Moldova had been in Czarist Russia before 1918, then in Romania between the two world wars. From 1940 on it was once again subsumed into the Soviet Union until it broke free in 1991. Thousands of Jews in this region were murdered in 1941 as the Romanian and German armies marched into the Soviet Union, and many of those remaining were sent to the infamous Transnistria camps, which were run by the Romanian government with exceptional bestiality.

From the end of the Second World War until 1991, Jews from the Soviet Union resettled in Kishinev, but Centropa's interviewer (we sent in Natalia Fomina from her home base of Odessa) only met with Jews who had been born in the country when it was Romania.

The reason: because our respondents lived traditional Jewish lives in Kishinev when it was in Romania, they have a closer link to their Jewish roots and customs.