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Centropa in Greece

We conducted 15 interviews in Greece, all under the stewardship of Dr Rena Molho, one of the leading experts in the history of Salonica's Jews (the name Jews use for Thessaloniki).

More than 90,000 Jews lived in Salonica at the turn of the last century, and Salonica had remained an open port city as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. It had never before been a Greek city.

In this fascinating ethnically mixed city, Jews held the majority. Since Jewish porters and merchants dominated the harbor trade, foreigners were often shocked to find the harbor activities closed from Friday evening until Saturday evening.

Almost wholly wiped out during the Holocaust, there are few Jews alive today who recall the time when Ladino, Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek were all spoken on the streets of this bustling port city, and neither the federal government nor the city government recognizes the contributions of Jews in Salonica.

Rena and her team conducted interviews in both Salonica and Athens (where they sought out Jews who had been born in Salonica).

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Centropa in Latvia

95,000 Jews lived in pre-Holocaust Latvia and the majority was murdered by the Nazis and their local accomplices. From 1944 until 1991, Latvia was subsumed into the Soviet Union, and over the following decades, the Jewish community did not exist.

After Latvia's liberation, the community re-formed itself, and if there are around 12,000 Jews in the country today, the majority are Jews who had been born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to Latvia during the Communist decades.

Except in a very few cases, Centropa made it a point to interview only those Jews who had been born in the Latvia in the years preceding the Holocaust.

In Latvia, nearly all our interviews have been carried out by our Kiev-based team at the Institute of Jewish Studies, headed by Marina Karelstein, coordinator, and Ella Levitskaya and Zhanna Litinskaya, interviewers.

Centropa in Macedonia

This short text describes our work in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia

There was no country called Yugoslavia before 1918, and this “Union of South Slavs” brought together lands that had spent centuries under Austrian, Italian, Hungarian and Ottoman rule. Some 87,000 Jews lived in this new land and they ranged from Sephardic Jews in Bosnia, Serbia and along the Adriatic to Ashkenazi Jews in most of Croatia and in the Hungarian-speaking parts of Serbia (Vojvodina).

Much to the chagrin of the other republics in Yugoslavia, Serbia dominated this interwar state, and when the Germans invaded in 1941, more than a few Slovenes and Croats saw them as liberators. Jews, of course, did not.

During the Second World War, citizens of Yugoslavia fought the invading Germans, Bulgarians, Hungarians and Italians and also fought each other. Although the Allies originally backed Serbian partisans, they switched their allegiance to Tito’s Communist partisans, who were clearly winning.

At war’s end, ten percent of the country’s population had died but over seventy percent of its Jews had been murdered. Yugoslavia then became a one party state under Tito, who, after breaking with Stalin in 1948, ruled the country until his death in 1980. His country would last just over another decade without him.

Before the break-up in 1991, some 6,500 Jews were living in the country and when Yugoslavia began its decade of wars they began fleeing the country for Israel, England and North America.

Even as of this writing, in 2019, it can be said with the economy continuing to languish (except for Slovenia), a great many of ex-Yugoslavia’s Jews have continued to leave. Very few remain today, although Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia all maintain lively, spirited communities, despite their miniscule size.

As for Centropa’s interviews: we have been lucky to work with Rachel Chanin in Serbia - an American who speaks excellent Serbian and who is married to Yitzhak Asiel, Serbia's chief rabbi. Aside from Rachel's extensive social welfare and cultural activities, she conducted interviews for us in Serbia and in Macedonia. Over the years, we have also managed to pick up a handful of interviews in Croatia and Bosnia.

In Croatia, Silvia Heim and Lea Siljak conducted two excellent interviews for us in Zagreb. We would also like to call your attention to a book published in 2013 called 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning, by Slavko Goldstein. Professor Goldstein, who died in 2017, was a publisher, Jewish community activist and writer. His memoirs are considered by many to be one of the finest personal stories published on the Holocaust in the past ten years.

For more information about the Holocaust in Croatia, read this article by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Here’s a brilliant set of pages about what happened in Serbia during the Holocaust

Regarding the Second World War in Bosnia, we highly recommend Emily Greble’s study, Sarajevo 1941.

Regarding Macedonia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-in-macedonia-deportation-of-monastir-jewry

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Centropa in Macedonia

This short text describes our work in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia

Before the break-up in 1991, some 6,500 Jews were living in the country and when Yugoslavia began its decade of wars they began fleeing the country for Israel, England and North America.

For more information about the Holocaust in Croatia, read this article by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Here’s a brilliant set of pages about what happened in Serbia during the Holocaust

Regarding the Second World War in Bosnia, we highly recommend Emily Greble’s study, Sarajevo 1941.

Regarding Macedonia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-in-macedonia-deportation-of-monastir-jewry

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Centropa in Latvia

Except in a very few cases, Centropa made it a point to interview only those Jews who had been born in the Latvia in the years preceding the Holocaust.

Centropa in Germany

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.

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Centropa in Greece

We conducted 15 interviews in Greece, all under the stewardship of Dr Rena Molho, one of the leading experts in the history of Salonica's Jews (the name Jews use for Thessaloniki).

More than 90,000 Jews lived in Salonica at the turn of the last century, and Salonica had remained an open port city as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. It had never before been a Greek city.

Rena and her team conducted interviews in both Salonica and Athens (where they sought out Jews who had been born in Salonica).

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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.

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