The pandemic that fell upon us in March 2020 has been difficult for everyone. But our hearts go out to Holocaust survivors who had years of their lives stolen from them as children, only to find themselves, in their eighties and nineties, locked away once again.
In the fall of 2020, we started the Centropa Book Club by sending books to our seniors from independent, Jewish-owned bookshops in Prague, Vienna and Budapest.
We then staffed the phones and sent emails to donors in Austria, Germany, and the US to look for sponsors.
Thanks to donors in Austria and the US, by early 2022, we had sent out more than 1,500 books and packages of sweets to our Holocaust survivors.
In Budapest, we not only sent out books, we sent Andris Schweitzer, a university student, to each of our seniors to set up their computers for Zoom calls.
Centropa does not have a social club for the Holocaust survivors we interviewed in Prague, but we continue to work with one of our best Czech interviewers, Pavla Neuner.
On Centropa’s behalf, Pavla has been sending books to 26 seniors in Prague, all of them between the ages of 90 and 99.
As a non-profit organisation, our ability to carry out projects like this solely depends on donations. Consider supporting what we do.