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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 Moldova

Moldova had been in Czarist Russia before 1918, then in Romania between the two world wars. From 1940 on it was once again subsumed into the Soviet Union until it broke free in 1991. Thousands of Jews in this region were murdered in 1941 as the Romanian and German armies marched into the Soviet Union, and many of those remaining were sent to the infamous Transnistria camps, which were run by the Romanian government with exceptional bestiality.

From the end of the Second World War until 1991, Jews from the Soviet Union resettled in Kishinev, but Centropa's interviewer (we sent in Natalia Fomina from her home base of Odessa) only met with Jews who had been born in the country when it was Romania.

The reason: because our respondents lived traditional Jewish lives in Kishinev when it was in Romania, they have a closer link to their Jewish roots and customs.

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Centropa in Moldova

The reason: because our respondents lived traditional Jewish lives in Kishinev when it was in Romania, they have a closer link to their Jewish roots and customs.

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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 the Czech Republic

More than 78,000 Czech Jews were deported to their deaths during the Second World War. In 1946 between 12,000 to 15,000 lived in the country. The community shrunk further with the coming of Communism in 1948, the Communist show trials soon after, and in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. Today there are around 3,000 Jews live in today's Czech Republic.

Almost no religious Jews remained in the Czech Republic after 1948, and our family stories and their accompanying photographs reflect this. What we have, however, is a collection of stories and pictures of some of the most erudite and well educated Jews anywhere in Central Europe and their biographies make for fascinating reading. More than a few of these people remained in their country after 1948 because they strongly believed in Communism, and all of them became wholly disenchanted-if not during the anti-Semitic show trials of the early 1950s, then during the Soviet invasion of 1968.

We interviewed 73 elderly Jews in Prague, Brno and other cities. Dr Martin Korcok directs our team in the Czech Republic. We have been working in the Czech Republic since 2002, and we cooperate closely with The Federation of Czech Jewish Communities, The Jewish Museum of Prague, and with The Terezin Memorial.

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