1: The variety of activities and field trips using Berlin as our classroom. Everyday I looked forward to the day’s activities.
2: Learning about Centropa resources and planning a lesson, as well as listening to other educators present their lessons.
3: The interactions with wonderful educators from so many different countries.
Luz Brito, Bronx, NY (CSA 2024)
In the early 2000s, Centropa began recording the stories of Holocaust survivors living in Vienna (and across Europe). People who, after unimaginable loss, rebuilt their lives. We see some of these people still, even today through our long-running Café Centropa. During the CSA, you will get the chance to these people and their families and hear their stories firsthand.
Together with experts and survivor testimony from Centropa’s archive, you will explore both well-known and overlooked sites.
Receive access to hundreds of free, classroom-ready resources on centropa.org. Through guided sessions, elective groups, and the Marketplace of Ideas, you will begin developing your own lesson plans or educational projects to take back to your students.
You will get to meet Dagmar Lieblova who although in her 80s, is a lecturer at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) Memorial. During her teenage years, she and her family were uprooted from their comfortable home in a small town near Prague, and sent to Terezin. When Dr. Lieblova tells them, "Things were not so bad in Terezin-- compared to what I went through next," they can only imagine what she's about to tell them.
Jindrich Lion is a noted journalist and author, who took us through his remarkable life for the Centropa Film " My Escape From Prague" which you will watch - from interwar Czechoslovakia to Palestine, then back home to begin again-only to leave when the Soviets invaded his country in 1968. In the film, Mr Lion shares with us his photo album, made in 1938 when he was sixteen years old-- a teenage witness to a history.
You will learn about the remarkable story of Leo Luster, who grew up in Vienna’s second district in the 1930s, through our Film "The Past Is Another Country". Leo tells us about the thriving Jewish life in Vienna during the interwar years, which came to a halt with the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938.
