By the spring of 1945, the Soviet Army was closing in on Berlin from the east, the Allies had entered Germany from the west, and Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. 

From the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, some 20 million military personnel had been killed along with 40 million civilians. Of those, 6 million were Jews and that included 1.5 million children.

This podcast season takes you into the personal stories of nine elderly Jews we interviewed between 2001 and 2010. In the first episode three Ukrainian Jews will tell you about fighting their way into Berlin. 

In episode two, we’ll hear from a young Jewish man freed from a German work camp, a teenager in Budapest who went to the train station hoping her father would be coming back, and from someone who stumbled back in Lodz, hoping to find someone in her family might still be alive.

The third episode is all about starting over: in Vilnius in Lithuania, in Bitola in today’s North Macedonia, and in Targu Mures in Romania.

All these stories were told to us by Jews who had been born in Europe—and who remained in Europe. Their stories were recorded in each of their languages. We have translated and edited them and they are read for us by actors in London.

This podcast season was co-funded by the European Union.