This is the story of one Lithuanian Jewish family, and all the things history threw at them.

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 by door numbers--her school at this address, her synagogue over there--even the church she used to go to on Sunday's with her governess. In 1939, a life of wealth and privilege turned into a life of hell and torment. This is her story. This film was made possible thanks to grants from the The German Federal Agency for Civic Education (BPB) and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).

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 1938, both fled Austria for their lives; Kitty went to England, while Otto emigrated to Palestine. After the war, they returned to Vienna, desperate to find out what had happened to their parents. That´s where they met, and they never separated again...

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 forward to emigrating to Palestine, just like her sister. But the Soviets took eastern Poland in September 1939 and Haya-Lea's membership in Hashomer Hatzair earned her a ten year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. The rest of her family remained behind, not knowing that the Nazis would overrun the town soon after Haya-Lea's deportation to the east. Haya-Lea survived the Gulag and moved to Leningrad (St.

A slideshow with pictures from eight of our Jewish interview partners from Krakow.

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 family members lost in the Shoah.
Paul Back tells us how his relatives became tragic victims on the Kladovo transport, while Edith Landesmann shares with us a letter written by her cousin Wilhelm Stiassny, who perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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 orthodox family and her parents would not let her marry an actor.
Because he was so much in love, Leopold gave up his acting career and went into business.

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 suffered from four decades of Communist-era neglect, the city is still a marvel of fin-de-siecle architecture, and we can see and feel her greatness. During these times, Jews came fully out of the ghetto and into society and were passionately patriotic.

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 towns in Poland, Zamosc, and through his memories and old pictures, Mieczyslaw takes us into his Zionist youth club, Hashomer Hazair. We also see and hear just how varied Jewish life was in Poland in the 1930s--from yiddishists to socialists, zionists to the orthodox.

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 came from an Orthodox family and she and her daughters kept a kosher household, celebrated all the holidays and did not work on Sabbath.
All four daughters married, and two of them, Piri and Bozsi, moved to Budapest. Anna's husband came from an Orthodox family from Slovakia. He had attended yeshivah, but he turned his back on religion as an adult.