportees from France came from various roundups in 1941, when foreign Jews were arrested especially in Paris, then the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup of mid-1942, then further manhunts and roundups through the remainder of the occupation, including after November 1942 and September 1943 when Nazi control expanded into Vichy and then into formerly Italian-occupied territory.
Belgium was similar in not really pushing religion in registration systems, and had a fairly low deportation rate despite the same combination of forced registration and manhunts. There were sizable communities of very traditional-looking Orthodox Jews in Antwerp and elsewhere that could be caught like fish in a barrel once the Nazis wanted to start deporting people.
The Netherlands had a very efficient and comprehensive bureaucracy which included personal ID papers specifying religion, as well as registers of residents much as in Germany. They also conducted censuses asking for religion and the last one had come long before anyone suspected Holland would be occupied. In 1941 Jews were ordered to register and could hardly avoid this, again a year before deportations. Still, quite large numbers tried to go into hiding, but the total deported was better than 80%.
In Poland, Jews could be identified by their dress and appearance. They were quite obviously Jews because they belonged to an entirely different culture to other nationalities, and mostly spoke their own language, Yiddish. While many also spoke Polish, they often did so with an accent. This wasn't as noticeable to the Germans but it was to Poles, many of whom were willing to denounce in exchange for payments of sugar or cash, or because they were antisemites. Nonetheless, despite being highly visible and thus easily identified, 10-20% of Polish Jews were either assimilated or could become so. Large numbers fled at the start of the war, about 300,000. They went to Soviet territory where of course they had to register and be identified as Jews, so could be caught once more when the Nazis invaded in 1941. The ones who remained behind in western Poland frequently tried to go underground or flee to the forests, to the tune of 10-20% in some districts, but this did not prevent many from being caught by patrols in the countryside or denounced or winkled out of their hiding places, which almost invariably meant the death of their Polish rescuers, several thousand of whom died for aiding Jews.
There were also some gender differences which became apparent, since Jewish women didn't have the problem of being identified as circumcised, and many had been sent to Polish schools since it was traditional to send Jewish boys to yeshivas if there was any money in the family, and this meant that Jewish women spoke better Polish. Many also had a more 'Aryan' appearance, especially the younger women.
Obviously, the fact that no system of registration was perfect meant that quite a few did survive. Which is why we have films such as The Pianist, and why the director of that film also survived the war in hiding as a young child placed with a Christian family.
SOURCES - a small selection, needless to say
Jews in France during World War II / Renée Poznanski. Hanover, N.H. : University Press of New England in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ; Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University Press, 2001
Moore, Bob, Survivors. Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010
Paulsson, Gunnar S., Secret city : the hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2002.
Krakowski, Shmuel, The War of the Doomed. Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944. New York, 1984
Seltzer, William, ‘Population Statistics, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials’, Population and Development Review 24/3, 1998, pp.511-552
Engelking, Barbara, Jest taki piekny sloneczny dzien... Losy Zydow szukajacych ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942-1945. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zaglada Zydow, 2011
Grabowski, Judenjagd. Polowanie na Zydow 1942-1945. Studium dziejow pewnego powiatu. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zaglada Zydow, 2011
