Seven interviewees share with us their stories of growing up in Jewish families before the war, of falling in love, of going to school - of everyday hopes and struggles. Taken together, these individual stories paint a diverse picture of Jewish women’s lives - and of European history - in the 20th century. 

Vera Szekeres-Varsa

Vera Szekeres-Varsa was born in 1933 in Budapest, the second child to a long-ago assimilated Jewish family with no religious beliefs and vivid Hungarian sentiments. In 1944, when the Germans marched in Vera's life changed drastically.
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Rosl Heilbrunner

Surviving the Holocaust under a new identity: Throughout the first years of the Francoist Regime, in the shadow of persecution at the hands of the Gestapo in Spanish soil, Rosl Heilbrunner, with her husband and sons, tried to save themselves using a new identity.
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Lisa Pinhas

Lisa Pinhas

Lisa Pinhas, a Greek Jew from Thessaloniki, vividly recounts her experiences in the concentration and extermination camps.
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Katarína Löfflerová

Katarína Löfflerová was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, surviving several concentration camps. Living her whole life in Bratislava, speaking several languages, she was the true Central European in heart.
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Ludmila Rutarova

Ludmila Rutarova was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Prague. She went from Terezin through Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, returning to Prague, where she established her own family after the war.
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Irena Wygodzka

My name is Eni Wygodzka, nee Beitner. Erna was the name used in documents, in the identity card, but both my friends and family always called me Eni. One of my cousins used to call me Koziula [from the Polish word ‘koza,’ meaning goat], because I was kind of wild...
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Rosa Rosenstein

Rosa Rosenstein was born in Berlin in 1907 to a Jewish family. Rosa worked in her father's tailor shop. She was married and had two children. Together with her family she fled from National Socialist persecution to Budapest, where she survived the war.
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