A remarkable story of survival, resistance and resilience. Mark Epstein was still a teenager when the infamous 900 day siege of Leningrad began in 1941. While members of his family...
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Personal Stories
This is the story of one Lithuanian Jewish family, and all the things history threw at them.
Kitty and Otto Suschny both grew up in Vienna, only a couple of streets away from each other, but they never met while growing up. After the Reichspogromnacht in November...
This unique story is told to us by a woman who never left her beloved Krakow—except for the six years she lived in Nazi hell. Mrs Silberring remembers her neighborhood...
Centropa interviewed nearly 100 elderly Jews in Vienna. All of them lost a brother, a mother, or a grandparent in the Holocaust. This short film is a tribute to those...
The remarkable story of Leo Luster, who grew up in Vienna’s second district in the 1930s. Leo tells us about the thriving Jewish life in Vienna during the interwar years...
Kurt Brodmann tells the story of his family: how his father Leopold, an actor, fell in love with Franzi Goldstaub, who was sitting in the audience. Franzi came from an...
Mieczyslaw Weinryb's collection of pictures and stories provide us with a fascinating glimpse of Jewish life in Poland before the war. He grew up in one of the loveliest small...
Panni Koltai was born in 1915 in the small town of Eger in Northern Hungary. Panni's father, Ferenc was a Neolog Jew, who did not observe traditions, her mother, Aranka...
In the traditional Ladino language of her Sephardic Jewish ancestors, Güler Orgun tells us how her family found a new home in the Ottoman Empire after being expelled from Spain...
Jindrich Lion, a noted journalist and author, takes us through his remarkable life--from interwar Czechoslovakia to Palestine, then back home to begin again--only to leave when the Soviets invaded his...
Leontina Arditi's film of growing up in a poor Sephardic familiy in Sofia takes us inside a world now lost to us. By sharing with us her familiy pictures, and...
The classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. Max Uri was living the comfortable life of a Viennese Jewish lad when he fell for Frieda...
Centropa's first film produced by the award-winning Bulgarian Photographer's Association. Here is a story that begins in Istanbul in the 1850s and ends in contemporary Sofia. After the death of...
This is the story of an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family living in Nagykoros. When Mariann's father lost his business, the family moved to Budapest and Mariann watched as her mother...
Katarina's story shows us what middle-class life looked like in interwar Czechoslovakia with a fascinating collection of snapshots taken in sports clubs and Jewish day schools, skiing in the Tatra...
A remarkable story of changing borders and stubborn optimism. Heinrich Nussbaum lived in the Austo-Hungarian Empire and had four sons who fought in the First World War. The empire collapsed...
Dagmar Lieblova, although in her 80s, is a tireless lecturer at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) Memorial. She meets and conducts classes with Czech, Austrian and German, as well as British and...
When we interviewed Judit Kinszki, she told us, "All my life I've been waiting to find someone who I could tell about my father. Because he was taken from me...
Piroska Hamos was born in Balassagyarmat, a small town in North-Eastern Hungary in 1912, to the family of Armin Schultz, a gentleman's tailor. Her mother Jozefin died very young. Piroska...
This story is set in the Transylvanian city of Targu Mures, or Marosvasarhely in Hungarian. During the Second World War, northern Transylvania was occupied by the Hungarian fascists, who deported...
Jozsef, who attended both a religious and a secular school as a child, paints for us a picture of growing up in the bustling, small Jewish community of the small...
The story of a Hasidic childhood in one of the centers of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism of Central Europe. Mukacevo (as it's called in Czech, or Munkacs in Hungarian) is...
Miklos Braun's family was middle class: his father, Zsigmond, was a a certified bookkeeper and auditor, his mother, Aranka, was a housewife. Miklos was born in 1913, his sister, Klara...
The story of a Berlin-born Jewish woman who lived through the turbulent times of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, all while growing up, falling in love...
Erna Goldmann takes us back into interwar Germany, where she grew up and met her first boyfriend at a Zionist youth club. But with the rise of National Socialism, life...
The Kalefs were one of the Belgrade's oldest families, tracing their roots back more than 300 years. Then the Nazis swept into Serbia in 1941... While scores of relatives were...
Lilli Tauber grew up in a small town in Austria, Wiener Neustadt, where her parents tended the family store. Then came 9 November 1938--the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Her father...
Haya-Lea was born in 1920 in Rovno, which then belonged to Poland. She grew up in a traditional Jewish family, joined a Zionist youth club called Hashomer Hatzair and looked...
