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Centropa in Greece

We conducted 15 interviews in Greece, all under the stewardship of Dr Rena Molho, one of the leading experts in the history of Salonica's Jews (the name Jews use for Thessaloniki).

More than 90,000 Jews lived in Salonica at the turn of the last century, and Salonica had remained an open port city as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. It had never before been a Greek city.

In this fascinating ethnically mixed city, Jews held the majority. Since Jewish porters and merchants dominated the harbor trade, foreigners were often shocked to find the harbor activities closed from Friday evening until Saturday evening.

Almost wholly wiped out during the Holocaust, there are few Jews alive today who recall the time when Ladino, Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek were all spoken on the streets of this bustling port city, and neither the federal government nor the city government recognizes the contributions of Jews in Salonica.

Rena and her team conducted interviews in both Salonica and Athens (where they sought out Jews who had been born in Salonica).

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Centropa in Hungary

Although less than 40,000 Jews are officially registered, experts estimate there are between 80,000 to 100,000 Jews in Budapest today, making it the largest and liveliest community in Central Europe. Three day schools, more than a dozen functioning synagogues, and a half dozen youth clubs are all well attended.

All our Hungarian interviews were conducted in Budapest. That's because the overwhelming majority of Jews in the provinces were deported to their deaths in 1944. Most of those who returned to Hungary chose to settle in Budapest, so there was little reason for us to work in Szeged, Debrecen and other cities.

We also conducted Hungarian-language interviews in Novi Sad and Subotica in Serbia, in southern Slovakia and in Transylvania in Romania. Elderly Jews in these communities still speak Hungarian as their mother tongue.

Centropa's interview methodology was created by Eszter Andor and Dora Sardi, who headed a team of nearly a dozen interviewers, editors, transcribers, transcribers and scanners. Together, they secured more than 200 interviews and digitized 5,000 pictures.

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Centropa in Greece

We conducted 15 interviews in Greece, all under the stewardship of Dr Rena Molho, one of the leading experts in the history of Salonica's Jews (the name Jews use for Thessaloniki).

More than 90,000 Jews lived in Salonica at the turn of the last century, and Salonica had remained an open port city as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. It had never before been a Greek city.

Rena and her team conducted interviews in both Salonica and Athens (where they sought out Jews who had been born in Salonica).

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Centropa in Moldova

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.

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Centropa in Moldova

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.

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Centropa in Latvia

95,000 Jews lived in pre-Holocaust Latvia and the majority was murdered by the Nazis and their local accomplices. From 1944 until 1991, Latvia was subsumed into the Soviet Union, and over the following decades, the Jewish community did not exist.

After Latvia's liberation, the community re-formed itself, and if there are around 12,000 Jews in the country today, the majority are Jews who had been born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to Latvia during the Communist decades.

Except in a very few cases, Centropa made it a point to interview only those Jews who had been born in the Latvia in the years preceding the Holocaust.

In Latvia, nearly all our interviews have been carried out by our Kiev-based team at the Institute of Jewish Studies, headed by Marina Karelstein, coordinator, and Ella Levitskaya and Zhanna Litinskaya, interviewers.