Austrian Ministry for Social Affairs

Jewish Life in Kraków and Kazimierz

"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 Jewish life in Cracow and Kazimierz prior to and after the Holocaust.

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Zahor - Remember

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 few years, Heinz was calling himself Menachem and was starting life over in Israel, and Manfred became Fred when he moved to America. The story of their wartime survival and the fate of their parents is what we tell in this story—and how they made the decision to return to Hoffenheim for a visit.

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Teofila Silberring -- So That Memory Doesn't Die

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).

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Kitty und Otto Suschny -- Only A Couple Of Streets Away From Each Other

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...

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Haya-Lea Detinko -- Surviving Stalin's Gulag

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.

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The Ones I Lost

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.

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