Herbert Lewin tells us about the best stories of his life: From his childhood in East Prussia, his life in Israel and his return to Europe after the war
In 2006, Vera Postavinskaya, one of our most insightful interviewers, visited Elena Drapkina in her St Petersburg apartment. Then 82 years old, Mrs Drapkina spent three afternoons sharing her life...
When Hana Montiljo was born in Sarajevo in 1940, Jews had been living in Bosnia for 400 years, but one year after Hana came into the world, more than 85%...
Renee Saltiel and Solon Molho grew up in the greatest Sephardic Jewish community of them all, Salonika, or Thessaloniki, in today's Greece. 90,000 Jews lived there then; by the time...
It was 1941, and Elvira Kohn had just turned 20 and was working in a camera store in Dubrovnik. Just up the Croatian coast in the port city of Split...
A Life Not Lived. More than twenty years ago, Centropa’s director, Edward Serotta, traveled to the Mosel River Valley in Germany with seven elderly Jews. They had been born there...
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A story from Hungary unlike any other in our collection. Miksa Domonkos was a decorated soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. During the Second World War...
Centropa’s most unusual film to date. Shelly Weiner and Raya Kizhnerman live in Greensboro, NC. But these two kindly grandmothers were born in the bustling city of Rivne—then in Poland...
Beno and Roza fell in love in the 1930s and were married in 1946. In between, the vast majority of Macedonia's Jews--more than 7,400--were deported to Treblinka. Not one returned...
After Larry Anzhel's father died in 1932, the family moved from Yambol to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. There Larry met Rosa Varsano. In 1939 he asked her "do you want...
With an introduction and epilogue narrated by Sixty Minutes correspondent Morley Safer, here is a story, produced by Brad Rothschild and Gustavo Villalonga in New York, of a Soviet Jewish...
Documentaries
"Jewish Life in Kraków and Kazimierz" is a documentary produced for the CENTROPA Summer Academy 2021 by Sky Heritage Pictures and Tomasz Cebulski. The film offers a historical narrative on...
Hungary's brief, golden age lasted from 1867 until 1914, during the half century of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Even though Budapest was badly destroyed in the Second World War and subsequently...
Vienna began the 20th century as the capital of one of Europe’s grandest empire and its cultural output dazzles us still: the music of Gustav Mahler, the philosophy of Ludwig...
Over 450,000 Jews served in the Soviet Army during the Second World War, or as it is referred to in Russia, The Great Patriotic War. Around 140,000 fell fighting, and...
Bulgarian filmmakers Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov produced this award-winning, 26-minute jewel of a documentary film for Centropa. Nine Sephardic women in their 80s and 90s, who had worked as...
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Dr. Eliezer Papo is a scholar on Balkan Jewish history at Ben Gurion University. This is his introduction to the subject. This lecture is available in English, Hebrew, Bosnian and...
A film about a soup kitchen run by a 90 year-old lady, down in the town of Arad, Romania.
The same week that Columbus sailed west in 1492, the last Jews of Spain were being expelled. Even though they had lived there for a thousand years, religious intolerance threw...
If 48,000 Jews lived in Bulgaria before the Holocaust and nearly all of them were alive at the end of the Second World War, how could that not be called...
How did mosques and Ottoman-built bridges get into South East Europe? Why is it that Austrians brought the glorious architecture to Prague?This short trip through Europe´s maps explains how borders...
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It was one of Europe's greatest and longest lasting empires. By 1914 its emperor had ruled for more than six decades. And under the reign of Franz Joseph I, Jews...
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The story of how an old synagogue in the Bosnian war zone became a beacon of hope for everyone. During the Bosnian war (1992-1995), the Jewish community of Sarajevo refused...
They began life as Heinz and Manfred, growing up in the village of Hoffenheim, not far from Heidelberg. But history, wearing a brown shirt, descended upon them, and within a...
The story of how a Jewish family from Rezina was torn apart during the Holocaust. When World War II came and the Germans approached, Tamara and her parents fled on...
Ivan Barbul was born as Isaak Rybakov in 1929 in Rezina, which was a mostly Jewish town in Bessarabia at that time. He grew up in a poor Jewish family...
Slideshow
A slideshow with pictures from eight of our Jewish interview partners from Krakow.
In the spring of 1941, around two hundred fifty thousand Jews lived in Lithuania.Seventy-five years ago, on June 22, 1941, German troops swept across Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and into three...
With more than 60,000 negatives in our archives, Centropa has created the largest photographic documentation of contemporary Jewish life ever made in this part of the world.This is one story...