The Hungarian Jewish Source Book is the sixth in a series of Centropa readers on 20th century Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2005 and 2006, Centropa interviewers visited twenty-six of the oldest living Jews in Lithuania and asked them to bring out their old family pictures and tell us about their lives through those pictures. This was not an oral history project specifically about the Holocaust. We asked our respondents to paint us a picture of what life was like for them during the twentieth century - from tales of grandparetns to anecdotes about great grandchildren.

Before 1918 the South Slav lands, which were to comprise Yugoslavia, did not share a common history. Divided for centuries between Ottoman and Habsburg spheres of influence, the various peoples developed their own distinct identities and particular traditions. With 'the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes at the end of World War I, East and West met and gave birth to a complex new multinational state'.

As anyone who has stood before a painting by Gustav Klimt will readily attest, Vienna's golden age literally glittered with gold. It began to glow in the 1850s and shone brightest from the turn-of-the-20th century until those pistol shots were fired in Sarajevo in 1914. Of course, no one knew then they had been living in a golden age. They would realize that only later, after the gold had been tarnished, stripped, and finally stolen.

When we speak about the Kindertransport, we refer to the rescue of approximately 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic to the United Kingdom between 1938 and 1939.

Although Centropa conducted more than twelve hundred interviews in fifteen countries during our decade of gathering oral histories (2000–2009), we never carried out our project in Germany itself. We did, however, interview four people who spent their childhood there.