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.

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 in the late 15th century.
We learn why her parents converted to Islam, and how Güler herself later came to find her Jewish roots again - before she married a Muslim man

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 country in 1968.
Mr Lion shares with us his photo album, made in 1938 when he was sixteen years old-- a teenage witness to a history.

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 Haber. They met at a Jewish summer camp, then ran into each other the following summer on the Adriatic coast.
But the rise of the Nazis got in the way and Max, who had fled to Palestine in 1939, despaired of ever finding Frieda again. Until that day he was walking down a street in Tel Aviv...
Max and Frieda Uri died in August 2009.

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.

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 and grandmother took charge of running things.
They were sent to the women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück in northern Germany; only Mariann returned alive. Now in her 80s, Mariann is still running her own publishing company.