Location: Poland

Teofila Silberring: So that memory doesn‘t die

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 of wealth and privilege turned into a life of hell and torment. This is her story.

This film was made possible thanks to grants from the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB) and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). Special thanks to Magdelana Bizon, who interviewed Mrs. Silberring.

Mieczyslaw Weinryb: My Town Of Zamosc

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 hear just how varied Jewish life was in Poland in the 1930s–from yiddishists to socialists, zionists to the orthodox.

Mieczyslaw, like nearly all of Centropa’s Polish interviewees, fled into the Soviet Union when war came. Mieczyslaw survived the war in the Ural mountains, joined the Society of Polish Patriots, and returned home to Poland to find his entire family had been murdered (save for his two sisters who had already emigrated to Palestine).

In Mieczyslaw’s biography, which you can access from the link on this page, he tells us what life was like for Jews in post-war Poland. He married a non-Jewish woman, Izabella, and their son, Eligiusz, graduated university in Warsaw and now teaches physics at Yale in the United States.