Warsaw
WARSAW. is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, in east-central Poland, roughly 260 kilometres (160 mi) from the Baltic Sea and 300 kilometres (190 mi) from the Carpathian Mountains. You can read more on the the Rough Guide website.
If there is one guidebook we recommend on Poland, it is The Rough Guide.
CENTROPA AND POLAND. Our main partner in Poland is the Galicia Jewish Museum, which is located in Krakow. You can find their website here: http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/
Centropa has conducted nearly 70 interviews in Poland and collected 1,600 Polish photos for you to explore in our database of family stories. Our interviewing team was led by Anka Grupinska, a well known historian specializing in the 20th century history of Jewish poland. Click here to visit our database of 52 personal stories and a thousand family photos. Here is link to our entire Polish exhibition. This exhibition has been traveling through Poland, Israel and the US.
Krakow: the royal city with a rich Jewish heritage
Film: Teofila Silberring
This unique story is told to us by a woman who never left her beloved Krakow—except for the six years she lived in Nazi hell. Mrs Silberring remembers her neighborhood by door numbers--her school at this address, her synagogue over there--even the church she used to go to on Sunday's with her governess. In 1939, a life ofwealth and privilege turned into a life of hell and torment. This is her story.Film: Haya-Lea Detinko
Haya-Lea was born in 1920 in Rovno, which then belonged to Poland. She grew up in a traditional Jewish family, joined a Zionist youth club called Hashomer Hatzair and looked forward to emigrating to Palestine, just like her sister. But the Soviets took eastern Poland in September 1939 and Haya-Lea's membership in Hashomer Hatzair earned her a ten year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. The rest of her family remained behind, not knowing that the Nazis would overrun the town soon after Haya-Lea's deportation to the east.
Haya-Lea survived the Gulag and moved to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where she shared her story with Centropa in 2002.
This film is dedicated to Haya-Lea, who died shortly after the interview.
Film: Mieczyslaw Weinryb
Mieczyslaw Weinryb's collection of pictures and stories provide us with a fascinating glimpse of Jewish life in Poland before the war. He grew up in one of the loveliest small towns in Poland, Zamosc, and through his memories and old pictures, Mieczyslaw takes us into his Zionist youth club, Hashomer Hazair. We also see and hearjust how varied Jewish life was in Poland in the 1930s--from yiddishists to socialists, zionists to the orthodox.