Auschwitz-Birkenau. The ultimate symbol of the Holocaust, where more than a million Jews were murdered. Of the 1,230 elderly Jews we interviewed between 2000 and 2009, nearly 100 managed to survive this hell on Earth—some to be sent on to even worse places. We present excerpts from five of those interviews, one each from Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland.
Introduction: Five eyewitnesses in hell. The Auschwitz stories.
narrated by
Edward Serotta
What was it like to find yourself descending into hell on Earth? That is what you’re about to hear in the five episodes in this season of Centropa Stories.
Thank you for joining us, and this program has been made possible, in part by CERV— Citizens Equality, Rights and Values of the European Commission’s Education and Culture Executive Agency.
Erzsébet Barsony. Hungary.
narrated by
Tina Gray
She grew up in a well-to-do family in Budapest, married in 1928 and doted on her only child, Erwin, while running three hat shops with her husband. Then the entire family descended into hell.
Katerina Loefflerova. Slovakia.
narrated by
Jan Goodman
Katarina Vidor grew up comfortably middle class in Bratislava. She worked in an accounting office, spoke four languages. She loved playing tennis and water skied with friends on the Adriatic. She had recently married and her parents lived nearby. Then war came.
Pavel Werner. Czechia.
narrated by
Elliot Levey
In March 1939, Nazi Germany occupied the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia. Pavel’s family was called for a transport to Terezin in 1944. Two years later, they were told they would be sent to “the east.” That meant Auschwitz.
Josef Seweryn. Poland.
narrated by
Steve Furst
Jozef trained as a barber and as someone who could repair fountain pens. Those skills first saved his life and brought him into direct contact with Nazi officers in Auschwitz—and led him to testify against them in nearly a dozen postwar trials.
Leo Luster. Austria.
narrated by
Henry Goodman
When Nazi Germany occupied Austria, over 110,000 Jews managed to flee. The Luster family, Moses and Golda, and their 14 year old son Leo, could not find a way out. Leo would endure nearly seven years of hell—in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, and in work camps in Germany.
She escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, and with a false ID, took to the forests and city streets to kill Germans. Read by Sara Kestelman in London, who has played in the Royal Shakespeare Company and in Star Wars.
Anna Lanota - A Jewish Partisan in Poland
Anna Rottenberg, born in 1915 in Lodz, grew up in a wealthy orthodox family. She broke away to study child psychology in Warsaw and when war came, she escaped but went into the Warsaw Ghetto to try and save her family. Anna describes scenes of unimaginable horror, and how she married resistance fighter Eduard Lanota. Together they fought the Germans in the August 1944 uprising. Eduard was killed. Eight months later, Anna delivered their baby. Anna went on to become one of Poland’s leading magazine editors and taught child psychology well into her 80s.
narrated by
Sara Kestelman
