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Centropa in Estonia

Around 5,000 Jews lived in Estonia before the Holocaust. When the Soviets invaded in 1940, approximately 400 Jews were sent off to prison camps. In 1941, more than 3,000 fled into the Soviet Union to escape the Nazis while those who stayed behind were murdered. Today there are less than 1,000 Jews in Estonia, but the community, like the country, is highly organized.

The Jewish communities of the three Baltics have this in common: they were all subsumed into the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and over the following decades, their Jewish communities-which had been frightfully decimated by the Holocaust-were re-populated by Jews from the interior of the Soviet Union who relocated to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius.

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

In Estonia, some of our interviews have been carried out by Alexander Dusman and Emma Gofman, although the majority 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 Estonia

Except in a very few cases, Centropa has made it a point to interview only those Jews who had been born in the Baltics 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.