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 mountains, swimming in Lake Balaton and water skiing on the coast of Dalmatia.

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 and Europe was divided, but Heinrich didn't believe in borders and sent his sons to universities all over Europe: Sandor studied economics in Prague, Joseph became a doctor in Berlin, Laszlo received his degree in philosophy in Paris and Jeno, Laszlo's father, studied mathematics in Florence.

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 Americans students. Equally at home in three languages, Dr. Lieblova, a sprightly grandmother with a ready smile, shares with these teenagers stories of her own teenage years--when she and her family were uprooted from their comfortable home in a small town near Prague, and sent to Terezin. When Dr.

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 at such a young age, I feel that when I describe him, I can draw closer to him."

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 had one sister, Etel, born in 1912. When their father remarried, they moved to Budapest, where Piroska went to school. She started at a commercial high school but dropped out after two years when she married her second-cousin, Imre Hahn.

Imre, born in 1899 in Budapest, worked as a clerk at the Hungarian Royal River and Sea Shipping Stock Company. Imre had a row boat.

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 150,000 Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. Juci Scheiner, who hailed from a well-to-do family, was one of them. She and her brother Andras survived and returned home, where Juci re-opened her beauty parlor. She won a motorcycle in the lottery and, during a motorcyclists' ball, met and fell in love with her future husband, Jeno Schoenbrunn. Jeno himself had only recently returned from Soviet labor camps.

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 Hungarian town of Kiskoros. His father, an orthodox Jew, served in the First World War and had a small leather goods shop.

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 a town that was in five countries between 1918 and 1991: the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, interwar Czechoslovakia, wartime Hungary, the Soviet Union and today, Ukraine. Mukacevo had a majority Jewish population (before it was wiped out during the Holocaust); its great rabbinical courts feuded constantly with each other.

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 in 1908 and his brother Ferenc in 1906.

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 and starting a family. With charming snapshots of holidays, kindergartens and Purim parties, Rosa shows us how integrated, assimilated Jewish families lived in Germany then.