Four German Jews remember the 20th Century

Although Centropa conducted more than twelve hundred interviews in fifteen countries during our decade of gathering oral histories (2000–2009), we never carried out our project in Germany itself. We did, however, interview four people who spent their childhood there.

In the following pages, the interviews with Erna Goldmann, Hillel Kempler, Rosa Rosenstein, and Herbert Lewin have been edited by Lauren Granite and Dominique Cottee. Each of them looks back at their lives and shares with us stories of a world that exists no more, about how they managed to escape the fate that had been written for them, and how they rebuilt their lives in the decades after.