Travel

Centropa in Austria

Although we have not yet secured grants to translate many of our Austrian interviews into English (we are still looking), our German-language website is devoted to our 98 Austrian and 2 German interviews, most of which were conducted by Tanja Eckstein in Vienna.

Through these life stories and the 1,700 privately-held digitized and annotated images, we now have a portrait of Jewish life in what was once one of the most well established and integrated Jewish communities in Europe.

Many of our Viennese interviewees were born elsewhere, and they have brought with them a colorful collection of pictures of growing up in Czernowitz, Lemberg, Budapest and in Romanian cities. A few of our interviewees hail from rural Austria, providing us with a unique view of small town Jewish life.

Nearly every one of our Viennese interviewees survived the war by fleeing to the USSR, the UK, the US or Palestine. All returned-for a variety of reasons-in the years after. Today, the number of Jews living in Austria is estimated at around 8,000-10,000, with the vast majority living in Vienna.

Centropa in Austria

Centropa in Poland

3,500,000 Jews lived in pre Holocaust Poland, 3,000,000 were murdered and 500,000 tried to start life over after the war. With the coming of Communism and a wave of anti-Semitic violence, the majority fled for the west and for Israel. In 1968 a government-sponsored program against Jews sent another 20,000 out of the country. Every government since democracy returned in 1989, however, has been strongly positive to the country's Jewish institutions and organizations. Although the number of Jews living in Poland today has been exaggerated, what is not in dispute is that this small community is quite lively, with a Jewish school and kindergarten, an active synagogue in Warsaw, and Jewish community centers in Warsaw and Cracow.

Regarding elderly Jews in Poland today, those who we interviewed, they are scattered about the country in Warsaw, Lublin, Legnica, Cracow and a few other towns. Our interview team was headed by Anka Grupinska, a noted author of three books on Polish-Jewish relations.

Anka also served in Poland's embassy in Israel for six years during the 1990s and currently hosts a Jewish cultural program on public radio in Warsaw.

Our Polish project is unique: until Anka and her team begun seeking out these last witnesses to a world destroyed, no one-to our knowledge--had ever interviewed them about their lives in pre-Holocaust Poland.

That makes this archive of stories and images all the more compelling, and all the more useful for historians, archivists and social anthropologists.

Centropa in Poland

Anka also served in Poland's embassy in Israel for six years during the 1990s and currently hosts a Jewish cultural program on public radio in Warsaw.

That makes this archive of stories and images all the more compelling, and all the more useful for historians, archivists and social anthropologists.

Centropa in Poland

Anka also served in Poland's embassy in Israel for six years during the 1990s and currently hosts a Jewish cultural program on public radio in Warsaw.

That makes this archive of stories and images all the more compelling, and all the more useful for historians, archivists and social anthropologists.

Centropa in Romania

800,000 Jews lived in interwar Romania, which then included all of Moldova and a slice of northeastern Bulgaria. Around 200,000 to 250,000 were murdered during the Holocaust. Fewer than10,000 Jews live in Romania today; most of them are elderly as more than 340,000 Romanian Jews emigrated to Israel.

Between 2001 and 2007, Centropa employed two teams in Romania, a large country where elderly Jews are scattered in small communities separated by long distances and bad roads. In the northwest part of the country (where most elderly Jews still speak Hungarian) Ildiko Molnar directed our team. Ildiko, a graduate of the Jewish Studies program in Cluj, has worked for Centropa since 2001 and trained more than a dozen interviewers and editors.

In 2006 we began a cooperative partnership with the Goren Goldstein Center for Jewish Studies in Bucharest, and Anca Ciuciu is our education coordinator and Professor Felice Waldman is our historical advisor.