Collecting Testimonies, Facing War and Genocide in Ukraine

The CU Boulder campus and wider community are invited to a presentation by Centropa founder Edward Serotta (Vienna, Austria).

Monday, April 1, at 4:00 pm
Eaton Humanities 150
(1610 Pleasant St., main campus, CU Boulder)
and streaming on Zoom.

Serotta and his team have conducted many interviews with genocide survivors in wartime Ukraine, where he has spent 17 weeks since the full-scale invasion. His talk will reflect on his experiences, the interviews conducted, and offer insights about a country in the midst of what Timothy Snyder once powerfully described as the “bloodlands” at war.

Edward Serotta has been working as a writer, photographer and filmmaker in Central Europe since the mid 1980s. Before 2000 he focused on contemporary Jewish life and he published three books and produced four films for ABC Nightline. One can find a dozen articles on Ukraine he has filed for Tablet Magazine at this link.

In 2000 in Vienna, he launched www.centropa.org, and he and his colleagues spent the next decade interviewing 1,230 elderly Jews, all of whom still lived in 20 Central European countries. Centropa never used video, they did not focus on solely on the Holocaust. They asked their elderly respondents to tell stories about the entire 20th century, just as they lived it—all while scanning 25,000 of their family pictures and transcribing 40,000 pages of stories.

That entire collection has been acquired by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Centropa now focuses on Holocaust education in the lands where the Holocaust took place. Their primary focus is on Ukraine, as this is a country still in the midst of discovering its own history, and developing its own sense of identity and civil society.

In March, the Austrian Parliament awarded Centropa with the Simon Wiesenthal Prize for its work in Ukraine.

Free and open to the public. No tickets required.