WHERE NEW TECHNOLOGIES MEET THE OLD-FASHIONED ART OF STORYTELLING 1 CENTROPA ANNUAL REPORTS 2012 & 2013 WHEN I WAS A BOY, I WOULD LISTEN TO THE STORIES OF THE ELDERS OF MY TRIBE Nelson Mandela 2 CENTROPA ANNUAL REPORT 2012 & 2013 3 THE CENTROPA ANNUAL Report 2012–2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART 01 PART 02 PART 03 PART 04 Centropa In 2012 & 2013 06 Exhibition Openings And Public Readings 14 Centropa Education Programs 24 Expenses 2012 & 2013 62 The Only Oral History Institute With A Social Club 10 The Re-Discovery Of A Lost Master Of Photography 16 European Public Schools 26 Income 2012 & 2013 64 The Ones We Lost In 2012 And 2013 12 Centropa.org – A Jewish Museum That Visits You 18 Centropa Balkan Network 32 Donors 2012 & 2013 65 Centropa Film Program 22 CJN: The Centropa Network Of European Jewish Schools 38 Advocacy 67 Israeli Educational Programs 44 Centropa Staff 68 North American Public Schools 50 North American Jewish Schools 56 4 CENTROPA ANNUAL REPORT 2012 & 2013 5 INTRODUCTION This annual report describes Centropa’s activities from January 2012 until the end of six, times or more, and most interviews lasted between six to twenty hours. We never 2013. The figures on the opposite page provide a glimpse of our accomplishments, used video in those interviews. Rather, we audio-taped and transcribed every word, which translate into thousands of students in twenty countries learning about other then digitized their family pictures while we quizzed them about the people in those CENTROPA IN 2012 AND 2013 cultures and working with students across borders and oceans; educators in those pictures: who are they; what’s going on here; whose wedding/school class/dinner countries creating projects that teach tolerance over intolerance, civic values over table is that; what happened to all these people and where are they now? prejudice and compassion for others. Twenty-two thousand times, on twelve hundred sofas, we held up a picture or a When we started our education program in 2007, we did not expect to be working document, asked those questions, entered keywords, then uploaded biographies in more than five hundred schools by 2013. These two annual reports, along with and annotated photographs into a searchable online database of Jewish memory. UNIQUE VISITORS COME TO OUR WEBSITE ANNUALLY our enclosed Summer Academy reports, will explain why we are expanding so rapidly. The result is something unique, something precious, and in the following pages, we 250,000 provide six excerpts with stories that span a turbulent century. Let us start by summarizing what makes Centropa unique. In the wake of the success of Steven Spielberg’s landmark film, Schindler’s List, several organizations launched Stories like these—so deeply human and so personal—draw readers in because they WE HELD 2 SUMMER ACADEMIES FOR 160 TEACHERS FROM 19 COUNTRIES interview projects with Holocaust survivors. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History are stories from real life—and that is why high school students and their teachers Foundation, the Fortunoff Archive, and several others video-taped tens of thousands on three continents embrace them. So do a quarter of a million other visitors who of elderly Jews in dozens of countries. Their goal: to ask Holocaust survivors to describe come to our website every year—to get lost in the stories we have captured, watch all they and their families had gone through during the years the Third Reich spread the films we have made from them, and use Centropa in the way that it was intended— WE PRODUCED 4 FILMS THAT WERE SHOWN AS OFFICIAL SELECTIONS its cancerous shadow over Europe. as a library of rescued memories. Centropa was founded for an entirely different reason. Launched in the first year of the This annual report will describe all that we have accomplished in the most important IN 9 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS twenty-first century, our goal was to ask Jews still living in one particular area, Central twenty-four months since our founding, and I thank you for reading through this. and Eastern Europe, to paint a picture of the entire twentieth century—as they lived it. We asked them to share their stories of the towns they grew up in, the schools they Sincerely, went to, the jobs their parents had, the clubs they were members of. We asked them to WE CURATED AND PRODUCED 6 EXHIBITIONS NOW TRAVELING SPAIN, tell us about how they watched their world being destroyed and how they survived that destruction. Then we asked them about those very small worlds they patched LITHUANIA, POLAND, HUNGARY, SLOVENIA, THE US, AND AUSTRIA together for themselves in the decades since. Edward Serotta That means Centropa was not founded to commemorate the destruction of the Jewish *I realize that by stating the world of Jewish Central Europe been destroyed there world of Central and Eastern Europe.