Travel | Centropa

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 Hungary

Although less than 40,000 Jews are officially registered, experts estimate there are between 80,000 to 100,000 Jews in Budapest today, making it the largest and liveliest community in Central Europe. Three day schools, more than a dozen functioning synagogues, and a half dozen youth clubs are all well attended.

All our Hungarian interviews were conducted in Budapest. That's because the overwhelming majority of Jews in the provinces were deported to their deaths in 1944. Most of those who returned to Hungary chose to settle in Budapest, so there was little reason for us to work in Szeged, Debrecen and other cities.

We also conducted Hungarian-language interviews in Novi Sad and Subotica in Serbia, in southern Slovakia and in Transylvania in Romania. Elderly Jews in these communities still speak Hungarian as their mother tongue.

Centropa's interview methodology was created by Eszter Andor and Dora Sardi, who headed a team of nearly a dozen interviewers, editors, transcribers, transcribers and scanners. Together, they secured more than 200 interviews and digitized 5,000 pictures.