Centropa Stories

Rachel  Chanin interviewed Matilda Kalef-Cerge for us 2002, and we have  remained in touch Matilda, who recalls both an idyllic childhood in a  wealthy Sephardic family, and how she, her mother and sister managed to  survive during the Holocaust. Read by Sara Kestelman, whose screen and  stage credits include the works of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Gorky and  Marlowe, not to mention Star Wars. Excerpt from Leigh White’s The Long Balkan Night read by Nate Kelderman of Carnegie Mellon University

Few Jews live in Dorcol today but this quiet corner of Belgrade still  evokes its past, when Jewish shops stood cheek by jowl and families  scurried off on Friday evenings to synagogue. Ida Labudovic interviewed  Vera Amar and Avram Mosic for us in 2002, and both describe what Dorcol  was like in its last years. Jilly Bond, who reads Vera Amar, is a  regular performer on BBC’s The Archers and has read more than 40 audio  books.David Horovitch. With 100 screen credits to his name, David  Horovitch has performed Shakespeare on stage and in film, was recently  seen in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner and is currently starring in the HBO Max  series House of the Dragons. Additional reading of Ernst Pavel’s memoir  by  Mikael Gemeda-Breka of Carnegie Mellon University. Special thanks  to Jaehee Cho of the Entertainment Technology Center of CMU and Tijana  Zherajikj of Centropa.

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We  begin our walking tour and podcast in Belgrade’s Kalemegdan, the  ancient fortress peering out over the confluence of the Sava and Danube  Rivers. In her book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941, Dame  Rebecca West provides us with a short history of Kalemegdan —from the  Romans to the Ottomans to the Serbs—and actor Melanie Preston reads an  excerpt for you. As we walk down into Dorcol, Stefan Sablic—cantor of  the Belgrade synagogue, Ladino singer and musician—will accompany us.

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Edward Serotta

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That  is what Maks Levin said when he went off to cover the Russian invasion  of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Once the Russians invaded in February, 2022,  Maks had but 17 days to live. He was embedded with Ukrainian fighting  units and covered the war on the front. On 11 March, his drone went down  near the Hostomel airport. Maks went to retrieve it. The Russians were  already there.

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In  this episode, we take a drive out of Kyiv. Our destination is the  village of Kozary, 82 kilometers to the north. This is where, in October  1943, the reporter Vasily Grossman wrote his searing essay, Ukraine  Without Jews.

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Lilya  Finberg paints a picture of postwar Jewish life in Kyiv, from the days  of the ‘anti- cosmopolitan campaign’ to the infamous doctor’s plot. But  Lilya watched society change, especially after Ukraine’s independence in  1991, and was thrilled when her son Leonid became one of Ukraine’s  leading Jewish intellectuals.

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Jakob  Shapiro was a highly decorated Army officer who railed against Jews  leaving their motherland for Israel. A construction engineer, he worked  on building sites until he was 86. In his final years, Jakob Shapiro  mused, “I’ll bet I would have done well there,” he said. “Guess I should  have gone, too.”

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Peter  Rabtsevich describes what it was like for Jews in Kyiv, and in the  Soviet Union, in the decades after the Second World War. Thousands would  stand in front of Kyiv’s only synagogue on the High Holidays. “They  came to remember their heritage, to remember their murdered families,  and to remember that they were Jews.”

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Before  he was 20 years old, Hertz Rogovoy had fought in three of the war’s  major battles: the defense of Moscow, in Stalingrad, and at Orel, where a  sniper shot him. Twice. After a year in the hospital, Hertz decided he,  too, would become a doctor. And he practiced well into his 80s.

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A  story with the wallop of a 19th century novel. When the Germans were  closing in on Kyiv, Sasha Goldberg took his fiancé, Hana Gehtman, and  her sister Dora, to a train headed east. As winter set in, Hana became  sick and died. Sasha kept writing her from the front line, and Dora  answered, pretending to be Hana.