* Our goal was, and is, to build a digital bridge will be those who will counter with facts about the rebirth of Jewish life after 1989. 23 WE ORGANIZED WORKSHOPS AND WEEKEND SEMINARS back to a world that no longer exists, except in the yellowed old photographs and I understand the point, and this is something I described and championed as early personal stories of the people who once lived there. That is why we interviewed as 1991 in my first book, Out of the Shadows. But the Jewish communities in this FOR 340 TEACHERS IN 9 COUNTRIES twelve hundred elderly Jews living between the Baltic and the Black Sea. That is why region today are not a continuation of their pre-war selves, and should not be den- we digitized twenty-two thousand of their old family pictures and documents. igrated by calling them "remnants." They are establishing a new model of Jewish identity as well as their own sense of community. The way we see it is that every one of these old souls is like a library unto themselves, and when they go, the library closes and they take with them the stories only they can tell. We were determined to find a way to keep those libraries open. To do that, Centropa’s oral history methodology had us visiting our respondents three, four, five, 6 CENTROPA ANNUAL REPORT 2012 & 2013 7 SIX EXCERPTS FROM THE CENTROPA ARCHIVE: PREWAR, WARTIME, POSTWAR In Kiev, Dora Postrelko shared this story with Zhanna Jiri Franek shared this anecdote with Dagmar At the age of ninety-four in 2004, Katerina Litinskaya in 2004: Greslova in 2007 in Prague. Loefflerova met with Martin Korcok in Bratislava In 2005, Magdalena Bizon interviewed Teofila Silberring My sister Hana [Gehtman] came down with tuber- I had been thrown out of the Communist party in the As for the changes in 1989 [Communism’s collapse] in Krakow nine times over the course of a month. culosis in 1936 but made a rapid recovery. Hana was mid 1960s and was teaching Soviet and Russian literature when the demonstrations started, I was on the streets Iosif Yudelevich, who was living in Kaunas in 2007, was engaged to Sasha Goldberg, and they planned to get in Charles University. In 1966 I got a call from Tübingen every God-given day. Every time Jan Carnogursky [lead- interviewed by Zhanna Litinskaya In 2005, Roza Kamhi shared this story with Rachel When those Soviet soldiers liberated us [from married after university, but life writes its own rules. I University in West Germany because they needed a er of the anti-Communist opposition] took the podium, Chanin about Bitola, in the Republic of Macedonia Ravensbrück], I flew to Krakow like a madwoman—on have always kept their pictures, taken in 1940. lecturer. They had had Russians lecturers, but they he scanned the crowd, saw me standing in front and Grandpa Avel owned a large hardware store [in Jonava] trucks, train, and by foot. It had all been so horrible were propagandists so they threw them out. Then they announced, "Mrs Loefflerova is here. We can begin." and peasants came to buy nails, horseshoes, fasten- The first time I traveled on a train was when I went to a [she had endured beatings, medical experiments and When war came [in July 1941] Sasha put us on a train brought in Russian emigrés, but they just ranted about ings, buckets, and other things like that. There was a moshav scout camp run by Hashomer Hatzair [a Zionist death marches] but I knew that if I could just get home heading east before going off to find his unit. We how much they hated the Soviet Union. That’s why they As for today. Antisemitism? I don’t want to say that it warehouse in the yard, as well as these huge scales youth group]. It was the first time I slept away from again, Dad and Henrik [her brother] would be waiting stayed in touch and Hana wrote him letters. We ended invited me, because I simply love all of Russian literature. got bigger, but it didn’t get much smaller. At the same on which peasants used to weigh cattle and then sell home; the first time I went out of Bitola. Oh good- for me and I could have my own room again, we would up in Kuibyshev, four thousand kilometers from home. time, I can say since the regime change, the world them to Grandpa. ness—looking back! It was the first time I bathed in a all be together and I could just go back to school and As winter came, Hana’s tuberculosis came back with a But then the changes came at home [Dr Franek is refer- here [in Slovakia] hasn’t gotten worse.